ICELT C1/4

IN-SERVICE CERTIFÍCATE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

COMPONENT 1 – LANGUAGE FORTEACHERS

TASK 4- Focus on the teacher's language

Length: 750-1,000 WORDS

The students that I had the privilege to work with were in the 7th grade here at the private school Justo Sierra. The class consisted of approximately 28 students between the ages of twelve and fourteen. They are all level B1, but they are able to communicate with other people. The lesson that I decided to do in my class was about monsters. During class, I had my students portray certain monsters. The way that they portrayed these characters was through a small script they presented in front of an audience. Some of the monsters that were talked about were; Frankenstein, Mr. Hyde, Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera. Each student was to introduce their monster and tell us something important about it. For example, how they came to be, what they do or simply where they live.

After the lesson, when we had the video of it, I went back and watched the whole lesson again. As I was watching it, I noticed a couple mistakes some of my students made and some of the mistakes I made. At the beginning of the video, I noticed that the introduction part was very fluent. I was very proud to see that my students were speaking clearly and understanding each other very well. As the video progressed, I noticed that some of the pronunciation was off at it was very evident that I have to work on the pronunciation some more.

During the presentation of the monster Frankenstein, I noticed that the student said dies instead of died. The presentation that the student was giving us was in past so when she said dies, it was grammatically incorrect. Another thing that I detected was during the Phantom of the Opera presentation. When my student began to talk about the monster, I noticed he said fall instead of fell. The entire sentence was, “I fall in love with a beautiful singer...” this was incorrect due to the fact that in his presentation he was talking in past also. For the remaining time of the class, my students did exceptionally well. Yes, they did stumble here and there but for the most part everything was fluent and well pronounced.

I also paid attention to what I was saying and how I was directing the class. As I watched the video, I noticed I would say that is a lot. Not only did I say it a lot, but sometimes it was incorrect. For example, when I was introducing Frankenstein I should have said it is, not that is. I also noticed that some of my pronunciation was off, but from what I saw, my students understood me just fine. Even though they understood me, I know I should still practice my pronunciation. One thing that I also noticed was that the lines they memorized sounded rehearsed. I know they aren’t actors or anything of that sort, but I still think we can improve that and make the skit sound more natural. Aside from that, I also noticed something that both my students and I said wrong. The name Dracula was said wrong many times. We pronounced the first ‘a’ in the word like we pronounce the ‘a’ in the word ape. However, we should have pronounced that ‘a’, like we pronounce the ‘a’ in apple.

Even though my students did stumble upon some words, I think they did great. I am really proud of them. I could tell that most of them were comfortable with speaking the English language. I was also very proud of them for being able to present something in a different language. I know that can be very stressing and scary, but they all showed me that they could do anything. They spoke fluently, with not many mess ups and had fun. One thing that also made me very glad was that our principal and the English department director could be there. They both said very nice things about the class and about their presentations.

Word count: 782

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