I observed a 17-minute Grade 6 EFL class lesson in China. I am unsure of exactly how many students were in the class but I would guess around 30. The lesson seemed to be a review lesson. The topic of the lesson was vacations, and the students practiced vocabulary related to vacations and practiced applying the vocabulary to a dialogue.
In this lesson the teacher did minimal speaking and gave the students space to practice their vocabulary, spelling, and speaking. She showed many pictures and prompted the students to name and sometimes spell what was depicted. The class seemed to have a strong grasp on the lesson’s vocabulary and spelling as they quickly and eagerly provided answers. Only one or two new words or phrases were introduced. It seemed this class was not designed for language acquisition but rather to increase fluency. The speed at which the students responded to the teacher’s prompts showed that they were effectively practicing their fluency. At the end of the lesson, the teacher had the students apply the target vocabulary by engaging in a dialogue in partners, which also seemed to be a fluency exercise.
The teacher was likely assessing the students’ fluency throughout the lesson, paying attention to how quickly and confidently they responded to her prompts. She did not seem to be particularly concerned with accuracy in this lesson as she rarely corrected pronunciation. For the most part she had the class speak all at once, which would not allow her to listen to each individual’s pronunciation. She did a brief individual pronunciation assessment by having the students take turns saying a phrase from a list. The teacher also walked around the room a little bit during the dialogue activity to be able to hear and assess some of the conversations the students were having.
If I were teaching this class I would have found the environment very distracting. There was a lot of background noise. It sounded like there may have been another noisy class nearby, and I heard a few honking cars. I was wondering if it also distracted this teacher and the students or if they were accustomed to the noise. I do not expect that anything could be done to solve this problem, but I could see it affecting the quality of both the teaching and learning in this class.
Another issue I saw in this class was a lack of focus in the dialogue activity. Students started chatting in larger groups instead of in their pairs, and it sounded like a lot of students were speaking Mandarin and not doing the task. There were a lot of voices in the room and they became increasingly louder and more excited. It did not seem as though all of the students were doing the task given by the teacher. I thought the teacher should have listened more carefully as she was moving around the room to make sure everyone was speaking English and doing the exercise. I saw the teacher walk right past a group that I was quite sure was speaking Mandarin and she did not seem to notice and did not redirect them.
Something I liked about this teacher was her use of visuals and body language. She used a lot of gestures to communicate meaning to the students when they did not have the vocabulary to understand. She was able to teach the students a new word, “skyscraper,” through the use of her gestures. She also used gestures as prompts to guide the students to produce certain words or phrases in the cases when they did have the vocabulary to do so. Her slideshow presentation was very visual with many pictures that supplemented her lesson nicely.