Will Newman

Language class observation 3

Location: Oak Grove Middle School
Level: 8th grade ESL, beginners
Date: December 3, 2014
Time: 9:30 10:30
Description:
I have been coming to this ESL class at Oak Grove Middle School since last semester.
The students are different, but the teacher is the same. I go every Tuesday and Thursday.
Normally I help, but I took this opportunity to observe more.
The class is in a large classroom with many desks arranged into clusters of four.
There is a dry-erase board on one wall with a projector. Different maps and posters cover
most of the over walls. Some of the teachers classes have nearly twenty students, but this
class only has four. There are a brother and sister from Yemen and two Hispanic students
from Mexico and Guatemala respectively. Three of the students are in the eighth grade while
the boy from Yemen is in the sixth grade and comes to this class for extra practice many days.
All of the students are relatively new to the United States and have fairly low levels of
proficiency in English. The class focuses on improving their English skills in the classroom
as well as their conversational skills.
In the week following this class, the students will have to recite a very short poem in
English. Recitation is not considered a very communicative activity, but learning to
memorize this poem will help the students in their other classes where memorizing

information is often a key skill. Furthermore, the students are practicing their English
pronunciation.
The teacher begins the class, as many do, with some informal conversation with the
students about how they are doing and how their other classes are going. The teacher is very
well informed about many aspects of the students lives outside of her classroom.
After a bit of informal conversation the teacher passes out the poem and the students
look over it a bit. After reading the poem, which is only six lines, the teacher talks about the
meaning and explains different words that are giving the students trouble. The poem does
include several words that the students do not know, but the meaning is fairly clear once the
vocabulary issues are cleared up. The poem is about chickens and includes words like hen
and chick that the students were not familiar with.
After explaining the poem and reading it again, the teacher had each student read the
poem aloud. She corrects some pronunciation, but lets many minor errors pass without note.
The students seem to enjoy the poem, but are understandably worried about having to
memorize it. After reading through the poem several times, the teacher passes out several
worksheets and students go over them as a group. The worksheets deal, for the most part,
with the vocabulary of the poem, particularly with the names of different animals described in
the poem. The students seem to understand the worksheets well and also seem to understand
the poem generally.
After completing the worksheets, the teacher says that they will do more with the
poem during the next class after the students have had a chance to look at it on their own.
The teacher then helps the students through some worksheet activities that deal with
homonyms. Again this is not a particularly communicative activity, but is something that is
important for the students success in their other class and on the state standardized tests.

Three of the students do surprisingly well on the homonym activities. The student
from Guatemala who has the lowest proficiency level seems to be guessing entirely. I can tell
that this is something that they have worked on either in previous classes or in their other
classes at school. The students work with these activities until the end of the class period.
Reflection:
I have often found myself thinking with mixed feelings about this ESL class. The
teacher does a great job of interacting with and motivating the students. However, many
activities used in the class are not very communicative. I have decided that much of this has
to do with the different goals of the ESL class. Rather than focus primarily on conversational
competence the ESL classes in public schools must work to prepare their students to pass
mostly written standardized tests. Given this goal, the teachers must utilize many methods
commonly found in other middle school classes. As I understand it, the students take not
only ESL standardized tests but also the general tests that all of the other students take.
Preparing students for these tests is a truly monumental task.
One of the most interesting things that I have observed in this class is the way in
which the teacher handles having both Spanish and Arabic speaking students. The teacher
speaks Spanish fluently. She is from Texas and I think that she may be a heritage speaker or
natively bilingual. Given her language skill set, she does occasionally speak Spanish with
some of her students, particularly just before or after class. Most often, if a student asks her
something in Spanish she will either answer in English or ask the student to repeat the
question in English. However, she will occasionally use Spanish. In order to make the
students from Yemen feel more at home, the teacher and the two Hispanic students have been
learning a few Arabic words every week. Now, both the teacher and all four students often
use basic Arabic greetings and phrases at random times throughout the class. If the teacher

finds herself speaking a few words of Spanish to the Hispanic students before class starts, she
makes sure to say hello in Arabic to the Yemeni students. The two Hispanic students are
having a lot of fun with their Arabic phrases as well. I think that this is a very interesting way
for the two groups of students to feel more comfortable together and is a nice gesture for the
teacher to make to her Arabic speaking students.