Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas

Academic Unit: Introducción a la didáctica de las lenguas

Homework: u5/t1/act1/Physical environment of the classroom.
Professor: Magali Andaluz Arévalo
Daniel Osman Bautista Bonifaz
bulgogix1@mail.com
06/09/2018

Physical environment of the classroom

There are mistakes that we make as teachers, many of the times unconsciously, in a
classroom. Some are minor and some others are not. Mistakes are there to make people
learn from experiences and grown to become better at what they do. By analyzing the video,
we can see some minor mistakes depicted there. These mistakes can affect the way students
process their learning experience inside a classroom. There are four aspects of the physical
environment of a classroom that were presented, and those are sight, sound and comfort,
sitting arrangements, chalkboard use, and equipment. Giving the proper use to all these
aspects can make the difference in the learning process of the students.

For instance, when it comes to sight, sound and comfort, students need to feel they are in a
comfortable place where they can learn free from stress. Their eyes and ears should let them
perceive the proper mood of the classroom and not that of a dull and boring one. In the video,
we saw only a whiteboard, desks, chairs and nothing else that said that was a classroom that
you wanted to be in. To alleviate this problem, we can decorate with posters of English related
themes or why not, modern artists that young people follow today.

Moving on, we have sitting arrangement. In the video, the students were sitting next to
someone along the classroom wall. Many of the times teachers can’t notice what’s going on
with the students sitting all the way in the back of the classroom and other times those same
people in the back can’t see what the teacher is doing or writing on the board. We can
eliminate such distractions by rearranging the chairs and tables in a semi-circle fashion. This
way, the teacher has control of everything that is going on and students can not only observe
but listen clearly to what is being taught. The video had students sitting along the wall and
because of the position of the seats were facing, some students could see what was being
written on the board. As shown in the video, it is better if we don’t body block the view of the
student while we are talking and writing on the board at the same time.

The use we give the chalkboard should be minimum and when need it, we should talk and
then write or write and then talk. There are times where we do more writing on the board than
interaction with students. Students need to feel alive during the class and not just write things
down and let that be the entire class session for the day. As teachers, we need to have
students participate more even during the introduction of the topic given for that day. I give
examples and act them out first and then write them on the board. This way, students are not
left unattended for long periods of time or make them lose their interest in the lesson being
taught.

Many of the public schools and even those that are solely for language teaching purposes,
tend to only have a radio for audio exercises as the only classroom equipment and some
don’t even have that, as we saw in the video. We need to have a variety of methods, we need
to be flexible when it comes to teaching. Exposing class lessonsin the same way, class after
class can get boring for students and teachers alike. Nowadays a computer can come in
handy when playing an audio or showing a video clip for teaching purposes. Having an array
of methods used to teach a class and taking care of the most minimum detail, can make the
difference between having a fun and productive class or a boring pointless one.