Task 1: The School and learning environment.

Name of Student: Gabriel Orrego Wieschollek

Name of School: Colegio Fénix
Number of students:
Date: August, 25th, 2010 Class: 5th grade

1. The School:

The name of the school is “Colegio Fénix”, it’s situated in San Antonio, Alto Mirador.
This school is divided into two buildings. The Primary school haa more than 410
students, while the secondary school building has more than 180 students.
The philosophy of this school is to provide the students with tools that are going to be
useful in their futures such as respect, honor and comprehension to others.
The educational policies are based on self respect and respect for others. These are
kept by the unconditional vigilance from the behavior chief.

2. The classroom:

The atmosphere of the room was a lovely place full of pictures and English words
posted on the wall. The light coming from the outside is appropriate to create a happy
and warm atmosphere, ideal for doing classes.
I have observed that students participate actively in the activities proposed by the
teacher creating a happy atmosphere among students. This is thanks to the teacher’s
ability to create funny activities making them to participate on these activities (the
affective filter is down) while they are relaxed.

The way the students sit on their desks is like every common school. Four rows with
two desks per student. The classroom is also a big place in which students have the
opportunity to participate on TPR activities.

The equipment in the classroom supports the teacher’s activities. In this school we can
find one radio per classroom (that helps in the development of listening activities).
They have also projectors in the school, but not in every classroom. If the teacher
wants to use it, the projector must be reserved.

3. The activities and resources:

a) The kind of activities was created taking into consideration the activities in the book
provided by books and bits store.
Sometimes the grammar activities were focused on book activities while speaking
activities were created by the teacher such as public speaking, descriptions, etc. In
these activities students participated actively, creating a collaborative learning class
filling the classroom with input, except for those students who didn’t participate in
some activities (in this case the teacher had to pay attention to those students and
motivate them by extra activities).

The classes were created with a lot of practice for the students paying attention the
the importance of “input” for the student. That’s why we call this an active class, in
which the teacher is interacting with the pupils all the class. The class stopped just
when the teacher had to give those marks and homework delivery.

b) The main resource used by the teacher was the student’s book. The activities were
based on the book, but sometimes the radio was used to enforce student’s ability for
listening activities.

Sometimes there were activities using just a sheet of paper and pencils to write verbs
and draw the actions. To enforce form meaning connections, the teacher also used a
projector to show images and videos to the students. These activities with the
projector were very useful in terms on gaining student’s attention.

Task 2: Student´s learning

1. The learners:

The learners seem to look motivated by the teacher, they really like the activities
performed in the classroom. As you can see, an English class requires an active
participation of the students while a mathematics class does not. The topics used in
the units are very easy to recognize and seem to be familiar to students letting use
student’s previous knowledge.

As I could see, student’s don’t expect the teacher to do the work for them. They are
very active at participating in the activities. I have noticed that students try to learn and
participate thanks to the idea to learn English for the understanding of songs,
videogames and movies. As I could see too, students get close to the teacher to check
if the (for example) grammar exercises are well written. I think that’s because they are
really interested in learning English. But of course, as in every school, there are
students that don’t seem to be interested, I suppose that the environment in which
these students are involved doesn’t need or require an English learning.

2. Behaviour during classroom activities.

I couldn’t find any student with special needs. I could notice that students were
motivated by the teacher with the use of audiovisual backup. Sometimes the teacher
started the class showing funny videos about the topic (that’s how the teacher gained
student’s attention and infused them with previous knowledge). Sometimes the
teacher used to use songs or images depending on the requirements on the topic
being taught.

3. Discuss the learning styles and levels of English in the classroom.

The levels of English in the classroom have a wide variation in which I could notice
that some students have a good level of English and some others do not. For me it is
awesome how the teacher is managed to get the attention of the poorest students.
Despite of the fact that some student’s knowledge in English is poor, the teacher is
able to make them work.

From other point of view, the learning styles are very different among students. Some
of them prefer to learn by watching videos and listening to music, but some others
prefer to make grammatical exercises to have a good mark in a test.

It is also important to mention that I realized that the students that have a high level of
proficiency in English were those who played videogames watch movies and listen to
(English) music. That’s why because they are highly exposed to the L2.