This is one of the observations that i wrote while observing an English teaching class in Morocco I hope you enjoy it .
As soon as I entered my third observation class, I received a warm welcome by Professor Anna along with the young learners in beginning 2 level class in the American Language Center in Rabat. The class had around 16 students, approximately around the age of 17. Before starting the lesson, Anna notified her students that I am there to observe her class and that I may also participate in some activities with the young learners. I truly appreciated the effort and attention she gave me by giving me various pieces of advice and providing me with the techniques that I truly believe can change my career as a teacher, and she also suggested having a little discussion at the end of the session to answer any further questions that I might still have.
The first thing I noticed was the enjoyable atmosphere. It was obvious that the students had a positive relationship with their teacher. To begin with, there was a brief discussion about travelling. One student was absent in the previous session and Anna asked him if he was traveling or he was ill. Asking the students such questions would actually make them feel that their teacher cares about them and wants what is best for them. Then, Anna started a warm up activity; the objective behind it was to see whether the students still remember the vocabulary words they had seen in the previous session or not. She divided the students into 5 groups and asked them to select one writer from each group. Then she mentioned some categories such as vegetables, diary, fruits, and so forth, and asked them to write as many words as they can that belong to these categories. The criterion was that the group with the highest number of words would win. She gave the task a competitive flavor so the students could be more motivated to recall what they had studied in the last session.
Afterwards, she asked the students to check their homework while she was writing some adverbs of frequency on the board, for the limitation of time. Next to each adverb she wrote the percentage of doing the action that goes with the adverb.
Often: 80% - 99%
Usually: 60% - 80%
Sometimes: 20% - 60 %
Hardly ever / rarely: 1% - 20%
The homework was a simple exercise about writing. The student had to write a short sentence that goes with a title given to them. If the title is chicken, for example, the students had to write something like “you need chicken because it has a lot of protein”, which is something they had already seen in the previous session. Anna, then, threw a small size ball to a pair to answer the first sentence and that exact pair threw it to another. The pair with the ball should give a sentence that goes with the title.
Next, they are introduced to an audio, in this audio a Japanese girl named Kimiko was inviting her friend to visit her and describing what her breakfast is usually like. Then she asked them some question about the audio to see whether the students listened carefully or not. The results were outstanding; from the first play, they were able to remember so much information and answered the questions easily and rapidly, which suggests that they had already worked on their listening skills. After assessing their listening skills, they were introduced to the written form of the audio. They were asked to read it, for the purpose of practicing reading and speaking. Not long after that, the students were asked to work with a partner and try to change some informations in the dialogue such as: date, meal, location, food and so forth. That is to say, working on their writing skills by trying to write their own dialogue using the first dialogue as a model; which they did, the dialogue they wrote was a bit far from the original one. Then they were asked to read it out loud, one student mentioned that they usually have ћrira for dinner. Once the student said that, the other students in the class started talking over each other and debating; Anna did not interfere and let the students express their ideas. The two interesting things were that Anna avoided correcting her students' mistakes as they were expressing their ideas about dinner and let her students communicate freely using English, which is the essential objective in any English teaching class. The second thing is that she tackled the four skills in this activity ranging from listening, to reading and speaking, and finally writing.
In the next activity, Anna went back to the adverbs of frequency that she had already written on the board, and asked her students what is the percentage of Kimiko having fish for breakfast. The students' task was to locate the adverb of frequency in the dialogue and relate it to the percentage that is written on the board. Since Kimiko usually has fish for breakfast means that the percentage of her having it again is 60% to 80%. After the students became familiar with the most common adverbs of frequency, she introduced them to the form of question "how often?" She further explained that we use adverbs of frequency to answer this form of question. She provided several examples related to students' personal life such as: how often do you go to school? Or how often do you watch TV? And she also introduced them to the form of answer by providing them with the grammatical rule. That is we can put the adverbs of frequency before the verb like in usually, often, and rarely, or before the subject like in sometimes. Then she asked them to try to come up with their own sentences that contain an adverb of frequency, and to assess whether they completely understood the rule, she gave them two exercises from the course book to do. The first exercise was a task to put the adverbs of frequency in their correct locations, EX: Well, I have coffee in breakfast (usually). The second exercise was scrambled sentences, EX: eat/for/pasta/dinner/sometimes/I. Those two exercises were accurate and purposeful to implement the rule that they had been given earlier. Anna followed the p.p.p method which is present, practice, produce. First she presented the adverbs and the rule then the students practiced it by reading the sentences and doing exercises, and finally they produced.
As a last activity Anna handed out lyrics of the famous music song "Don't Let Me Down" by Rihanna, this lyric was missing few words. The students had to listen carefully to the music in order to fill the blanks in the lyrics. After completing the lyrics, Anna asked the students if there any words that they did not understand. Some students found some words difficult and some other found no difficulty in the vocabulary. To conclude the session they all sang the song in a chorus within a very pleasant, fun, and enjoyable atmosphere.
It was truly a beneficial experience for me. I learned many new activities and many small details that I was not completely aware about. I hope that in the future I will be able to use some of Anna‘s techniques since I witnessed myself how much effective they are. I am also glad that I had the opportunity to watch a real capable teacher in action. I believe now that my instructions and procedures in my class will be much better due to what I have just learned.