The language that the children learn and use is a reflection of the language the teachers use in the classroom. Thus, it is very important for the teacher to pay attention to how she addresses the pupils, the words she uses and her tone.

 

In retrospect, I should say that this was a very generous and general list of language items. As much as I knew I would not even use half of all of these items, I did not think that I would actually use so few of them. In the classroom, the teacher is very busy making sure everything goes smoothly. A novice teacher myself I found difficulties figuring out my way inside the classroom, which left small room for me to focus on the list above.

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I felt confident with my vocabulary in English, and I did not felt the need to plan for specific vocabulary lists. However, I realised that not having some guidelines to stick to made it difficult for me to stick to the specific items I wanted to have the students learn. In the future, I intend to use lists with the main vocabulary items of the session. These items can be explained to the pupils and used by them during that specific hour.

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The experiences with the teaching unit and the co-teaching activity were very different. The former, a series of 7 sessions, gave me more time to reinforce certain vocabulary items. Reflection on the previous sessions allowed me to make improvements in the following ones. I did use some of the Routine and Opening and Closing Session expressions. Because I struggled with classroom management and the activities were very hands-on, I did not have much time for end-of-session recaps. I must admit there was not much paraphrasing or checking for understanding, but I did ask for translation at some points. As for feedback, I only stuck to the vocabulary for the positive bits. For classroom management I stuck to Class-yess! and Hands on top-everybody stop!. I consider that introducing more of them would only make things worse, especially considering the short period of time I was with them.

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In the case of the co-teaching, as I had the support of my partner teacher, I could pay attention to these elements while she was explaining. What is more, as they say, two heads are better than one. What I did not come up with, my partner did and vice versa. In the classroom we used rewards. Thus, it was very easy for us to catch their attention and manage the classroom. Rarely did we use any of the expressions above, as it was quite a complex and unusual session for the children.

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With regards to the language, one aspect that I place on top of my "teacher priorities" is to learn to use scaffolding effectively. A good use of scaffolding can truly help the children feel confident speaking their target language and gain tools to do so. I did not use it during my teaching unit, partly because there was very little group discussion, but mostly because I did not know how to introduce it. I saw how my co-teacher used it in her school, so together we tried to implement it during the co-teaching. When using it in class, however, we were too ambitious: there were too many sentences, and we expected the pupils to use it autonomously without much prior explanation. What was very clear to us, it was not so much to our pupils. Thus, they did not use it. Obvious as it may seem, it is absolutely essential to start small and go from there. Explain how to use it and introduce linguistic support little by little.