During the first year, I had an opportunity to participate in the practice work at Szkoła

Podstawowa z Oddziałami Integracyjnymi nr 318 in Warsaw im. J.CH. Andersena. It was a

Polish public school of a 2nd grade where there were 20 pupils in the classroom. The
duration of the practice was from the beginning of October to the end of May. I attended
two days in a week on Mondays and Thursdays.

I could observe different teaching techniques of conducting not only English lessons but also
Polish lessons and Math classes. I could see various students' behavior and reactions to
teacher's ideas and commands. There were no pupils who would speak English, so this
language was virtually new to them, even though they knew the basics of the English
alphabet, pronunciation or elementary vocabulary. Moreover, I was able to note during my
lessons that these students had some problems with understanding the commands and
instructions which were given by the teacher. I observed that the commands and questions
were too challenging to them. My thought was that the classroom language was an essential
element because it was part of each lesson but had definitely been used too rarely. I decided
to change that during my conducted lessons and observed what would happen then. Firstly,
when I started to run my first lessons I had some difficulties to communicate with the pupils
using English language. One of the reasons was that I used only English language during my
lessons and they weren't accustomed to it. Another problem was that I commented every
single action which I had done so it could definitely be confusing to them. After my
conducted lessons I was thinking about my classroom language, so the ways of giving
commands and asking the questions. My first reflection was to stop commenting every
single action and use phrases which provide the necessary information to them. Another
thought was that my intonation wasn't suitable to a specific situation. I should emphasize
every word that was spoken by me. Additionally, I realized that gestures, mime and facial
expressions were really essential in communication with young learners because they were
useful and helpful to them for better comprehension of what the teacher said. After all the
conclusions I started to implement these actions and I could notice that the pupils reacted
much better to what I said and started to use simple questions, like: 'Can I go to the toilet?' ,
'Can I drink?' 'What page?'.