In this second part of the assignment I will report two of my observation sessions.

The first at the Awatapu college level 1ESOL students class and the second is St. Albans community class. These two classes are quite different, since the first is formal and the second is more communal. I will explain further about these two classes respectively. ESOL class at Awatapu College Introduction to the class The ESOL Class in Awatapu College is a level 1 ESOL class containing 10 students from various countries like China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Tonga, and India. The students are from grade 10 and 11. They join this ESOL class in order to be prepared for the mainstream classes, where they will be fully taught in English, of course the native speaker level. The head of ESOL department explains that the present moment these students are equipped with help from teacher-aide in the mainstream class. The teacher aide will help them to re-explain the instruction given by their teacher, but not to help them doing the assignments. Later on as the students proceed to Grade 12, there will be no more teacher aide help provided, so this ESOL class is aimed to prepare the students for more independent learning, especially in aspects of language. Speaking about language proficiency, this class has a wide range of it. There are students who had stayed long enough in New Zealand, but there are also some students who have just arrived and joined the class recently. Generally, the head of ESOL department describes the English proficiency level as beginner to upper intermediate. The focus of the course are reading and writing. There will be some activities involving speaking and listening, but those will be the minor ones. The departments head says that these students have been doing speaking and listening all the time during their interaction with other students and their teachers, that is why the focus is on reading and writing.

The activities From my Understanding of the session, there are three different activities conducted. The first is reading, the second vocabulary, and the third grammar. The vocabulary and grammar activity is linked with the reading materials that the students read at the beginning of the class. This is quite an interesting technique, because from my own practice, I mostly can only integrate two activities for one session, like reading and vocabulary. I believe that the reason why this teacher does this technique is because of the purpose of the course mentioned earlier by the ESOL department head, which are reading and writing. The latter activities which involve vocabulary task and grammar focus are aimed to support the students reading comprehension ability and strategy. In other words, the sessions activities are based on reading. The vocabulary task is to discuss the meaning of difficult words found in the text. The grammar focus talks about pronoun which also utilized to deepen the students understanding about the text they read. This technique is in coherence with the emphasis on reading and writing, especially focus on reading for this session. There is not much communicative participation from the learners expected from this class, because their activities are mostly focused on text rather than oral communication. But, of course the teacher still invites them to express their ideas and opinion about the subject matter, but the initiative is not on them. The procedures The procedure to the activity starts with pre reading discussion on topic related to extra terrestrial theme. There are no specific groupings used in this session. The teacher communicates to the class as a whole. The students are likely to be expected to do some individual tasks. Actually, I joined the class a little bit late, the conversation with the ESOL department head was very interesting, so that we were not aware that the 2

class is already begun. When I come to the class the learners already begin to read the text provided by the teacher. So, based on the writings on the board, I assume that the teacher has done some introduction in the lead in phase. It seems that the teacher stimulates the learners curiosity by asking questions like have you heard about UFO sighting? or do you think that alien really exists? This procedure also helps the teacher to introduce some key vocabulary items to the learners. The students read the text independently. The text entitled close encounter. The text is taken from magazine or wallpaper, so it is an authentic reading text. After some time dedicated to independent reading, the teacher starts to write some questions on the board. There are five closed-ended questions, with fixed answer that could be found explicitly in the text. The teacher later asks some students in turn to give their answers. Later on, after all the questions has been answered and discussed, the teacher initiates the vocabulary activity of matching some words taken from the text with provided meaning. The procedure is the same with the previous one, learners are asked to answer independently, and later the teacher asks them randomly or in turns to answer. On last ten minutes of the session the teacher decides to do some grammar review. The grammar feature is pronoun. The teacher firstly asked the students what they know about pronoun, this kind of metalanguage question I notice makes some students confused, because they know what pronouns are, but I assume they have difficulties in defining them. Luckily, there is one student answering the question, later on, I spot the teacher realizes the students confusion on the question, and she tries to explain pronouns in a more practical way, by providing examples and analogies. There is not enough time to finish the grammar review. Because I suspect this grammar review will utilize the PPP method, but the time is up when 3

they only begin the second P; practice. In my mind I would question the teacher decision to bring out the grammar review on the last ten minute of the session. She decides to continue it on the next meeting. The session is closed, the students are asked to do some independent reading at home. Evaluation I think, overall the technique used in the session is quite effective. It can be seen through the ability of the learners to accomplish the tasks goal. From reading comprehension questions, words and meanings matching, and the unfinished part, the grammar focus, all learners is able to do what the teacher requires them to do. From the aspect of participation, the learners seems a bit passive, it is mainly because of the goal of the course that put its emphasis on reading and writing. So, although the teacher has actively invited the students participation, the students just respond moderately, because they are bounded with written materials. The teacher does a great job as a controller and as resource in the classroom, it is seen in the way she leads the learners to do various exercise at certain pace. But I do not think that the teacher has maximally explore her capacity as prompter, to be able to dig more from the students, and to be able to draw their more active participation. Extension Generally, I have adopted this kind of procedure in my own teaching setting. We have similar pattern of reading activity that followed by comprehension question; type 1 tasks which involve top-down strategy and concentrating to the big picture or general understanding of the text. Type 2 tasks that deals with details and implicit or explicit information from the text, this requires bottom-up approach (Harmer, 2007, p. 270) . But in my own practice I usually integrate reading with another activity, either vocabulary or grammar. Doing three different activity in one session can be so demanding and time-consuming.

The teacher of this classroom is able to lead the students to a better comprehension of the text by incorporating both top-down and bottom up strategy. She assists the student to develop their schema through pre reading discussion, and later discuss the big picture after the independent reading by the students which helps the student to understand the general ideas from the text. And through the comprehension question she demands her student to look carefully for explicit and implicit information as a form of bottom-up process. The vocabulary and the grammar focus is, as I mentioned before, an extension to the reading activity itself. There is not much to say about the vocabulary activity, since it is only in the form of words and meanings matching. But there is something interesting about the unfinished grammar focus at the end of the session. From my understanding, the teacher utilizes the PPP method in straight arrow sequence / Engage-Study-Activate (Harmer, 2007, p. 67) to explain pronoun as a grammar feature. What is interesting during the first P; production is the teacher asks metalanguage question what is pronoun? which leads some students into confusion. The teacher had just come to the second P; practice, when the session ended.

Session at St. Albans community class Introduction to the class St. Albans is a community English class run by the church, and like any other community classes, its main purpose is to help immigrants who are struggling with their English. The idea is to support these people with the skill they need be able to communicate and to interact within the society, in their new environment in New Zealand. It is a lot different than any formal classes, because its communal atmosphere, where learners would feel like in a social gathering rather than in a classroom.

The learners who participate in this class are mainly immigrants, international students, refugees from different nationalities and various length of stay in the country. They also have a range of proficiency level. Due to the mixed ability, the class organizer conducts parallel class at the same time. They have classes every Monday night. In St. Albans, there are a number of volunteer teachers, so, the organizer is able to arrange up to six parallel classes according to the proficiency level of the learners. The number of learners per class is usually not more than six. In this particular session, at more or less twenty learners participate in a whole. The number of participant is not the same from week to week, because there is no obligation to come, people come if they want to come, and it is a hard work to arrange the course and lesson plan for this course because of its fluctuating number of participants. From my understanding of the session, the emphasis of this language program will be providing learners their basic English. Of course, there are more advanced learners who usually join the conversation class. For the rest of participants whose proficiency level ranging from beginner to lower intermediate, the focus of the program is like bringing the strands together, Pronunciation, vocabulary, and reading. The Activities What is so interesting about this community class is their routine before the classes begin, there will be some activities conducted in the whole group mode. These activities include reading and singing together, the topic of this opening activities give the learners the clue about particular topic that will be discussed in that session. The topic is about body parts. As the classes begin, I join one of beginner class. The class consists of 3 Chinese men. The class activities mainly evolve around vocabulary focus that to my understanding employs methods like TPR to practice the vocabulary of parts of body. It is followed by cue-response drills as a form 6

of PPP method. As The vocabulary activity flow, the teacher would make some occasional remarks on pronunciation of the learners. The teacher also provides bilingual materials, and puzzles to brighten up the activities. The procedures To start with, the learners sit around the table with the teacher teaching on one side of the table. To introduce the activity, the teacher asks the students to recall the song that they sang in the pre-class activity, she reveals that the song is about parts of the body. The learners are asked to recall the related vocabulary from that song. Then, the learners focus on the teacher as she begins to use TPR to show the vocabulary items for the body parts. She points out a part of body like arm, hand, leg or foot, and asks the student to mention the words. They later switch positions; students in turn stand up, point particular parts of body, and the peers with the peers guessing the associated words. The teacher follows up by introducing cue-drilling exercise; instead of using single words, teacher suggests the learners to use the vocabulary items in simple demonstrative sentence like here is the head, here is the nose. The teacher presents it first and asks the learners to imitate, and later they go on to cue-response drill by employing the same pointing and guessing activity. The plurals form of this simple sentence is introduced after; here are the arms, here are the teeth. This introduction raises learners curiosity of irregular plural forms. Some materials are used to help the learners with the vocabulary like picture of body and its parts in English and Chinese. Evaluation As a whole I think that the experience of observing this class is very worthy, and I see that this class is quite effective in giving its effect toward the learners. Nevertheless, it cannot be expected much that this kind of beginners class would give you active and autonomous initiatives of the learners. Despite their eagerness and enthusiasm, these three men are still depending to the teacher in learning. There is likely to be a one way communication, because the teacher initiates almost everything. The 7

warmth of the class is preserved by a good approach of the teacher who has a good sense of humor. It keeps the class atmosphere far from boredom. The emphasis on vocabulary is what the learners need to improve their proficiency, and the teacher presents it in pleasant and entertaining way. It provides the learner sense of joy and maintains their enthusiasm. The teacher has done a great job in her role as prompter and resource (Harmer, 2007, p. 108). Another important aspect that I highlight is the effort of introducing simple sentence pattern through drilling, it encourages the students to depart from word-level into sentence-level. Extension These kinds of activity are quite handy for a small beginner class. Adaptation to a bigger, higher level class is possible with careful considerations. Students in bigger class would find this TPR activity of pointing and guessing rather daunting, with a bigger possibility to ridicule themselves in front of big classes. This activity is actually adaptable with pairs or groups arrangement. I like the idea of using cue-response drill since it will develop the students to sentence-level. This can be done in a bigger class with teacher as the demonstrator, but adjustments of topic should be made for higher level class In one chapter of his book, Folse (2004) quote Wilkins (1972) expression; one could say less without grammar, but could not say anything without vocabulary. It depicts the importance of vocabulary for language learners, especially for beginners. So, the idea of emphasizing vocabulary to this community class is in rhyme with the main purpose of a community class itself; to help people that struggling with their second language in a new environment. Knowing a word does not merely mean to know its meaning, it is a lot more complex than that. One of the key principles in learning vocabulary is 8

repetition (Coxhead, 2006). Repetition enables learner to dig more aspects of a word, to utilize it in a meaningful way, in order to achieve fluency (Coxhead, 2006, p. 19). Based on this notion, the use of drills will gradually help the learners to absorb the form, the pronunciation, meaning, and use of a word. *** I have never thought that the opportunity of observing other teachers in actions would be so precious. By doing this activity, I can see different viewpoints about how I would approach my own teaching context.

References: Coxhead, A. (2006). Essentials of teaching academic vocabulary, (pp. 1824). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Folse, K. (2004). Vocabulary myths, (pp. 19-34). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Harmer, Jeremy. (2007). The practice of English language teaching (4th Edition). Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman.