Observation third semester

The language of questions

The observation of 8class, this lesson was aimed to speaking and listening. The lesson was divided into three areas of questioning. Introduction questions as the teacher does every lesson at the beginning, he was asking How are they? then accidentally: Have you got any….? What is your favourite ….? What is your hobby? What do you like doing? What are you doing? How was your weekend? Did you watch something in English last few days? I suppose that they were answering appropriate and in the whole sentences and they wanted to answer since they are used to doing it. The second sets of questions were on the text they read last lesson. At first questions which answers they should have found for HW. Who was John Ross? Who else was in the house. What were they doing? – pupils read the answers and they were taken sentences from the text. It continuous with questions for the picture of the house. Which room is it? Who is there? What is the person doing? Children answered together in one or two word responses however the teacher always repeated their answer in the whole sentence. Last part was aimed to listening another part of the story. Who was the detective interviewing? What did she say? With this question the teacher must have help with additional questions: What did she say about…? The most difficult question came at the end. He asked who do they think killed John Ross and after their guesses he asked Why? The most often answer was I don’t know. I liked the idea of graduation of questions during the lesson.

Attending to the classroom

I have noticed two interesting things that the contact between a teacher and pupils change a bit with the position of the teacher. It depends if the teacher is sitting or standing. He often forgot the line by the window sitting directly in front of him but in the standing position he followed all the class. The standing position also prevented more the disturbing of children. The teacher was keeping the eye contact when he asked a question and waited for an answer as well as when he was talking. He chose children by their names but sometimes he just made the eye contact with a child. He never touched any children but he was going through the aisles and sometimes he stood standing near a child he was talking to.

The teacher´s meta-language

For this observation I chose to go to the 3class – pupils starting with English. The teacher there can speak English but she is not an English teacher. She tried to use English much but she often gave up very quickly with giving the idea , of what she is saying, to children. Single words she accompanied with some gestures which pupils were able to understand. However more complicated phrases she tried saying once or twice and then rather use mother language. The instructions were said firstly in English then Czech and the pupils were obviously counted on it.