Goal 2.1 To Describe a Language Teaching Situation

Unit 8 of “English Adventures 2”: My clothes. 

Type of school: Private School.
The grade: 3rd grade of elementary
The level: Advanced beginner 

Students:

Age: Around 8
Number: 20
Attitude: Excited to learn English with Disney characters. They participate loudly and slightly unceremoniously.
Behavior: Because of the excitement some of them interrupt a little too often. A pair of students got slightly distracted talking about their favorite Disney character and how nobody likes Peter Pan all that much. The front row is very attentive but one specific little girl makes up more than half of the interruptions.

Methodology: Total Physical Response (TPR) and Communicative language learning.

Explanation: Since most of them are particularly excited, it’s in the best interest of the teacher to get them moving and use their energy as a learning opportunity. A warm-up is in order, using flash cards, the teacher will evoke elements from past lessons. With this, the teacher will both get the students focused towards an “English learning” mindset and remind them of the words and elements that will be useful for this lesson. The teacher will follow the book’s activity plan as a basic guide when explaining the first elements of clothing and adjectives. 

After that the teacher will find a volunteer to stand in front of the class so the class can brainstorm and describe what they are wearing. By the end on the activity, the class will play a few rounds of “I spy” using clothing elements, in which the “spier” will call out the color of a clothing element in sight of all the children and the students will try to guess what clothing item the “spier” is talking about. 

(If the school makes them wear a uniform, the teacher may use pictures of people with different clothes and replace the “I spy” game with a “Find Waldo” of sorts with pictures)

Possible solutions if students’ disruptions get too significant could be asking them to help the teacher with the planned activity. You can add onto this by having the group of disruptive students going up one by one to help you out, that way none of them feels excluded. If all else fails you can just split the group and make them sit far apart from each other during the activity.