Amaranto, Damaris 1

Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CRDOBA

Observer: Amaranto, Damaris
ESP Observation Report 2

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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 Dentistry School and the teacher in charge of the two-hour English lesson was
Miss Patricia Ferreyra.
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 telling students what they were going to cover during the
class (go on with textual references, finish the topic and practice noun phrases) and then
she started doing some revision of the topics they have been dealing with the previous
class. For instance, she asked: alguien recuerda qu eran las referencias textuales? la
importancia de ellas? qu tipo de informacin nos brindan? After that, she told students
to read a text and, while they were doing so, she wrote on the board the most important
concepts of textual references and the classification of them. When students finished
reading, she explained everything she had written on the board with many examples.
For instance, she asked: en la oracin the patient who/that/which I see cul es el
elemento referencial y cul el referente o participante? Then, she made students work on
a text to practice all she had explained before (identification and retrieval of referents)
and while they were doing so, she went around monitoring and answering questions.
When the learners finished the activity, she said: Ahora vamos a hacer todos juntos el
anlisis y vamos a compartir las dudas que fueron surgiendo thus 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 noun phrases and then
asked them to highlight them and translate them to Spanish taking into account the
context in which they appeared. However, before students started doing the activity she
said: Recordemos antes cuestiones claves para el anlisis de las frases sustantivas and
started asking cul es el primer paso? and so on, to make them refresh the steps they
had to follow in the analysis. Afterwards, she went round monitoring and helping
students with both the identification of the heads in the noun phrases and with the use of
the dictionary for the translations.
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, by stating all
the topics that would be covered throughout the class Miss Patricia made sure that

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Observacin y Prctica de la Enseanza II

students would know the structure of the class and could follow it without getting lost.
Secondly, the warm-up activity was very useful to refresh concepts related to textual
references and to prepare students to move to the first written activity. Thirdly, before
delving into the topic of noun phrases, she chose to do some revision of the main steps
in their analysis so as to avoid her students making silly mistakes just because they did
not remember the steps. Therefore, I can say that all the activities, which involved
cooperative work and constructing knowledge with 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 essentially positive. Miss
Patricias use of the board as a means of refreshing concepts and giving examples
together with her use of questions to guide students to the right answer constitute very
significative and valuable learning experiences to me. Unfortunately, these aspects are
usually ignored in many classes since they are very often considered as a waste of
time. However, I do believe they are very helpful for both students and teachers since
they show, from the part of the teacher, that he or she does care about his or her students
to take the time to explain again and again concepts that may be difficult and confusing
and, from the part of the learners, that their participation in constructing knowledge is
an essential part of both the lesson itself and the learning experience as a whole.
Word Count: 683