Classroom Observation Report

I. Introduction

In this document, I will describe a teacher and her students in an observation I did in a false

beginner English as Second Language (ESL) class at the University of Texas. The purpose of this

report is to reflect on the teacher’s teaching strategies and class environment in relation with what I

have learned in my Teaching Methods class. Throughout this paper, a variety of students’ and

teacher’s behavior will be discussed that will be analyzed in the reflection section.

II. Before the Observation

After I arranged a day and time to go observe the ESL teacher, she asked me if we could

meet a few minutes before the class to give me a brief overview about the class. We discussed class

size and level; there were ten students who were beginners. The teacher said that the focus of this

class is reading and her goal is to use reading activities to help them develop second language

acquisition. We also briefly discussed the activities that they were going to be doing that day. The

students were working on a reading assignment about the five senses and were also learning about

pronouns. Then, she told me that at the beginning of class she was going to tell the students that I

was going to be an observer and that at the end of class she was going to let me introduce myself to

the class. Thus, I politely accepted her suggestion.

III. During the Observation

In this section, a chronological list of events including students and teacher interaction

during my observation of the class will be listed.

o Teacher and students talk about the five senses and it seems that they talked about

this topic in the previous lessons.

o Teacher tells students to do a list of things that they like to eat. The students compare

their list with their partners to see if it’s similar (5 minutes).

o Teacher asks, “What did you get the same?" Some of the students’ responses are:

“hamburger, chicken, and pizza”.

o After the students reviewed their answers out-loud, the teacher tells them to open

their book to page 66. Later, the teacher asks the students to pronounce some words

from their book like “watermelon” and “strawberry” and she asks if they have a

sweet tooth. The students don’t understand what the teacher is talking about, so she

decides to explain that a sweet tooth is a strong appetite...

... middle of paper ...

...addition, during the break, the students were so

exited to talk to me in English because they recognized the importance of practicing their

communication skills in English in order to become proficient.

Overall, observing this ESL class was a good experience for me as a future educator because

I was able to see that students’ motivation varies according to their age and educational interest for

learning a language. I also enjoyed observing a class with teenagers because I never taught

teenagers so I didn’t know what was like to teach language to older students compared to young

learners. As a result, after observing this class, I would like to try teaching Spanish as a foreign

language to teenagers or adults because I found it to be very interesting.

References

. Horwitz, E. K. (2008). Becoming a language teacher: A practical guide to second

language learning and teaching. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

. Hadley, A. O. (2001). Teaching language in context (3rd ed.). Boston: Heinle and Heinle

. Lightbown, P. M. (2000). Anniversary article: Classroom SLA research and second

language teaching. Applied Linguistics, 21, 431-462.