MAINTAINING DISCIPLINE

Maintaining discipline in the classroom is an important part of the language teaching/learning process. General classroom management, including maintaining discipline, depends on a number of factors. First of all, that is the age of students. Children and young teenagers need to be more disciplined than the adults. Especially young teenagers are considered to be the most difficult. When dealing with children and young teenagers a teacher has to know that they require his/her full attention, understanding and contribution to their teaching, and that maintaining discipline can sometimes become a real issue. As a teacher, we must give our students good reasons for learning and motivate them for language learning process. Students should not feel pressured, although we must show that we are the authority in the classroom. A good teacher gains respect of his/her students by being well prepaired for the lesson, being punctual, treating students consistently and fairly etc. We should not ignore our students problems if they show that they have confidence in us, but we must keep a certain distance and do not get too personal with our students. Once we have gained the respect, maintaining discipline will be much easier. Another important factor in maintaining discipline is the size of the class. It is much easier to control class of 20 students than one of 35.

In smaller class we organize our time much better, and while doing a new lesson or test we can monitor and dedicate some of our time to each individual student. Teacher should must show that he/she cares for the students and what they are interested in. When students are learning what they like and what they are interested in they will not be talking and making noise in the classroom. So, a good teacher should know how to make his/her lectures interesting for the students and to be as relaxed as possible. Students may cause problems in a number of ways They may be unwilling to take part in activities, show signs of boredom, disaffection, talk when they are not asked to talk. Some students may be over-enthusiastic and they do not let others to speak. There also may be the case that some students do not want to work with certain students, and it is not good to order them to work together at the first place (because they would not function as a team), but to give them some time. We must listen to our students and let them see that they have our attention, but the problem may occur when we have a shy student who does not want to talk or he/she feels bored. It is good to put that particular student into a position of responsibility. We must keep our authority in the classroom and students should be aware of their position and their role.

A good teacher should never let students see he/she is nervous or in bad mood, our personal problems should be left outside the classroom. Being authority in the classroom does not mean we should treat students as less important or pressured. An important thing in maintaining discipline is that teacher should not raise his/her voice. A good thing to do when students start to talk loud is to not try to outloud them and continue to talk in our normal voice. They will find it strange to hear the teacher is talking normally and start to listen for it may be something interesting or important that teacher has to tell them. In maintaining discipline we must know that students like to use every situation to talk in their mother tongue and that is not a good thing in foreign language learning because they lose contact with the lesson. Authority must be shown but in a nice and friendly way, we should not be too strict, because it can cause that our students start to feel afraid of us and we lose communication with them.

OBSERVATION PAPER

SCHOOL: HIGH SCHOOL USKOPLJE CLASS: 3. A STUDENTS: 30 TEACHER: BRANKA BABI

When I entered the classroom with my mentor teacher the students were sitting and talking, some of them even singing as they had been told they were going to listen to the music that day. Students were sitting in classical style, as the activity did not require group work. The students were given a brief introduction in what they were going to do. When the teacher turned the stereo on and the song started to play, the students got quiet, listening to Yesterday. After the first listening of the song, a few students answered the questions about the song. Then the students listened to song again, and after this second listening they had to fill in the gaps in the text of the song they were given. The teacher wrote the title of the song and some unknown words on the blackboard.
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Communication with the students and maintaining discipline seemed to be an issue for the teacher, although she has seven years of experience. With their previous teacher these students used mother tongue a lot, but this teacher used every possible situation to give explanations and instruction in English. She had to try very hard when she was explaining them their next activity in English. They started to talk in Croatian asking what they were to do, but she continued in English and finally managed to explain the next activity (she read them five sentences which did not have nothing in common and they had to write a short story using simple past and simple past continuous). So, the usage of mother tongue was as less as possible. While the rest of the class was writing their stories, two students were having an oral examination. These two students sit in front of the teacher so they did not disturb the others. Every now and then the teacher asked if anyone needed help with the story. The teacher used a lot of gestures and non-verbal language (especially when telling them to stop talking). When they had finished their stories, the teacher asked few students to read their works and she corrected their errors with the rest of the class writing these sentences on the blackboard. The aim of this lesson was checking students listening, memorizing and writing skills. It was in some way a repetition of what they had done few weeks ago (simple past and simple past continuous).

This was done through the activities of listening, writing and reading. The students were very noisy and in the mood to talk all the time during the class, but they did not seem interested in talking with their teacher. Teacher did not have a strict attitude to the students and she tried her best to keep them quiet in a nice way, but showing more authority would have been a good thing. Although, the number of students in the classroom (30) was difficult to monitor, she did it quite well walking through the classroom and asking them if everything was clear. In their second activity (writing stories) the group work would be much better solution, but in the class noisy as this was it would be a mess. The teacher had a good feedback to the students although they did not seem to cooperate during the lesson.