In this classroom observation, I observed a TEFL class in China. There were 12 Chinese adult students in the class, who were intermediate level. The goal of the class is to learn how to give advice to people and how to react to people’s advice.
One of the good things about the class is the seating arrangement in this classroom. The U-shaped seating could be helpful to build an open-minded, supportive, and communicative learning environment, which was necessary for language learners to participate and improve their language skills by practicing a lot. Another good thing is that the teacher constantly used body language to help students understand his tasks. The body language of a teacher is visually important in a classroom as it helps students to understand better and creates a friendly interaction between the teacher and the students.
I also learned teaching approaches that I found effective in my future teaching. Firstly, I noticed the importance of students seeking information and knowledge actively. Before starting to teach the advice language, the teacher let the students listen to a dialogue and write down the way people give and receive advice. This way students will get their brain active and focused in order to catch the information, which would improve their learning effectiveness and listening skills.
Second, it was great to set a big topic in order to manage the students to practice certain skills and many small subtopics according to students’ interests. After the instruction of the advice language, the teacher asked the students about other aspects of life that they would like to give or receive advice in. After the students gave their answers like “job, relationship, children’s education”, the teacher wrote these topics on three different corners in the classroom and asked the students to go to the topic they were interested in practice giving and receiving advice. Students practiced certain sentence structures with the topics they are individually interested in. I found this a great way to improve students’ interest in learning and increase their participation, especially in big classes.
Another approach I learned was to let the students correct themselves with what they learned in the class. At the beginning of the class, the teacher asked the students to give him some advice about being sick. After the whole class time learning and practicing, the teacher asked the students to give him advice about him being sick again before finishing the class. The students had learned the correct way to give advice and they could easily complete this task, what they learned in the class would be emphasized by comparing their answers between the beginning time and the finishing time.