Analysis of a situation in an English language classroom

Admittedly, a language lesson achieves its effectiveness only when learners are engaged

communicatively and attentively with the foreign language throughout. However, the success

of a lesson is not all the time guaranteed basically as there might be unforeseen problems that

might probably impact some of the lesson stages and the learning process accordingly. At the

heart of this essay is to evaluate the effectiveness of the lesson in box 15.5, using the criteria

in the box 15.4.

A close observation of the lesson in box 15.5 shows that there is an obvious lack of

engagement and attentiveness to the lesson. Explicit is the absence of the absence of students’

recurrent interest during some stages of the lesson: there are many stages during which

students do not show any interest; for instance, right from the outset of the lesson, it takes

students around five minutes to be seated and while the teacher elicits the results, only three

pairs are willing to take part, and in one of the last stages, only seven students are speaking,

whereas the majority of the class don’t. A fact that can be explained probably by the

inappropriate choice of the topic (conformism in not compatible with learners’age), or it can

also attributed to poor clarity of instructions, or the time allotted to the some of the activities

(sometimes 2 minutes). Another point which negatively affects the motivation of the learner is

variety in the sense that teacher devoted one hour-lesson only to reading skill, which in turn,

makes most students show more disengagement from the lesson.

Other factors that affect the effectiveness of the lesson, from my own perspective, have

to do with the way the lesson is introduced. It is far from being complete and satisfactory

which I partly trace back to the poor lesson plan and partly to the teacher. Based on the

description of the lesson it is clear that the teacher does not start with a warm activity and

embarks on the lesson instead. Additionally, he/she also does not include a closure. The

absence of these two main parts has a noticeable impact on the lesson: the absence of

warming up activity affects the motivation from the very beginning of the lesson, whereas the

poor closure makes the outcome unfulfilled; a fact that push some learners to talk to the

teacher at the end of the lesson. Another weakness of the lesson has to do with the waiting

time. I think that the teacher does not take into account the heterogeneity of the class by

giving little time to students to safely reflect upon the questions given which impacts the class

coverage and engagement in turn. As to teacher’s strong negative contribution to the failure of

the lesson, I bet that the he/she is not that assertive which very clear right from the outset of

the lesson when she allows students to take 5 minutes to have their seats and she/he does not

copy the answers, while eliciting ideas from the students, on the board and it seems to me that

she gives chance only to those who show interest and ignores the vast majority of the class,

which demonstrates further carelessness of the students as the lesson progresses ahead.

I do believe that the teacher should have reflected upon the nature of the class

before she stepped into it. Because the class is heterogeneous class, the teacher ought to bear

in mind the hindrances that usually thwart the lesson outcome with such classes. Some of

these problems are interest, materials used, individual awareness and participation.

Regarding the lesson under scrutiny, the teacher should have brought topics and activities that

fit the needs and the age bracket of the majority of students. It seems that conformism for the

15 year olds is hard to grasp. Also, the materials should have been diversified to make

students active and motivated as the textbook alone mostly generates stagnation. Regarding

individual awareness, the teacher should take every single student’s interest while planning to

get more participation during the lesson.

Based on the aforementioned ideas, I reckon that the whole lesson under discussion is

far from being successful and failed in accomplish its outcome; the language is not used

communicatively throughout the lesson; the degree of attentiveness is very low; only a few

students are engaged; the learners do not seem to learn the lesson outcome well …etc.