Assignment 4: LESSONS FROM THE CLASSROOM

Part 1

1. Adapting materials: I think I do a good job of identifying the quality of tasks and their
appropriateness in relation to the students’ and for meeting lesson aims. For instance, during TP3
I had to teach a listening lesson to a group of pre-intermediate students. The audio was around 3
minutes long and included around seven words that would have needed to be taught for students
to respond to the tasks. As such, I not only edited the audio to exclude the excessive vocab, I also
created my own listening for detail task to ensure that it aligned with the range of pre-taught
vocab and the new edit of the audio. In TP7, the listening for detail task provided by the text-
book asked for too much detail and was really vague so I wrote my own questions to provide
students with a greater but more appropriate challenge.
2. Creating slides and visuals: I have received consistently positive feedback on my use of slides
and visuals since the begging of TP, which have been described as ‘creative’ and ‘engaging’. This
was particularly the case in TP3 as well, when I created a small comic from scratch to match an
anecdote that I had told to convey the meaning of the words ‘borrow’, ‘lend’, ‘owe’ and ‘spend’.
3. Pre-teaching vocabulary: I received praise on my approach to pre-teaching vocabulary during
TPs 3,5 and 7 for being “thorough” in doing so. In TP5, for example, I used the image of a half-
full glass of water to convey and elicit the words ‘optimist’, ‘pessimist’ and ‘realist” using the
universal analogy of the ‘half-full/half-empty’ glass of water’. Afterwards, I removed the words
from the screen and focused on pronunciation through drilling and boarded the form with syllable
stress, part of speech and plural form. In addition to having asked CCQs to ensure understanding
after conveying and eliciting, I created and gave students a gap-fill to teach other members of the
word families.

Part 2

Area 1: Planning: During the first half of the course, my planning was somewhat shallow and rather
subpar in comparison to lesson execution. To remedy this weakness, I began including rationale in
relevant areas of the plan, describing stage procedures in greater detail and paying attention to stage
names in accordance with CELTA terminology. I received an ‘above standard’ on my TP5 plan, which I
believe was due to my accurate naming of stages for a receptive skills lesson, my ability to rationalize
unusual decisions (e.g. not offering feedback after lead-in pair-work discussion and including a more
thorough description of procedures to include (e.g. timings, specific steps and identifying clear interaction
patters (e.g. S-S /OC).
Area 2: Providing support during listening exercises: During my pervious listening lessons, I used to
simply display the answers that student could not provide on their own, with little to no feedback or
guidance. I remedied this issue in TP7 when I listed the specific timings of where the answers were in the
audio and replayed them for students so that they may answer on their own and correct themselves.
Area 3: Linking lesson stages: My early lesson stages (e.g. lead-in/prediction) were often ended
abruptly and each stage felt separate from the next one. I feel like I have made sufficient progress in that
regard by simply including a linking sentence at the end of each stage. For example, in TP5, I thought that
students had some really interesting ideas during the prediction stage and as such I told them that I
thought so and told them to keep their ideas in mind during the next part (reading for gist) to see if they
were correct, thus linking the two stages.
Parts 3 and 4:
Areas to work on with specific
examples from TP:
1. Improving lesson timing/flexibility
during execution. This has been somewhat
of an issue in my most recent TPs (5-7),
where I would plan for flexibility but
overlook it during execution.
2. Setting clearer communicative
goals/stages. My tutors have pointed out
that simply giving instructions ahead of
final communicative stages is not very
effective (e.g. TP4).
3. Reducing time required for the
vocabulary pre-teaching stage: This was a
problem in TPs 3,5 and 7 as pointed out by
my tutors and peers as it would take
anywhere between 20% to 40% of my
lesson time despite being a secondary aim.
Ideas (including some from my observations) which will help in
my areas to work on (2 ideas per area):
a) Closing BROs faster during an online class: This may seem like an
entirely minor/insignificant point but from my observation of several of
my peers, failure to send and retrieve students to and from breakout rooms
leads to losing a large portion of time.
b) During language lessons, I need to more carefully select which aspects
of MPF are most important to cut short/eliminate ones that do not
contribute to lesson aims. For instance, in one of her earlier TPs, one of
my peers focused on pronunciation in a grammar lesson where the final
stage was controlled practice, therefore pronunciation could have been
discarded completely as a stage. I did the same thing in a lesson on the
passive voice, where my final stage was controlled practice (TP6).
a) Exemplify communicative task: One of the ideas provided by one of my
tutors (Annette) was to exemplify the activity with one of my peers or a
strong student so that students can proceed with the activity with ease.
b) Reading published authors/online materials for ideas on interesting and
engaging communicative activities (e.g. Learning Teaching by Jim
Scrivener – p.217).
a) Selecting more efficient methods: In her lesson on common illnesses,
Jane used gestures and pictures to convey and elicit the meanings of words
like headache/stomach ache, through which students were capable of
providing the target language immediately.
b) Removing/keeping certain parts of MPF as flexi-stages: In one of her
TPs, my peer Dina used a matching exercise to allow students to guess
meaning on their own and only briefly went over pronunciation and form,
which saved a lot of time for the main focus of her lesson, which was
listening.

Part 5

One weakness that I know I have is related to classroom management. By nature, I generally lack the
ability and confidence to assume control or take the lead as is often required for teaching. I also lack the
assertiveness that I have observed in some of my co-trainees. To address this issue, I intend to work at a
school with YL/teenagers, who are more likely to disrupt lessons, ask irrelevant questions or interrupt the
teacher. This will likely be very difficult at first, but it will give me the confidence I need to maintain
control of my classroom especially when there is a power struggle. This will be done, however, after I
gain more experience with adults, which will allow me to hone my knowledge and application of
methodology before I move on to the difficulties of teaching younger learners. I also need to improve my
language awareness, particularly with regard to grammar To do so, I intend to reference Jim Scrivener
and Jeremy Harmers’ respective books (e.g. Teaching and Learning Grammar by Jeremy Harmer), which
provide native speakers with a concise and profound understanding of grammatical concepts.

Ali Sabah