Observation Report
On Feb.26th, 2015, we observed a lecture class as scheduled, which taught by Mr. Shi, lasted about 65 minutes, and the target students were 8 who are at junior level. We were there early; Mr. Shi told us the class we were going to observe would be an exercise class. Usually, the students have 5 times a week, the first 4 times classes are focusing on new lessons, the last time is exercise. As we sat in the back of the classroom, the students arrived one after another; they sat on U-shape tables, and Mr. Shi stood in front. He asked students to take out a piece of paper, and then reviewed the grammar points on it, they started from the vocabulary, for each sentence, the students would read together, and Mr. Shi corrected their pronunciation and explained some vocabulary, such as “无奈 means 没有办法,the difference between 起诉and 倾诉,孝means 孝顺,could be used alone.” The second part was to review a song, named 常回家看看, Mr. Shi asked students if they could sing it now, most of them said they could follow the singer, but not sing it, Mr. Shi showed his understanding and encouraged them to learn. And then students read the lyric together, Mr. Shi illustrated “the difference between 恋人and 爱人,also 不图means不希望。” The third part was for students to do the gap filling, they worked in pairs discuss and picked the right vocabulary; Mr. Shi assisted them by correcting and explaining and walked around to check. In the end, he left homework-translating sentences.
After a while, I discussed the observation with my peer, we both felt the exercise class is similar with drill class, both of them are designed for students to practice and review. However, the drill class has more energy and color. I’m curious what the lectures-new lessons are like. So far I think the lecture class is not communicative language teaching, which focuses on form, no learner-centeredness. Take this class I just observed as an example, students just practice a little reading; it’s not integration of the four skills. To say nothing of authentic input and output, the learner didn’t have chance to speak. As we discussed in class, the goal of teaching should be to enable learners to use the target language for real communicative purposes- and of the means to achieve it.