Reflection paper-ESL teaching 1

Reflection paper-ESL teaching

Teaching is one of the most interesting careers in the world. This is because apart from

the teacher having an opportunity to disseminate knowledge to students, he/she is able to meet

various challenges that will either increase his knowledge, skills and experience or it will derail

his morale, causing him to seek for another career elsewhere. One of the teaching fields that

remain vital in unifying different communities in the world and helping them to be able to

interact with one another is teaching of languages and specifically teaching English as a Second

Language. In this paper, I will discuss the experience I went through while teaching English as a

Second Language in Asia.

Lesson 03: One hour lesson

Breaking the language barrier when teaching English as a Second Language is one of the

biggest challenges that teachers encounter. My first task was to familiarize with the student by

creating an environment that could allow me to interact with them freely. I have learnt that

asking students questions on the previous lessons was a perfect way of creating familiarity

between the student and the teacher. Since this was an intermediate class, learning more new

word was necessary for them. Therefore, I taught the students a lot of new vocabularies to

enhance their proficiency in English. According to Vale & Scarino (1991), the use of appropriate

exercises is one of the ways that can be used to help the learners of English as a Second

Language to develop interest in the language, thus helping them to learn the new vocabularies in

an easy way (p.23). To make sure that these students were able to do more practice by learning

new vocabularies, I provided them with handouts to provide guidelines for practice on their own.

Whereas this was to help them to have extra learning materials of their own, it was also an

avenue for them to prepare for tests that were given out to evaluate their progress.
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Learning alone was not enough for students to be able to grasp every new word and

vocabulary that they are taught. They needed to speak these to learn how these words are

pronounced. Most Asians student has been found to be very quiet. However, I had to encourage

the students to speak out to avoid posing questions to random students, a factor that increased the

chances of loosing the attention of a student incase he/she was unable to answer a particular

question.

Capturing the attention of the student is also another issue that is vital when working as

an ESL teacher. This is because the language they are learning is new to them and therefore as

the teacher, I had to make the learning process of this language as interesting as possible.

Therefore, I used pictorials such as PowerPoint and fashion magazine pictures to help them learn

some words and phrases. One of the advantages of using pictures in teaching is its ability to

capture the attention of the students and enhance their ability to retain everything they have

learnt in class, especially when introducing new words. However, Vale & Scarino (1991) argues

that while pictures can serve as an excellent way of communication between the teacher and the

student, there are words whose meaning cannot be captured by picture.

Controlling students while the lessons are going on is also another issue that I had to take

into account since on various occasions I had seen some student talk in class using the Mandarin

language. On the other hand, despite the fact that we arranged them in class, this was still a

challenge. Therefore, it was important make the class as interactive as possible and to avoid

making personal judgment when the native language was spoken in class. This was sometimes a

challenge since I had to constantly ask these students questions to keep them focused in class, a

factor that denied the others an opportunity to participate too. Therefore, I kept on asking myself
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ways that I could use to control this situation without jeopardizing student-teacher relationship

(Pease-Alvarez & Schecter, 2005).

Testing the students to know of their progress was another issue that I had to consider.

Initially, I thought of making the students to review the new words from the chapter that

contained their unit test. However, I changed my mind on this since the unit test comprised of

reading comprehension questions and letting the students to define the answers. Having had

various classes previously, I had heard that most students say that they didn’t know how to

prepare for tests. Therefore, after having taught them for one hour, the question that lingered on

my mind was how to prepare these students for their tests.

Lesson 04: 2hour lesson

Lessons plans are also very important tools that teachers that are teaching English as a

Second Language can use to improve on their lesson delivery to students. Studies have found out

that teachers who come to class without any lesson plan have been found to be very boring to

their students, a factor that contributes to easy distraction of students while the lessons are going

on (Richards, 1998). Therefore, for this particular two hour lesson, I found it overwhelming,

unlike the thirty minute and the two one our lessons that I had undertaken previously. Therefore,

to prevent boredom and student distraction, I prepared a warm up activity in my lesson plan

My analysis of the class showed that this class had not done anything before that

involved a warm-up activity. Therefore, when I introduced the warm up activity in this lesson,

they were surprised. However, to motivate them, I came with a prize, promising to give it to the

team with the highest score at the end of the game. This motivated the students to participate,

and we manage to cover every new word in this particular chapter. After the game was over, the
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new words I reviewed again the new words with the students as a class and gave handouts to

students on parts of speech.

My lesson plan succeeded in ensuring that every student was able to participate in class.

For example, while teaching them vocabulary skills on prefixes and suffix, I described prefixes

and suffix as drawing a tree on the whiteboard, and gave students more information on the roots

and the apex. This gave me an opportunity to give a lot of examples on the board. This however

did not prevent the students from participating. Instead, they also gave me a lot of opportunities

to give to me many different examples on this lesson. However, there are various challenges that

were uncovered in during the lesson. There are some groups that scored more than other in class.

Therefore, I changed the strategy and allowed all groups an equal opportunity to answer the

questions and to participate (Erben, Ban & Castañeda, 2008).

There are various limitations of lesson plan that need to be handled by the teacher, failure

to which his/her visions that are carried by the lesson plan will be underachieved. One of the

limitations is the different learning styles and capabilities of different student. There are those

students that are fast learners while others are slow learners. Therefore, the teacher must be

flexible in his/her lesson plan to ensure that no student is left behind in their coursework. For

example, there are lesson that will need the teacher to write on the whiteboard for some of the

students to understand what they are being taught. Having realized this during the lesson, I wrote

some words on the white board to help the visual learners. This also gave me an opportunity to

incorporate visual learning into the next lesson plan so that these students are not left behind in

the lesson. On the other hand, I thought of working on my pronunciation of words to make sure

that my students were able to grasp every word that we learned or that was mentioned during our
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lessons. In this lesson, I had to repeat some questions several times for them to understand and

work out on how to improve on it in the next lesson (Richards, 1998).

The wastage of time during short breaks in the middle of the lesson is also one of the

challenges that teachers experience. During my lesson, I realized that students could not go for a

break for ten minutes and then come back immediately. Instead they took more time despite the

fact that I reminded them to come back after exactly ten minutes, something that really distracted

me. Therefore, I have been wondering how I can make these students to come back in class on

time instead of taking more than the time I gave them.

Lesson05: 2hour lesson

The assessment of a teacher and his/her teaching methods is one of the issues that should

be taken with a lot of seriousness. This is because it is important to understand the strengths and

weaknesses of a teacher and determine whether such a teacher is in a position to disseminate

knowledge and skills to students. On the other hand, teaching students while under supervisions

remains one of the tense moments in a teacher’s career. According to Hinkel (2005), the teacher

will show signs of nervousness when he/she is aware that assessors are watching every

movement he/she make in class and every method of teaching that he/she employs while

teaching (p.870).

Therefore, the first hour of the lesson was so relaxed and casual. However, the second

hour was characterized by nervousness due to the presence of the supervisor. However, I tried to

direct my focus on teaching the student and checking out to see if I could spot strengths and

weaknesses among them. One of my strengths that helped me during this lesson is my ability to

move as I taught instead of remaining stagnant at the same place. This helped me to ensure that

students were able to follow the lesson and helped those who seemed not to be understanding.
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On the other hand, my strength was depicted in the fact that I gave equal opportunity to students

to answer both direct and indirect questions.

On the other hand, I still realized that there are students who still had learning problems

without using any visual teaching tools. Therefore, I wrote on the white board to guarantee at the

end of the lesson that every student had understood all that had been during the lesson. From

time to time, I clarified student’s answers and wrote on the board. After the supervisor came in,

my sponsor teacher used a teaching strategy that involved giving all the definition of new words

right away. I learnt from this and decided to adopt a student-centered type of teaching whereby

students are allowed to ask questions about the words after every passage in read instead of

providing definition to every word.

This lesson included introduction of study skills differences between skimming and

scanning by using my university academic program experience. In this lesson, I made the

students to understand that at one particular moment I was a student and went through the same

experience they were going through by find difficult in learning some thing. I realized that these

students got interested in my experiences and were very attentive. However, I realized later that I

was much in a hurry to finish this lesson. One of the weaknesses that I noticed in this lesson was

my inability to check whether the students understood or not, and that I failed to double checked

their understanding by asking direct and indirect questions. This was made worse when the

supervisor came in, as I was very nervous. As I watched myself in the DVD that was recorded, I

noticed that my lesson was more teacher centered than student centered. I did not use the audio

CD as I noticed when my sponsor teacher used it, students were distracted. However, I should

have used it as this would have helped the students to raise more questions than what they were

able to raise. From this lesson I was able to learn that I don’t need to hurry through the lesson to
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make students to understand, but rather follow the normal steps that are involved in teaching and

to always double check the students (I.S.P. Nation, 2008).

One of the challenges that I noticed with the students was how I could make them to

concentrate on a new topic while this did not feature anywhere in the next test that was just

around the corner. Therefore I still have questions on how to motivate students to concentrate on

their lessons of new units that is not related to the unit test.
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References

I.S.P. Nation. (2008). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. Boca Raton, Florida: Taylor &

Francis.

Vale, D. & Scarino, A. (1991). Pocket ALL: a user's guide to the teaching of languages and ESL.

Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation.

Richards, J.C. (1998). Beyond training: perspectives on language teacher education. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Erben, T., Ban, R. & Castañeda, M.E. (2008). Teaching English Language Learners Through

Technology. Taylor & Francis.

Pease-Alvarez, L. & Schecter, S.R. (2005). Learning, teaching, and community: contributions of

situated and participatory approaches to educational innovation. New York, USA:

Routledge.

Hinkel, E. (2005). Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning. New York,

USA: Routledge.