Task 5: Opening a classroom door

My English classes in general during high school

The role of my teacher of English during high school was very friendly because she was a young teacher, but at the same time it was kind of weak because she always tend to give us worksheets and all the classes we were working in a new one. It was the same outdated method for all. On the other hand, the role of the students was very passive because we just had to fulfill the worksheets, do the exercises on the book and that was all. Indeed, the exercises from the worksheets were like the following exercises from the book but from the teacher book so the only difference was that we could not see them in our books but it was the same format of fill in the gaps items and multiple choices.

Some characteristics that she had could be that she always wrote the different formulas of the grammatical structures on the board. She used to say that as we were all different, for instance, if you were good at Maths, you should understand easier with the Subject + Verb + Participle. But I can not deny the fact that she did try to help us with our speaking by letting us creating dialogues and we had to stand in front of the class and read them out loud or perform them sometimes. It was depending on the aims of the Unit.

The interaction student-teacher was always good. We were very respectful and if we had any doubts we had to go to the teacher's desk to ask her but as she was young, most of my male classmates used to ask her about her personal life in order to avoid the tasks that we had to do and as she liked to know us and really cared for our personal lives, sometimes she tend to get distracted when we were all finished with the worksheets and there were no activities left. On the contrary, the student-student interaction was never relevant for me because I was one of the only ones that actually did the tasks by himself so when I was done, some classmates tend to ask me for help and I tried to explain them. But then it was just talking. I always thought that for many of my classmates back in those days, they considered the English subject as the Arts class, which is not less relevant but being honest, nobody cared about.

The feelings of the students were really changeable so if I have to think about it now, I would reflect on the fact that my teacher knew how to handle them, but sometimes we were not even able to control ourselves. Most of my classmates liked Biology, Maths, and they were interesed on the other subjects. We were a few ones that really paid attention and did the tasks at English.

The areas of language and skills that were more emphasized were always grammar and listening. The occasions where we had to create dialogues and speak were a few ones, because everyone was ashamed of their pronunciation and nobody was willing to improve because English was not relevant for them.

The role of the students' L1 was very relevant indeed. The teacher always explained everything in the L1 and she used to translate everything because nobody understood if she said full sentences in the target language.

The evaluation was accomplished through written tests and they were always very mechanical. She used a lot memorization techniques, conversation practice and translation.

The tests were the following: It was a sentence with a blank space in the middle, and you had to write what was missing. But it was the same movement for all the sentences, there were not many changes. The blank space was always in the middle so the missing part was always the same. (i.e. She ______ chocolates (not/like) ). And she always gave further explanations in case of any errors. She did not have any difficulty with that because she knew that you have to be flexible when you are teaching a second language because sometimes there could be more than one answer right and I always tend to point her out that, and she agreed.