Materials or info on the school(s) that I have collected

From 18/09/2016 to 22/09/2016 the students from PISMP semester 3 including

me attended our school-based experience (SBE) in the chosen school. I went to a
school located in Kluang, Johor which is Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina Chong Hwa
(3). This school was located at Jalan Balau, 86000 Kluang, Johor.

This school is one session school (morning). It was an A grade school. It also
have total 723 students, 371 male students and 352 female students. There are 45
teachers in this school. It is the top school among the schools in Kluang district.

Photos of Guru Besar/ teachers/ staff of the school

Photo 1 : All of the teachers and GB from SJK(C) Chong Hwa (3)
Photo 2：Celebrating 100 years of SJK(C) Chong Hwa (3)
Photo 3: Opening-ceremony of the event celerating 100 years of

SJK(C) Chong Hwa (3)

Photo 3: The students are performing Tanggu (drum).

Notes on lessons observed (if any) and the skills taught by the teacher

During the first day of SBE, I manage to introduce myself to the teachers. I started
to mingle with them. I took the opportunity to ask permission to observe Mrs Hiew’s
lesson in the classroom and she granted my permission. What I had observed in the
classroom are Mrs Hiew’s instructional language and questioning techniques. It was a
60 minutes grammar class lesson. It was a year 4 class. I actually realized that she
used cloze activity by practizing adverbs and Strip a story activity. Using
communicative activites in the classroom encourage the learners to speak and listen
to other learners as well people in the program and community. These activities serve
real life purposes. For example, in the activity, they need to find information, talk about
self and learn about culture. And through these activities,it helps to prepare the
students to face the outside world. For instance, if we were traveling to a foreign
country, we can use English to communicate with the locals. It could be useful, even
more than that.

As we know, teacher should give clear, simple and short instruction to the
student especially when it comes to English language. This is due to the students will
start to imitate and learn every single word spoken by the teacher. If we canot
segment the word clearly, it will confuse our students. So it would be a appropriate if
the teacher can repeat the instruction so that the students can grasp and understand
the meaning conveyed by the teachers. In addition, from my observation, Mrs Hiew
tend to use simple words in giving the instructions to ensure the learning process is
smooth. However, there were few students who can not understand the easy
instructions in English. Therefore, she helps used their native language, which is
Mandarin to translate the meaning to them. I am not surprised with this scenario
because sometime to teach students in English, native language does helping.
However, teacher should not use it so frequent because it will affect students by trying
to convey English words in native language using direct translations.

Lastly, I also observed that Mrs Hiew used questioning techniques during her
lesson. This is the important skill that a teacher should have possessed. From my
observations, Mrs Hiew preferred to ask question to the students. She always made
her students to think before giving answer. This is good way of doing it because it
helps to build the students’ self confidents besides sharpens their creative and critical
thinking skills.

Notes on discussion/ interviews with teachers or students on the teaching &

learning of English namely L&S Skills and R&D

During SBE, I had interviewed two year 6 students to find out the problems faced
when they are learning English language especially in the four skills that is listening
and speaking, reading and writing.

Listening&Speaking

From the interview, the students said that they were hesitating to speak English
with their teachers and friends no matter in or outside the classroom. This is because
they worried about making errors such as grammatical mistakes. They also felt
embarrassed of their poor language proficiency. They afraid of receiving negative
response from other more proficient speakers when learners spoke incorrectly. Thus,
they were not fully involved in classroom activities even though they were constantly
encouraged to speak freely by their teachers. So, negative experiences and fear of
negative judgement from others hindered effective language learning among the
learners.
Reading &Writing

In the reading aspects, both of the students experienced problem in

comprehending passages because they required longer time to complete the reading
passage. In addition they encountered many unfamiliar vocabulary which hampered
their reading comprehension and fluency. So, they need to always refer to English
and bilingual dictionaries to check for the meanings of the difficult words.

Writing

Whereas one of the students said she faced the problems of writing an essay
because she was lacking of ideas to plan her essay outlines in the pre-writing stage.
She required longer time to write in the writing stage was because she had to mentally
construct sentences in her mother-tongue before translating into English. In the
writing stage, she constantly referring to English and bilingual dictionaries, and online
translator just to ensure there is no grammatical errors.

Language activities you carried out with students during 'relief' classes

I did some language activities with my students during ‘relief’ classes. One of
the activity is called “Hangman Activity’. Hangman is an classic game but everyone is
addicted to this game. It can act as a chance to reinforce key words for students in the
process of learning English.The pupils were so happy and they really enjoyed the
activity. Firstly, I choose a word and draw lines on the blackboard to represent each of
the letters that makes up the word. Next, I ask a student to guess a letter, if they are
correct then write the letter in the corresponding space on the black board and if they
are wrong then draw another part of the hangman picture. Keep asking students to
guess letters until they know the word or the hangman picture is completed. If they
successfully guess the word they win but if the hangman picture is completed then
you win. This game is easy but fun. Through the hangman activity, the students have
learnt some vocabulary besides having fun in the ESL classroom.