ICELT Task 1 Focus On The Teacher's Language

EVALUATION OF TEACHING

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this assignment is both to analyse and evaluate a grammar lesson I taught with reference to the elements which I thought were successful and not so successful during it, as well as supporting my view with the corresponding evidence and rationale.

SUCCESSFUL ELEMENTS

ELEMENT Nº1 : CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT-TIME MANAGEMENT

Despite the need to predict the time each activity will take in order to ensure that everything fits and seeing that timing is not always fully predictable, since we can think that an activity will take less time than it actually needs, I decided to keep my plan flexible.

I looked at what I considered to be the practice and production activities I must complete during my lesson and timed them generously as I tried to keep in my mind that I needed to teach my students not the plan. I spent the time of the lesson making sure that my students fully understood what they were doing and could complete the controlled, semi controlled and freer practice successfully.

ELEMENT Nº2: DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF TASKS AND ACTIVITIES ROLE PLAY

I think I got quite a balanced lesson where my students were able to perceived the logic and coherence of the activities and their contribution to achieving the lesson aim that was being better able to form accurate sentences using third conditional in the context of expressing regret about unfulfilled plans after winning a prize and as Martin Parrot states “Some students find it difficult to remember the grammar of long conditional sentences with two clauses”(Parrot 2010,p.272) that`s why I considered helpful to deal with the third conditional only and provide a lot of opportunities ´ get their tongue round´ the complete sentences accurately during the practice and production stage of my lessons.

These stages were not only recognizable as activities flowing naturally into each other but also did not push my students too fast onto the next stage since the lesson ended at a coherent point where they felt they have completed and achieved the lesson objective, to invent third conditional sentences of their own following the same pattern. The role play showed evidence of it.

NOT SO SUCCESSFUL ELEMENTS

ELEMENT Nº 1: CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT-TEACHERS`ROLE

“One of the most important tasks that teachers have to perform is that of organizing students to do various activities. This often involves giving the students information about the rationale for the activity the students are to be asked to perform , telling them how to do the activities, checking understanding even asking students to give the instructions back ,putting them into pairs or groups and finally closing things when it is time to stop and give feedback properly.” Harmer p.111

That`s why I consider that in the presentation stage I failed to conduct and close my leading activity properly because neither did I provided my students with the correct number of handouts to make them able to read individually nor did I check my students’ prediction adequately and gave feedback on their performance before moving onto the analysis of the model sentence.

And as Jeremy Harmer says “ When teachers act as controllers, they are in charge of the class and of the activity taking place and are often leading from the front. First, for a start it denied my students access to their own experiential learning by focusing everything on the teacher; secondly , it cut down on opportunities for students to speak because the class was acting as a whole group , and in the third place ,over reliance on transmission teaching can result in a lack of variety in the activities and classroom atmosphere.” Harmer p. 109

Of course there are times when acting as a controller makes sense but according to

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