OBSERVATION #8: Eliciting: teacher responses

For my last observation I decided to focus on "Eliciting" as it will be shown in the chart below. This interaction between the teacher and the students happened in a sixth grade where they were practising "Present Simple".

It is evident that the teacher's response, whether accepting or rejecting student's responses, is very important. I've seen in this observation that for example a response can redirect students when an incorrect answer is given or when they don't understand the question in the first place. What's more, the teacher can give a partial acceptance to the child's response, ask them to rethink their answer or ask for more information as in the third example shown in the chart above.

Again, it is clearly important because I think this could help students reach a higher level of achievement. I imagine that if we give them critical or vague responses such as
"No, that's not right" or just "No", they will most likely never try to participate again.

However, we have to know when to elicit and how. Students should have the chance to speculate, manipulate and imagine the information being presented. I don't know if eliciting can be randomly done. Children need explicit instructions, guidance and like I said, give them credit for their contributions right or wrong, which as I see, didn't happened in the second example above. The teacher was clearly looking for an specific response and didn't accept the answer given by the student, that's why I wrote it was rejected.

Of course as in every class some students didn't even bother to open their books or participate in class but as a whole, the students were engaged in the activities and they were able to share their knowledge about the topic. In most cases children don't even try to share their opinion because they're afraid of being picked on because of it or just for the mere fact of being wrong. But here I observed they weren't afraid to participate again even after the teacher's response. In some moments, example number four, it felt as if they were playing a guessing game. It came to my mind maybe that's why they were participative.

Generally, it depends on the teacher. Some of them accept only the answer they want or expect but some of them value every single contribution. In this case, the teacher accepted most of the answers and encouraged students to speak freely. I personally believe that's the way it  should be, we should guide responses to "go beyond". 

OBSERVATION #7: Managing error.

During the observation of this class, I decided to focus on "managing error". Before going into the lesson, I tried to make myself familiar with Fluency and Accuracy. Once again, as this happened two weeks before the Winder holidays, the students were revising everything they'd learnt for the test they were going to have the following week.
In the following chart, it is shown all the information I could collect:

As it is seen in the picture above, in most of the cases the teacher focused on accuracy. I could see that there was interruption from the her to point out that something wasn't right and how to correct it.
I think there could be some corrections more important than others, though. I understand this class was to revise activities and to practice so it is normal most of them were "accuracy-focused activities" rather than "fluency focused activities". Errors made during an activity which is meant to practice structures or something specific could be more important.
What I mean is that, for example, mistakes made during a fluency focused activity could be overlooked and the class could go on as if nothing happened. That is the case of the example number four above. The mistake was overlooked because it was a minor one.

There weren't really any instances where the students participated in the correction of mistakes made by their classmates. In addition to that, I couldn't see any situation where the teacher asked the rest of the students to take part in the correction of an error either. As I said, they were corrected by the teacher and nothing else was done. In some cases, she addressed the student that made the error and asked them what was wrong. I think those opportunities were the closest they were to "self-correction".
When the focus is on fluency there may be ways in which a teacher can avoid interrupting the flow of the pupils' language. I believe it is possible to correct in a non-obtrusive way. For example, during the class the teacher can take down notes of the mistakes that were made during the lesson then show those mistakes to the students and try to correct them and learn from them.

About the teacher's language in response to mistakes, I think next time the teacher should also try to keep in mind the message, not only the error made. Maybe this could have a positive effect as they will see she considered their effort. For instance in the fifth example, the teacher should have praised the student for a good performance and at least he was trying to participate, even though that wasn't the correct answer. I'm not saying this is the case but in a similar situation the student probably won't participate next time because he could have felt offended.

Most of the people don't like being corrected but in my case, I don't find it humiliating or offensive, though it does depends on how they do it. But in general, I like to think over my mistakes in order to understand why I was wrong. Besides, I take it as gaining more information.
When it comes to teaching is something completely different, though. I don't want to be that kind of teacher who corrects the spelling and grammar of everyone all the time. There is always time for correction but I think the important thing would be for the learners to build up their own confidence in responding to their own errors.

OBSERVATION #6: Learner motivation.

In this observation I tried to analyse the learner's motivation in a class of fifth graders from primary school. Since I hadn't already had the chance to observe this group of children, I didn't who it would be better to choose from them so I decided to randomly choose five.
During the observation this is the data that I could collect:

Considering the information that I have collected, I think it is necessary for the teacher to get to know their students to start with. Every teacher plays a crucial role in their students' motivation. There's not really a "formula" or "recipe" we can follow to motivate them so, as teachers, we should reflect on how we can do it. I believe it is important because a motivated child make an extra-effort to overcome challenges, to learn, is more confident, ambitious, most of the time succeeds in their tasks given and doesn't feel disturbed by their lack of understanding because knows that eventually understanding will come.
To know what motivates them I imagine a teacher can observe the students during the class and during their activities which could involve personal preferences and opinions to know what subjects they enjoy talking about. The problem is that most of the time teachers believe that making activities fun means to make it easy and they think that way they will motivate children. That's not entirely true.
For instance, the teacher could start by checking their resources and see what kind of activities they take into the classroom. If children like it that will most likely keep them (and the teacher) motivated.
In my case, when I first started studying English, it was entirely an integrative motivation because of my interest in foreign cultures. I was willing to put all the persistent effort needed to become bilingual. I would like to believe I was successful at learning as I have studied over seven years so far and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I think my motivation had a direct bearing on my successfulness. We can't ignore that motivation and success go together, they are interconnected and they are what drive us to our goals and dreams.

Observing this class I've learned that a not motivated student will make less progress in their learning as they are not very interested in communicating with the teacher or learning with their classmates. They won't practise since they don't really care and they will probably end up failing, as it could be the case of Leandro in the class I observed.
In this case I felt the teacher wasn't really motivated herself. It makes me wonder, how is a teacher supposed to motivate their students if they are not motivated themselves? Maybe the first question we should ask ourselves is whether we are motivated to motivate or not. Because if we are not, we can go ahead and "go with the flow" which could eventually lead to nowhere really..

OBSERVATION #5: The learner as doer.

In this lesson from 6th grade, I focused on "the learner as doer". The teacher came up with a variety of activities which demanded different things from students. As this observation happened in the same class from one of the previous posts, the children were still in a revision process with the "Present simple".

During the lesson I had the opportunity to write down every activity they did. I have classified all of the activities as "cognitive activities", as you can see in the following picture.

As a whole, I believe there was a prominence of cognitive activities. It probably has to do with the fact that, as I mentioned before, the teacher's main purpose was to do a revision before the following week's exam. She seemed to be focused exclusively on the grammar and vocabulary.
Nonetheless, given that the children had to produce a writing activity about themselves, we could say there was an affective element going around. For what I observed, most of the children were very active and involved in the activity. They rarely stopped to chat with their classmates.
It was very difficult for me to see which one was the most valuable activity for the learners. But I could see that they deeply enjoy doing activities that had to do with themselves, as these are more "contextualized". At least in this observation I could see they felt more motivated with that activity in particular.
It wasn't really surprising for me to see that they were all working at their own pace with the same topic and exercises. Most of the time they worked individually, though sometimes they stopped to chat to their mates about their results and compare them.

In general, I think that even today most of lessons are based on cognitive activities when in fact it should be the other way around. For example, I find that when children speak about their feelings, personal dislikes and likes, opinions or experiences they tend to feel more motivated as they interact and share with others. Since affective activities are "true-to-life scenarios", we should try to use them because honestly sometimes I feel that teachers pay extra attention only to grammar and spelling. Sometimes it seems that all that matters is how much grammar and vocabulary you know, how well you follow the task or the marks at the end of the year.
As a future teacher I would like to develop my skills in creating that affective aspect of my teaching.

OBSERVATION #4: Classroom power.

In this case, I had the opportunity to observe a 3rd grade class. Before going into the class, I had the possibility to talk with the teacher about what she had planned for the lesson, which was "revising vocabulary (Theme: "Food") and doing a listening activity to complete their activity book".
Given that the children were going to have two weeks of Winter holidays in about two weeks, she told me they were going to have a little test before. Finally, the teacher nicely replied to the first four questions from my observation notes.

1) Who chose the aims? ► Teacher (T)
2) Who chose the language and-or skills focus? ► T
3) Who chose the topic(s) and activities? ► T
4) Who chose and prepared the materials? ► T
5) Who chose the sitting arrangements? ► Student (S)
6) Who wrote on the board? ► T
7) Who cleaned the board? ► T
8) Whom did the students speak to? ► Teacher/Student (T/S)
9) Who created the pairs or groups? ► Not applicable
10) Who decided when to stop an activity? ► T
11) Who operated the equipment? ► T
12) Who decided which questions or problems in the lesson were explored? ► T
13) Who chose the vocabulary to be learned? ► T
14) Who gave meaning for words? ► T/S
15) Who spelled out new words? ► T
16) Who gave explanations? ► T
17) Who asked questions? ► T/S
18) Who answered student questions? ► T
19) Who repeated what was said if others didn't hear it? ► T/S
20) Who created the silence? ► T
21) Who broke the silences? ► S
22) Who checked the work? ► T
23) Who chose the homework? ► T

In general, there wasn't really anything that surprised me. I expected the teacher to directed the lesson and that is exactly how it was. Children only participated when they were asked to. Sometimes they asked questions because they weren't sure about what they had to do, but they asked always in Spanish.
Making reference to question N° 5, I think that it is okay to allow them to choose where they want to sit. Most of the time, they choose the classmate they feel more comfortable. However, this could often lead to low-effort response to complete the activities as they misbehave.
For what I've observed when it comes to writing on the board (Question N° 6), children feel an extra-pressure and they tend to pay extra-attention to their mistakes. I suppose that when it comes to values, students could feel teachers trust them when they ask them to write on the board. To them is like assuming the responsibility, they feel like they are leading the class.
I have to admit that I feel a little sceptical about giving the children the power to choose their own homework (Question N° 23). As I haven't worked as a teacher yet, I do not know if it could work but I do believe that it could make everything more engaging, challenging and valuable to them.

A shift of power is not really present in today's education, I think. Thinking about the idea of having students leading the class and not the teachers themselves requires making some changes in education. I mean, before we should think if we are ready for such a big change, otherwise it would be a huge loss of time and it could all end up in chaos. The traditional image of the teacher hasn't really changed, the teacher is supposed to be the authority and guide.
If we hand over some decision-making power in the learning process to the learners, I wonder what would happen with the aims and purposes. I'm not saying it is impossible or that it will never happen but it is certainly risky as it could all get out of control. After that, getting back on track would be even harder.
Children are used to being instructed and not being in charge of their own learning. If we wanted to change that, we would have to clarify roles, there would have to be some kind of training before because even today, sometimes student don't know what to do when they are left to make some decisions.

Reflection: I think when facing a group of students we have to know who they really are, their position and potential so that we can know where to go from there and what kind of options we can offer them to choose. Experiment with them, give them the chance to have some control over the direction of the lessons. I mean, allow them to take part in our decisions as teachers. This way children can learn about responsibility, compromise, respect and how to trust their teachers.
Of course, never forgetting that it is always necessary to set some limits otherwise they could end up thinking they can do whatever they want.

OBSERVATION #3: The language of questions.

Observation N° 3 was based on "The language of questions". Here, I observed a class of fifth graders from primary school who were revising the modal verb "can" to talk about abilities.
The teacher explained what the activity consisted of, each student were required to read comprehensively a story about the planets and after that they were supposed to reply orally to some questions related to it. I imagine the teacher's idea was to test their reading comprehension skills and work on the vocabulary and pronunciation. (Though they tend to switch to Spanish all the time)

As they all speak together, it was almost impossible for me to write down everything they say. Before reading the text, I could collect these questions:

1. T: Do you remember how we express ability in English?
-Con "Can".

2. T: Page N° X, is everybody ready to start?
-Yes, teacher.

3. T: Do you understand what you have to do?
-Yes, we have to read.

During the text, these are the questions I could collect:

4. T: Is it a story or an article? Why?
-I don't know, teacher.
-It's a story.
T: It is a story? (Reformulation)
-Si porque tiene dialogos y personajes.

5. T: Why that title?
- Because they can see the planets.

6. T: What happened in the text?
-Brian and Emily use the telescope to see the planets and the extraterrestrials.

7. T: Can we see the moon?
Yes, we can.

8. T: Can we see Mars?
-No, we can't.
-A veces podemos, teacher..

9. T: Can Emily see Mars? Why?
Yes, she can. She uses the telescope.

10. T: Can they see extraterrestrials?
-No, they can't.

11. T: Are extraterrestrials real? What do you think?
-They are real and they live in the galaxy!

12. T: Can Emily and Brian go to other galaxies? Why?
No, they can't. Because they don't have the technology.

13. T: What's your favourite planet? Can we travel to other planets?
-Jupiter is my favourite.
-No, we can't, teacher!

Having into consideration all these questions, I decided to classify them in the following way:

Yes/No questions: 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12
Short answer questions: 5, 6, 9, 12
Open-ended questions: 11,
Display questions: 1,
Referential questions: 4,
Imaginative questions/Opinion: 11, 13

Even though I can't find any pattern in these questions, I do find that the questions were all prepared to make students think logically and read carefully. What's more, most of the questions during the whole class were Yes/No questions, I suppose that's the correlation between question and answer. I feel they were all prepared to practise "Yes, .. can/No, .. can't". I would say they felt involved though challenged at some moments.
Using questions like these gives the students the opportunity to share with their classmates and teacher their thoughts, opinions and how they feel about some specific subject. In this case, I don't think children showed any difficulty with the reading since they found mostly all the answers. Most likely because it was a class where they were revising everything they had learnt and they were practising for an exam they were supposed to have the following week.
Nevertheless, I did could see that some of them required more time than others to answer the questions but that's normal, every student work at their own pace. Next time, though it is very hard, I would encourage them to speak entirely in English.

What I've learned: Before coming into this class I knew we could use questions as to start a discussion, to involve students or as opinion retrievers. After this observation, I realize teachers could use questions to guide the class and discussion in the direction they want them to. It probably takes a lot of experience but I believe it is possible with a lot of practise.
Apart from that, in this case, I felt students were more focused on answering questions rather than making questions themselves. As a teacher, I believe I would encourage them to ask as many questions as they want. It is important for them to learn how to get the information from others.

OBSERVATION #2: Language echoes.

In this observation I observed a class in the 3rd year of primary school. After making myself familiar with the way "echoing" is defined, I decided to script some examples of echoing and the utterances leading up to them.
Before analysing the class I honestly thought I would get more situations with echoing but in fact, I could only find three. This is what I got from this lesson:

1) T: Today is...?
S: Teacher, today is Friday.
T: Today is Friday. (No change in intonation)

2) T: What does Norton have?
S: A sandwich.
T: A sandwich? (Yes-no question for confirmation)
S: Yes, a sandwich.

3) T: What's that in N° 7?
S: A biscuit.
T: A biscuit. (Again, no change in intonation)

After the class, re-reading the worksheet we were given and my papers, I started wondering whether echoing number 2 is really an example of echoing or not. Given that the teacher is asking for a yes-no question, I would say it isn't but I'm still not 100% sure.
In all of the three cases above, I believe that the teacher didn't realize that she was echoing her student. In fact, since I am the one observing it's easy for me to detect it but I think most of the teachers do it just unconsciously.

When the children were "echoed", there was no sign of response from them. In fact, after seeing they wouldn't respond or react in any way, I started to think what was the purpose of echoing as there was something missing or at least it felt that way.
The same happened when it comes to classroom interaction, I could notice that echoes didn't add anything at all either. Could it be that when teacher echoes them they feel she could be trying to correct them? If so, this could be a problem because children could fell scared to make mistakes and they would not participate again.
Honestly, I still have difficulties to find the purpose of echoing as I haven't seen any positive response in this observation. That's why I think that echoing can't be taken into account as a way of giving feedback. If you think about it, it doesn't really help students to detect a mistake nor to correct it. It seems as if it is just repeating what somebody said and repetition is one thing, feedback another thing. When a teacher gives feedback, the purpose is to help students to know if they are right or wrong and how to correct it, echoing is something different.
Then again, maybe this observation wasn't the best example for echoing. Somehow this experience makes me believe that echoing is exclusively classroom-based discourse feature because outside the classroom echoing is normally used when we show shock or surprise, if that's really echoing.

As Lindstromberg says echoing is a way to reinforce language, but it is certainly not the only way. The same happens with pronunciation, poor pronunciation may not necessarily be solved by echoing but through listening games, for example.
However, I do agree with him that echoing could be used as a strategy to correct students. Of course, never forgetting that there are other ways to correct an error.
Finally, I would like to say that since I still don't see how it could contribute to my class, I'm still not sure if I would apply it in one of my future classes.

OBSERVATION #1: Attending to the learner.

During this observation I had the opportunity to observe a class in the 6th year of primary school. There were 30 students in the classroom. Before coming into the class, the teacher warned me about Mateo's behaviour, one of the children. She told me not to expect anything from him since he would only try to distract his classmates during the class.
Some of them sat at the front, while the others sat near the end of the classroom. Something not so important that I found peculiar is that, as the teacher allow them a free choice of seats, boys chose to sit with boys, and girls with girls. There was just one exception in this class. At first I thought this could mean something, however, then I thought it could be just a coincidence. 

I don't think the gender of the children was relevant to the distribution of teacher attention but I do think that the seat arrangement lent itself to a particular spread of the teacher's attention (See the seat arrangement in the image below).

I feel that the students sat at the back of the classroom did not get the equal attention compared with the students in front. What's more, one of the students sat at the back didn't even open her activity book during the whole class. I suppose the teacher never noticed it and if she did, she never took the initiative to do something about it.



About the image above, I would like to say that every point mark has its explanation.
In this case, the attending strategies used by teacher were the use of abundant student's names and eye contact with her students. Also the occasional use of nodding and smiling.
As she had already warned me, Mateo talked and tried to distract his classmates during the whole class. The teacher said his name two times combining the last time with reprimanding look. The children's response wasn't positive, he laughed and eventually kept doing what he was doing.
As Serena, another student sat behind Mateo, wouldn't stop complaining about Mateo's behaviour, the teacher decided to move Mateo from his seat and put him in her own seat so that she could monitor him better. Even though the boy still kept talking and making jokes, I feel the situation changed (a little) for the better.

In some cases, the teacher asked questions about the activities given and the students (randomly chosen by the teacher) replied. For example, in the case of Lucia, the girl could reply to the question she was asked, the teacher nodded implying it was fine and Lucia nodded as well.
Another children, Braian, replied to a different question and the teacher smiling told him it was fine and he literally screamed of joy. I realized later that he was competing with the classmate sat next to him to find out who could get more correct answers.

The teacher never touched any of the students under any situation but she did give only one reprimanding look to Abril. In this case Lucas, who was sitting in front of Abril, had been bothering her during the whole class. In only one occasion, the teacher called his name but he kept doing it anyway. Seeing that the teacher wouldn't do anything to stop him, Abril said something rude to him and the teacher called her name and gave a reprimanding look. Abril's tone of voice suggested that she was mad and she even said to the teacher that she misunderstood the whole situation but the teacher asked her to behave properly.
As a whole, I feel the boys' behaviour is more challenging and requires more and special attention from the teacher.

What I would like to apply to my own teaching from what I learned from this teacher's attending strategies would be to try to give equal amount of attention to students. In this observation, I felt the teacher only asked questions always to the same students.
I would have encouraged students in the back to participate, sometimes it seemed as if those in the back felt inferior, unequal or as if they had obstacles to learn.

POST #2: Communicative Learning.

When it comes to communicative approaches, it is clearly seen that students' motivation to speak is much greater if what they say is "for real". That is to say, if the activities we give them take into account their individual opinions, their feelings and their experiences. In that case, language learning will be meaningful. 

Having said that, I think the image above represents a clear example of real communication because through a guessing game, the children are using English and their prior knowledge about animals, colours, everything they've learnt, to try to help them discover more about animals.
Games in teaching are not just to play games, but in fact, it serves for teaching. Its purpose is to make knowledge more joyful to children.

Our role, as teachers, is important because we need to provide students of English speaking with learning opportunities. Providing these opportunities for real communication is important too, because this kind of talk will satisfy students and motivate them. I think teachers should personalize the learning experience in such a way that engages students to participate and create the need to speak.

For example this activity taken from the book "Good Times 3" (Richmond, 1999) could be used as another example of real communication:





Just like guessing games, role-playing games can be a fun and compelling learning experience. Again, children would be using all their prior knowledge in a familiar context (They know food, they know the days of the week and it is a part of their routine). Interaction would be real and meaningful as it relates to their everyday lives. What's more, children think they are playing a game, but they are really focusing on future tenses. Educators have the power to teach them when students think they are playing.
The intent is to have the students think about the material and to have them make it relevant for themselves rather than just studying to pass a test. That is why, not only communicative but all kind of activities should be like this, .