School Visit: La Trobe University International College

I observed class 6B which the topic of the lesson was “Child Worker in Mine”. The teacher was experienced and most of the teaching approaches adopted by her were appropriate and effective to help students learn. However, there were some drawbacks which required improvement.

Each time, she elicited responses from students instead of giving them the answers directly, which is important as this is a student-centered teaching, students were required to think of the answers themselves. If they get wrong answers, teachers can provide clues for them to guess again or point out and explain their errors. If teachers do all the talking, then students will become passive learners and their understanding of particular concepts cannot be examined.

Moreover, after asking students for answers, she asked them for the reasons for supporting the answers, which is highly recommended in teaching since teachers are able to check whether their students comprehend the rationales of the answers. If they cannot tell the reasons, which means they do not fully understand the concepts and ideas taught, hence more time should be spent on corresponding topics.

In addition, the teacher incorporated four macro skills in teaching, namely reading, writing, listening and speaking. This integration of skills is encouraged in language lessons as students can learn by using different methods and the concepts will be consolidated, which makes learning more effective. Other than this advantage, students will not feel bored easily because four different types of practices are available and the types of tasks are not the same.

At the beginning of the lesson, the students were asked to play roles of an interviewer and an interviewee regarding the topic. The teacher asked one student only to be the interviewer and ask others questions. Although this is convenient and time-saving because students do not need to spend time on changing roles, it is quite unfair to the interviewer as he has got fewer opportunities to speak in English, which should be avoided since students tend to speak in their native languages beyond the classroom. For instance, there are a number of students from China in the class, they prefer speaking with each other in Putonghua even in the classroom, thereupon if teachers do not maximize their use of English in class, then they will have less practice in oral English and not be able to speak fluent English.

The ability of students vary in a class, therefore individual difference is a common phenomenon. In order to cater to it, teachers should set a variety of tasks with different levels so that all students will be taken care of. In the lesson, the teacher drilled the students the target languages first, followed by organizing an activity which required them to rearrange sentences containing the target languages. The difficulties of the sentences ranged from beginners’ to advanced levels. In Hong Kong, this teaching approach becomes more and more common and it is hoped that more students will be benefited.

(Number of Words: 499)