This week, I had the opportunity to work with Daniela, an amazing English teacher with 12 years of experience. I decided to work with her because I wanted to learn new approaches to address the challenge of the students with a low level since she was working with A2 students like me. She is an English teacher in a private school in the UK. Her students are of different nationalities: 5 from Saudi Arabia, 1 from Libya, another one from Palestine and a woman from Spain. Her class was therefore made up of 08 people from different cultural backgrounds. They are learning English for academic and professional purposes. Their current level is elementary. The purpose of the class was to equip the learners with the possessive adjectives and pronouns, a class that was prescribed by the school that day for the elementary class.
This is my first peer observation in which I am the one observing. I had to watch a 6 minutes video clip, short but insightful regarding her way of delivering her class.

First of all, she started the class by asking them about the possessive pronouns (My and Your) to see if there is any similarity in their use Arabic. From their answers, we could deduce that they did not get her point. She had to find another way to make herself understood and this is something I can relate since I do work with beginners as well. It could be so frustrating not to be able to be comprehended by the learners after lots of eliciting. She could not speak Arabic unfortunately but was making gestures to pass across the message. This teaching method reminds the total physical response where the teacher gives instruction in the target language using gestures and body movements to ensure effective understanding ‘Asher( 2012 cited in Wikipedia, 2018).
In contrast, my way of delivering classes is quite different. Maybe, I am not patient. I always allow my learners to use both the target language and their L1 (French) if they are stuck. The purpose is to reduce the affective factors that could lead to less participation in the classroom. The classroom accommodates people with different attributes and attitudes as mentioned in Graham’s Article so the teacher should create an environment where they will be free to express themselves without fears and doubts.

Another thing that caught my attention was the teaching technique she was using besides her gestures and body movements. She was applying the talk and chalk method which is an old technique where the teacher delivers his classroom by giving more explanations on a board with a chalk or a marker. (Sharman &al, 2019). Obviously, the aim is not to create learner autonomy because the learners are passive listeners who wait for the teacher to transfer to their brains the whole knowledge. The benefits of such a method are arguable even if the learners seemed to really appreciate Daniela class. Her voice was loud and intelligible to avoid any confusion. Besides, I was also impressed by the way she was calling on her learner’s names. That feeling of belongingness could be really rewarding with their active participation in class. I hardly remember my learners’ names and I think this is something I could really take out of this observation.

However, something unexpected occurred in the classroom. One of the learners was tired of her explanation regarding a specific area and asked her to move forward. Maybe, this is an area to improve.
She might try out different ideas to really involve her learners in the learning process to avoid boredom. She told me that it is complicated to do that because she has to follow the curriculum guidelines. Little (1995a cited in Benson, 2015) think thats ‘regardless of the curriculum and the content, the teacher cannot help but teach herself. In another terms, she could decide on the area to focus to foster her learner’s autonomy. Nevertheless, after observing her class, I intend to use her model lesson with the talk and chalk technique since it allows the learners to learn at their own pace.

Something to consider in the future is to really work on the lesson plan. It would have given me a clear-cut idea about the lesson stages. She told me about the insubordination of the learners. I would have appreciated to see at least 20 minutes of the video clip instead of six minutes to figure it out by myself and suggest some ideas to address it.

From this observation, I understood:
-How important it is for the teacher to involve the learners in activities that are meaningful to them in order to create active participation
-that gestures and body movements could really help the learners to quickly learn the target language without resorting to their L1
-how important it is to develop learners’ autonomy in the classroom

I focused on the paralinguistic features (Volume of the teacher’s voice, Speed, the intonation along with gestures and non-verbal clues) of her communication and the interaction with her learners to reflect on her teaching practices

Reference list
Benson, P. (2015). Teaching and researching : Autonomy in language learning. Routledge.

Kumar, N. and sharma, A. (2018). Importance of Talk and Chalk Method of Teaching: Dental Students’ view in Preclinical Years. International Journal of Healthcare Education & Medical Informatics, 05(03), pp.11–15.

Little, D. (1995). Learning as dialogue: The dependence of learner autonomy on teacher autonomy. System, 23(2), pp.175–181.

Wikipedia Contributors and Asher, J. (2018). Total physical response. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response.