Teaching Journal

Lesson 5
25 November 2013

Basic English

Our class this week felt more like our first class than how our classes have gone the last few weeks due to our lack of confidence and our relative disorganization. Perhaps because our class has been so predictable the past couple of weeks, we got a little too comfortable with our lesson plan, adapting a “we’ll be fine, our class is great” attitude. We’ve had the same four students since the beginning and then out of the blue two more showed up this week. We didn’t have enough copies of handouts because we’d just sort of assumed that by the fifth lesson we’d have established our regulars. Truly though, with a class as free-form as ‘free English at la biblioteca publica’, we should be extra ready to adapt. That lessons should be adaptable is advice that we can carry to every lesson we plan in the future.

Though I left the library more dissatisfied than satisfied with our fifth lesson, after some reflection as to what exactly was not right, I feel confident that the three main causes of the breakdown were that the content of the lesson was too advanced, that we tried to teach too much and the students were quickly overwhelmed, and that too much Spanish was spoken—by both the students and teachers. It’s important to mention that our beginner class is just that—a beginner class. Conversations take a long time and what they are able to say in English is based on chunking and language learned from exposure to English speakers rather than explicit grammar instruction. Our elder students studied French in grade school and for this reason, my partner and I found explicit grammar to be a helpful vehicle for our lessons. Our basic model has been to supply new vocabulary, a basic grammar lesson and then activities to practice both. This week we chose a theme of ‘current events’ and gave vocab lists with words about the media, the news, and common verbs used to define the state of affairs; our grammar portion consisted of simple past tense and using the passive voice. We chose this topic because we wanted to give our adult students the tools they would need to talk about the things they are actually interested in, rather than something dull, such as the weather. The truth is, that might be closer to the level that they are ready for. The passive voice posed a challenge for us to explain and also for them to understand. Additionally, looking at the lesson in hindsight, passive voice seems sort of irrelevant for a basic conversation class. The next challenge was definitely the amount of information we gave to the students. We would have been fine to provide only the simple past tense conjugation and it seemed like while they were still grasping that conjugation were moving on to single and plural subject passive voice conjugation which meant we had to conjugate ‘to be’ and also provide the past participle of the verbs. Just too much.

Finally, we realized how easy it is to resort to the L1 when there is any sort of confusion. What ended up occurring was one of us would give directions or explanations in English and then the other would translate directly, which is just counterproductive in a language class. It discourages trying to listen to English when you know you’ll hear it in Spanish shortly after. Really though, it’s much better to speak English and use rephrasing and copious comprehension checks to get the point across. When I consider my Spanish classes in the past, my teachers really never spoke English to us.