Teaching Journal 2

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<i><b>Teaching Journal 2</b></i>

<b>Teaching Journal 2:</b>

Student: Hoàng Thị Hoài Giang

The second class I observed is a Writing 1 class at Hue College of Foreign
Languages. The lesson is about “What is sentence” and “What is paragraph”. It’s
from 3:00 pm to 4:45 pm on 25th_{September, 2010 with 30 first year students.}

In this lesson, I learnt many from the teacher.

First of all, the teacher had an exciting warm- up activity by letting the
students listen a nice children song named “Bingo”. This can get students’
involvement more.

In while- writing stage, she followed most of the exercises in workbook.
She asked students to do exercises in pairs or individual within few minutes and
then she received the answers from most of students in class. Instead of doing this,
the teacher can let her students spend more time in working in pairs, then taking
the answers from some of students and giving feedback. By doing this, she may
not be very teacher- centered in class.

And there was no post- writing stage. It is not same as I learnt but I think it
is not necessary to have post- stage in this lesson because this is the first period of
first year students. And it is better to help students to realize “what is sentence”
and “what is paragraph” first. There was no post- writing is a good choice of the
teacher for this lesson.

She has a clear, loud voice. Also, she is a good model of English. She used
simple language with medium speed that was suitable for her students. She had

clear stages by using clear instructions that can help students identify what they
would do next. So students could catch teacher’s idea easily and the class kept
going on well.

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<i><b>Teaching Journal 2</b></i>

Another good point of the teacher is that she was friendly, enthusiastic to
teaching. She often smiled and sometimes she called some students at lower
levels, encouraged them to answer questions by using eliciting questions.

The last one is that she had a good hand writing and well board use. Also
she had good demos for doing exercises.

However, it is better for her if she gave students a specific purpose when
they listened to the song “Bingo”. In this activity, she could ask students to listen
to the lyric of the song because in her purpose, this song has 2 sentences, after
listening to 2 sentences, the teacher will help students to analyze “what is
sentence” and start to the lesson. But not good enough instruction took her more
time on warm-up activity.

Another thing is that she was very teacher- centered in class that I have
mentioned above. She set pair works, group works but in very short time. So
students did not have enough time to discuss and explain their answers. Teacher
can shorten the time for warm-up activity to ask students to write down their own
sentences and their own paragraph for specific topics that students may be
interested in.

After observing two classes above, I think that it is quite difficult for
teacher to apply all steps in theory to practice that depends more on many things
outside. And the most important thing is that a good teacher is setting up suitable

lesson plan for their students’ aims and their own conditions.

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