My third peer observation with me observing was a face-to-face classroom delivered by Lucy in a language English school in Brighton. I thought it would be valuable to observe her because of the quality of her intervention whenever we have a seminar or a given class. I could see that she is an experienced teacher from whom I could learn and improve some aspects of my teaching practices. She is a CELTA qualified teacher with almost three years of experience in the UK.

My aim for this observation was to challenge and question my underlying assumption when it comes to teaching and to enhance my teaching performance for my personal and professional development. Moreover, I have never had the opportunity to teach advanced English learners or observe that. I was, therefore certain that observing will give me fresh insights into facilitating the process of learning in my classroom instead of just transmitting the knowledge. Also, the context being different from mine, I will be able to reflect on my own practices critically and, as mentioned by Peel (2005, p.496), develop my ‘own discursive understanding’. In other words, the multiple experiences that I will gain by being exposed to different ways of teaching in different contexts will widen my understanding of how things should be done and, at the same time, lead me to question my own beliefs and habits for new perspectives.

The ESOL class consisted of 12 students (11 young ladies and one man), C2 level coming from Sweden for an immersion in the UK. The lesson aimed to equip them with a range of fixed expressions they can use to write a formal email. The language focus of the language was writing. The teacher followed the coursebook of the school and this lesson was meant to be taught on this particular day. Overall, it was a lively and engaging lesson, but, in the following, I will flesh out the different aspects of the lesson that really stood out for me and the potential areas that needed improvement.

The class started with a running dictation (dictogloss) where the learners were expected to listen to the teacher reading a text, try to write down the main ideas, and build back the story with the help of their classmates. Some learners swapped to different groups and were required to work collaboratively, compare their own text with their classmates, make corrections and reconstruct the full story. I heard about dictogloss during our last seminar on ‘materials’ with Paul. One of my classmates used it as a lead-in activity to activate her learners’ schemata about collocations with ‘Go’. I was really impressed, and I promised myself to implement it one day with my learners. Surprisingly, Lucy used it with her C2 learners, an opportunity for me to see how helpful it will be for her to achieve her lesson aims since the language focus is writing. Since Dictogloss has been introduced to ELT by ruth Wajnryb as an alternative method to teaching grammar (Vasiljevic, 2010, p.41), I was wondering how it will be implemented in a writing class and how effective it will be. I was pleased to see how enchanted the learners were to correct each other. This first activity fostered language decoding and encoding, cooperative learning, and a sense of achievement when they succeeded in writing the text. In short, the running dictation or dictagloss was effective in integrative form and meaning and allowed the learners to write down the text. It seems to be an effective tool for improving writing skills. What lucy may improve is to find a way to involve the shy learners in the collaborative work. Some of them were really shy to participate. What could have worked to get all of them engaged would have been to make the weaker learners work together and the proficient ones together?

After the lead-in activity that lasted eight minutes, the learners were asked to open the textbook and work on the first activity.

The teacher followed her lesson plan, and everything seemed to work the way she predicted. What really surprised me is the content of the textbook. She is working with C1 level learners, but the activities were quite simple for them to do it. The activities were not as challenging as I thought they would be. The learners were asked to read an email written to a catering company and cross out the irrelevant and inappropriate sentences. They did it perfectly and most groups got it right. I might be wrong, but the learners easily completed all the activities. Much of the lexis was known to them, which allowed them to handle the second activity easily. This reminds me of an argument made by Ghorbani (2009) that stipulated that the educational system sometimes fails in demanding enough from the learners. The module on materials with Paul maybe turned be into a critical teacher when it comes to textbook evaluation. Besides that, it was a brilliant activity and Lucy succeeded in creating a supportive environment where they could help each other.

An area that needs improvement might be the use of classroom materials. The whole session was oral. The teacher did not make use of the board. As regards to their level, it is not obvious that she could bring in more error correction because the emergent language from the learners was accurate. But using the blackboard would have helped the weaker learners to better understand the instructions. Yet, I really liked the fact that she used some instruction checking questions to clarify misunderstandings: are you going to work together on this task? What page is it on? What do you have to do?

Another area that I felt was missing in the class is the personalization of the task. The teacher was following the textbook content which is not necessarily wrong. By the end of the third activity, the learners were equipped with different types of discourse markers and useful language related to polite requests and inquiries that can help write formal emails. However, she could have made them write an email in pairs, make sure they corrected each other’s work, and use the blackboard to consolidate their knowledge about it. The class was perfect, but she could have brought in more creativity and allowed the learners to use their background knowledge to write an email in the classroom. This would have been an opportunity for the teacher to know the type of language they need to write a successful formal email before involving them in completing the rest of the task. As a teacher, I need to try out new ideas and see how they will go with the learners. During the post observation conversation, she agreed with me on this point but told me that she was running out of time because the students were to meet the school counsel, she had to free them earlier than usual.

Overall, Lucy’s class was magic. Even if she was time conscious, it was not that obvious because she allocated much time to each task for the learners to work collaboratively. It was not a race against the clock. I learned a lot about time and classroom management. I have also learned about dictogloss, and I think I will implement it in my text class.

Reference list
Farrell, T.S.C. (2017). Research on Reflective Practice in TESOL. Routledge.
Peel, D. (2005). Peer observation as a transformatory tool?1. Teaching in Higher Education, 10(4), pp.489–504. doi:10.1080/13562510500239125.
Pertiwi, D., Ngadiso, N. and Drajati, N.A. (2018). The effect of Dictogloss Technique on the students’ writing skill. Studies in English Language and Education, 5(2), pp.279–293. doi:10.24815/siele.v5i2.11484.
Vasiljevic, Z. (2010). Dictogloss as an Interactive Method of Teaching Listening Comprehension to L2 Learners. English Language Teaching, 3(1). doi:10.5539/elt.v3n1p41.