Assignment 4: Lessons from the Classroom

Strengths

The feedbacks I get from both my tutors and peers are fundamental to help me improve with the way I teach and for my self-evaluation.

The first strength witnessed by both tutors and peers is the good rapport that I establish with learners. A good rapport with learners means higher motivation for learners, more comfort that they can answer more confidently and with a higher degree of frankness. In addition the good rapport enhances respect and facilitates the communication between teachers and learners.

Second, during my teaching practices I showed an improvement in class management such as dividing them into groups and pairs; using material especially data show.

In my first teaching practice, I didn’t use the data show and I exclusively relied on chesting, it’s from the second teaching practice that I mastered its use.

Third, my peers and tutors acknowledge my cultural awareness when I choose the warm up and lead in. I usually start my lessons with topics they are familiar with and able to speak about them. For example in teaching practice 2 I started the lesson with projecting photos of famous shops in Turkey and asked about their shopping habits; in teaching practice 5 I used the photo of a famous Turkish chef and made them talk about his success story and compared with the success story of the chef in their reading activity.  

Learners loved the lead in activities and were so engaged. They shared their shopping habits in teaching practice 2; in teaching practice 5 learners spoke with zeal and enthusiasm about the chef because they know the secrets behind his success story.   

Finally after each teaching practice I become less stressed and more confident. For me it’s all about practicing.

Developmental Needs and Action Points

Of course there is a lot of work to be done in order to improve my teaching abilities. First, my main challenge is to comply with teaching procedure, lesson stages, such as lead in, prediction, highlighting the target language and free and controlled practice. Actually lesson planning  has to have a shape that changes from one lesson’s main focus to another; receptive skills lessons (reading and listening) have a different shape from productive skills (speaking and writing). Language that includes grammar, lexis and functional language have different lesson shapes as well; either you rely on a text or a listening track to present the language, or testing learners before and after the lesson.  It’s very challenging for non-experienced trainee.

Second, despite the improvement, I often fail to do a proper feedback and diversify its techniques after every assigned activity to learners. I often make it longer, example in teaching practice 7 I gave a long feedback by doing a detailed reading of the ten questions of the reading for detail.

In teaching practice 6, I confused between listening and lexis, that means vocabulary and language. It was treated as a listening lesson not lexis. marking the word stress and syllables on the whiteboard along with drilling and phonetic transcriptions were totally absent during the teaching practice. Fortunately I rectified in the following teaching practice and I’ll rectify in the eighth teaching practice, that its main focus is grammar, and make it a to standard lesson.

I also need to work more and more on my lesson planning, vocabulary analysis and grammar and functional analysis. I confess that it’s a major weakness that needs improvement.

Summary

During the course I have learned a lot about English teaching. It’s a different teaching approach for both experienced and non-experienced teachers. For example, it’s very recommended to make the lessons more and more student centered rather than teacher centered. Learners are now very familiar with foreign languages that using topics they are interested in may facilitates their interactions with the lesson and teacher and makes the lesson more interesting.

Finally, it’s very useful to observe my peers during their practice and my tutors during their demo lessons. It helps learn new teaching techniques and styles.

Plans for Post-Course Development

First I will practice every technique and method I learned during the training. Not only in English teaching but also in teaching Arabic and French.

Second I will enroll in every conference, workshop, training and courses related to English teaching. It’s the most efficient way to stay updated with new methods and trends. Luckily it’s the era of internet, open resources and materials are very abundant on internet.

Finally, I will sign up for a DELTA course or any equivalent advanced qualification in addition to a master’s degree program in English literature, history and linguistic.