Amaranto, Damaris 1

Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CRDOBA

Observer: Amaranto, Damaris
ESP Observation Report

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Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

This observation task was carried out in one of the courses known as Mdulos de
Idioma at the Business School and the teacher in charge of the two-hour English lesson
was Miss Vanina Neyra.
As regards the most relevant occurrences of the class, I can say there were several
aspects that contributed to the development of students reading skills. First, Miss
Vanina started the class by listing on the board the topics that would be dealt with
during the class, for instance, she wrote: voz pasiva, conectores, referentes
vocabulario, etc After that, she did a warm-up activity which consisted in asking
questions about the content and vocabulary of a text dealt with the previous class and
she wrote on the board all the vocabulary students remembered. For example, she
asked: se acuerdan del texto que vimos la clase pasada? De qu se trataba? Qu
recuerdan sobre los bancos? Alguna palabra? Qu era loan? Quin lo da? Then,
she asked students to read a text paying a lot attention to details since afterwards, they
had to order it chronologically and select relevant vocabulary from it. While learners
where doing the activity, she went around monitoring and answering questions and
when they finished the activity, she corrected it always asking if they wanted to add
something or if they agreed or not with their classmates answers. Moreover, she made
students read a short text which included many instances of the ing form and then
asked: qu se repite en las oraciones? so they all answered: verbos en ing. Then,
she asked students to translate all the phrases with the ing form taking into account the
surrounding words. Since learners came up with different translations of the same
phrases (for instance: for managing its assets they said: del manejo or de la
administracin), she explained that whenever they came across a preposition followed
by an ing form they had to translate the ing form as an infinitive or as a noun but not
as a conjugated verb in progress.
With respect to my perceived rationale for the activities above mentioned, I can say that
in all of them the objectives were very clear. Firstly, by listing on the board all the topics
that would be covered throughout the class Miss Vanina made sure that students would
know the structure of the class and could follow it without getting lost. At the end of the
class, she came back to this list of topics and she started crossing out the ones they had
dealt with (which were all of them) thus making it clear for everybody that all the

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Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

objectives were fulfilled. Secondly, the warm-up activity was very useful to activate
vocabulary related to banks and to prepare students to move to the first written activity
which was also linked to the topic of banks. Thirdly, when dealing with the ing form,
the teacher could have introduced the topic and explained students how to translate such
structures all by herself but instead she let them discover the ing form and distinguish
it from the conjugated form by asking them to translate phrases containing -ing and
share them with their classmates. Therefore, I can say that this activity involved
cooperative work with both teacher and peer feedback.
With reference to my learning outcome, I can say that throughout the whole class I tried
to take down as many notes as I could so as to be able to apply different aspects of Miss
Vaninas class in the future. Her use of the board as a means of organizing the lesson
together with her use of questions to guide students to the right answer and her way of
presenting topics (inductively) constitute very significative and valuable learning
experiences to me. Unfortunately, these aspects are usually ignored in many classes and
I do believe they help both students and teachers a lot since they show, from the part of
the teacher, that he or she has taken the time to plan the lesson and that she or he is
interested in making learners become aware of their abilities to discover knowledge by
themselves and, from the part of the learners, that they are in a position to know what
comes next in a lesson and that their participation is as important as the topic being
presented.
Word Count: 721