Observation Report 3:

The observation was in fourth grade with the teacher called Maria Laura Bianchi, and the topic that the students were working was “At the wild life park”.

The teacher started with a speaking routine a song, when students were ready they sang a song with movement, mime and facial expressions. They sang “Good morning, Good morning” etc.… The teacher was prepared to speak carefully in English, first she wrote the day on the blackboard, and then she asked, what the weather was like?, and in her hands she had a variety of pictures (sun, cloud, rain etc.…) and the students had to answer. They did it very well, because that is a routine for them.

She used a variety of techniques to make listening input and comprehensible. She wrote on the blackboard “ask and answer”, Can a parrot fly? Yes it can, no it can´t, Can an elephant jump? Etc... She used gestures and body movement about animals. She repeated and rephrased all the animals with meaning (a snake, a monkey for example). The words were clearly used in every explanation, they had plenty of opportunities to participate and speak about animals and their wild life. She was checking their comprehension students by students and when they didn´t know how to do the activity she helped them. This is the first task they had to do, although the majority of the time the teacher spoke in Spanish they managed very well speaking in English, I would have spoken more English like a teacher because students responded well in this.

The speaking environment wasn´t active because the majority of the time they were working in the same activity and if some students finished first were very dispersed because other part of the students hadn´t finished yet. Then they corrected the task on the blackboard. They worked on their own; the last five minutes they did the second task of their activity book. The teacher put a cd on the radio, gave the instructions in Spanish and they had to listen and circle in the correct animal; then she mentioned every animal in English and the students repeated their name. She used in many opportunities, “are you ready”, “very good”, “well”, “it´s great” to motivate students; the activity was unfinished because they hadn’t time to finish it. I think she stayed lots of time in the first task and she didn´t take advantage of the time to speak more in English and make activities short. To finish they had homework, describe one animal with their characteristics.

Is very important to keep an environment active in listening and speaking, furthermore when students respond very well in English, but in this case listen and speaking weren´t active, only in some moments, but students showed comprehension because they recognized the main vocabulary words.