A case of effective language teaching

The class starts when the teacher says “good morning class!”; then, the students answer “good morning teacher!”. Afterward, she asks them about the date of the day ; for this reason , she uses different posters that contain the days of the week and the months of the year. So, she says “Is it Monday?” ; the children reply “no!”; then, she asks “Is it Tuesday?”; they say “yes!!”. The next question is about the month; so, the teacher asks one students to identify it on the poster , the student does it very well. The final question is about the number of the day, she uses a board that contains the days of the moth ; so, she says “yesterday was 24th ,so today is 25th !” ; she writes the number on the board. To finish the calendar routine ,she writes the whole sentence on the board and reads it “Today is Tuesday , November 25th !”; then, the students have to say the sentence too. She says “very good!”. Subsequently, the teacher asks “How is the weather today?”; she has another poster , which contains pictures of different kinds of weather. The students answer by themselves saying “cold and sunny” . For this reason, she writes the complete sentence on the board and reads it “the weather today is cold and sunny” ; then, they have to say the sentence. Afterward, the teacher asks them to sing the song of the ABC s ; so, she has another poster with the whole alphabet. Then, the students star singing“A, B, C, D...”; they do it really well. Finally, the whole group move to another side of the classroom to practice maths. The teacher has a big chart that contains the number from 1 to 144. So, she start asking the group to sing the numbers “1, 2, 3, 4, 5...”. Then, she asks one student to count by 5s; consequently , another children count by 10s but backwards. The whole group do it excellent.

Before I say why this English instruction was effective, we have to consider some points. First of all, the group have around 6 students; so, it was a small group. Second, all the students were non English Speakers; for this reason, it was really difficult for them to follow instructions since they know a little bit of English. Finally, this routine had been done more than 8 times by these students; so, they knew how to answer.

The class was really effective because each student was able to answer when the teacher asked something, every student learned all the topics that the teacher taught ; for example, how to say the date of the days , ABC s, maths,etc.

She used the communicative approach because the purpose of the activities is that the students are allowed to communicate with other people; for this reason, the teacher makes them to speak a lot. She used games, music and rhythm, repetition, and planned the lesson very well in order to get it. Besides, in other lessons I could observe that the students are not only allowed to speak, but also to read and write , which is very important since these skills have to be taught from the beginning too. Last, I could appreciate that the teachers in general teach important things about the American culture; for instance, Halloween , Thanksgiving, etc. For theses reasons, I have to say that this lesson and my teachers are really effective.