Amaranto, Damaris 1

Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CRDOBA

Observer: Amaranto, Damaris
ESP Observation Report 3

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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 Business School and the teacher in charge of the two-hour English lesson was
Miss Graciela de Federico.
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
Patricia started the class by asking students to look for words in a given text that they
considered to be important for the understanding of the text. After students did so, she
made all of them participate and share their ideas while writing what they said on the
board. For instance, one student said: counterfeit and she asked the class the meaning
of the word and also its grammatical category in that context. After that, she started
doing some revision of the topics they have been dealing with the previous class (simple
past) in a collaborative way with her students. For instance, she asked: alguien
recuerda la forma interrogativa y negativa del pasado? Cules son las caractersticas?
Then, she moved on to a different topic (connectors) and started correcting homework.
There was a paragraph full of highlighted prepositions so she asked students to translate
each of them and mention the relation they signaled. For instance, students said that
after and before indicated that ideas were chronologically related. Afterwards she
wrote high-ranking managers on the board and asked learners to translate the word
and tell her what type of word was it. In that way she moved on to the topic of
compounds and started to give students tips to identify and translate them. For instance,
she said Cmo se dan cuenta cuando hay una palabra compuesta en un texto? Cul
es su funcin? Then, she made students work on a text to practice all she had explained
before (identification and translation of compounds) and while they were doing so, she
went around monitoring and answering questions. When the learners finished the
activity, she corrected it taking advantage of questions and mistakes that had come up
while doing the exercise. Moreover, she made students read a short text which included
many instances of words ending in -ed and then asked them to highlight them. After
that, she explained the difference between verbs in the simple past and adjectives ending
in-ed thus making sure that students would not get confused when they had to translate
them. For example, she took two sentences from the text that contained words ending in
ed and analyzed them. The examples were the HSBC was founded () and () a
new and established business therefore, she made them become aware of the fact that
words ending in ed are verbs when they are preceded by the verb to be and they are

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Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

adjectives when they are followed (not necessarily immediately) by a noun. Afterwards,
she went round monitoring and helping students with the identification and translation
of compounds in the text.
With respect to my perceived rationale for the activities above mentioned, I can say that
in all of them the objectives were very clear and closely related. Firstly, the warm-up
activity was very useful to refresh concepts related to banking and to make students
develop the habit of analysing the words they come across in terms of their meaning and
category in relation to their context of occurrence. Secondly, instead of delving into the
topic of compounds and words ending in -ed, she chose to introduce them in a deductive
way thus making students participate actively even in the development of new topics.
Therefore, I can say that all the activities, which involved working collaboratively and
cooperatively in the construction of knowledge from the part of both the teacher and the
students, contributed to the development of students reading skills.
With reference to my learning outcome, I can say it was positive. Though Miss Graciela
s use of the board as a means of refreshing concepts was rather disorganized (she didnt
erase what had been written on the board in the previous class), students could still take
advantage of her right use of questions for guidance and her willingness to answer any
question from any topic. Furthermore, her presentation and development of topics in a
deductive way constitute very significative and valuable learning experiences to me as a
future teacher.
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