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Methods II

Student: Natalia López


Observation 2
“The language of questions”
From “Classroom Observation Tasks” by Ruth Wajnryb

Level: Beginners (7th form)


Place: Colegio Marianista
Number of students: 23
Duration: 40 minutes

Students are going to read about music, before reading the teacher asked them
1. Do you like listening to music in English?
2. What band/singer you like?
Then in reference to the text she wrote:
3. What’s the girl’s favourite kinds of music? Why?
4. What other kinds of music does she like?
5. According to the reading how can you describe dance music?
6. What about pop music? And classical music?
7. What does she think about salsa? Why?
Once they worked with the text the T said ‘ Today we’re going to work on different kinds
of music, and on adjectives in its comparative and superlative form’.
Do you remember that from last year? The class said ‘yes’ and so she told them to go
back to the text and asked:
8. Can you find 2 or more comparisons in the text about music?
9. What do you think some of the comparisons have in common?
10.Do you think there is a difference in the use of short and long adjectives when
making a comparison?
11.Have a look at the Grammar bank, can you tell me how do you make a
comparative sentence?
12.Can you find at least two example of superlatives in the text?
13.Look at the chart in your book, how do you make a sentence using superlatives?
14.What’s the difference between regular and irregular adjectives?
15.There is a chart in your book, can you provide examples of regular and irregular
adjectives?

Classification of the questions

The questions mentioned above can be classified in the following way:

Short answer/retrieval style questions: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14


Checking understanding: 11
Opinion: 10
Referential questions: 1, 2
Checking learning: 8, 12, 13, 15

• In this lesson there was not a specific followed pattern in the questions. What I could
see is that the questions made students think carefully about what they read and so
they felt involved with the questions and challenged at the same time.
The idea of making questions helps students to participate more in class. Questions
give our students an
opportunity and a reason to speak and to share with the teacher and classmates
what they think and
how they feel.
• Students showed no difficulty with the reading since they found all the answers.
However, as every student works differently and at a different time I could see that
some of them required more time than others to answer the questions. As regards the
grammar point, when they had to answer the questions about the use of
comparatives and superlatives, some of them had some doubts about the regular and
the irregular adjectives but when they read the rule from the book with the T she
made it clear for them.
• Unluckily, there was no chance to record question and answer set. Many students
gave short answers and speak in Spanish.
The topic was nice and motivating enough for the students to feel involved with it.
Students loved the idea of discussing about music. When the T asked them if they
listened to music in English most of them said ‘yes’ and started to name different
bands and singers they like. In that particular case, I can say that almost everyone
talked about their likes in music (most students did it in Spanish).As the reading, they
only provided the answer of the question, some students participate, others just
listened to their classmates.
• “The teacher must have a clear and explicit understanding of the nature of the
challenge to students´internal representation of knowledge that a particular question
may present … They must appreciate the level of cognitive difficulty involved in the
students´effort to respond to a particular question.” (Tollefson 1989)
I agree with the quotation. I think that we teachers should always have in mind how
difficult it can be
for our students to formulate an answer for one single question. Hopefully our
students always try to
follow us and give themselves many chances to answer our questions.

REFLECTION

The usual use of questions is for checking, but after having observed this lesson
I realised that when we use it with our students for communication they work even
better.
When a student shares something with me for example ‘teacher tomorrow I’m going
to
Cordoba’ I usually ask them about their trip on the following class. I admit that I don’t
do it only just for
curiosity but also to show them that I care about them.
I think that we (teachers) should foster communication in class and asking seems
to be a good reason
to start doing so

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