Observation Report #2

In this second language classroom observation report, I am going to discuss an adult ESP
program that is provided to the international staff who work at a university. This 10-week adult
English for specific purposes (ESP) program meets every Tuesday and Thursday from 3:15 to
5:15pm. All the students native language is Spanish and most of them work at the university.
Half of the students were taking this program for their second or the third time.
The instructor started the lesson by greeting the students and collecting the homework
assigned in previous lesson. She used sentence dictation as warm-up activity by asking students
to take out a piece of paper and announced that they were going to dictate 6 sentences that
contain the vocabulary taught in the previous lesson. For example, I learned how to make sweet
tea through online videos, learned was the vocabulary taught in the previous lesson. The
instructor slowly reads each sentence for three times by breaking them into short meaning
groups. Certain students asked questions like spelling during the dictation process but she did not
answer the question and told them that they would check the answers together afterwards. Then
the instructor asked each student to write one of the six sentences on the whiteboard and let the
rest of the class correct the errors.
In order to make students to be able to differentiate the pronunciation of //, /s/, /t/ and /f/,
the instructor demonstrated the differences by pronouncing the phonemes with pointing at the
place of articulation on a handout of sagittal section diagram. She asked students to repeat the
pronunciation of the phonemes and to give examples of the words that have the // sound. After
writing down students examples like thing, thick, etc., the instructor divided the class into four

groups (two groups of two and two groups of one) and each group had one phoneme. She
covered her mouth and read several minimal pairs to the students and the group has the phoneme
of the word that she pronounced needed to raise their hands. For example, she pronounced /n/
and the // group raised their hands. The instructor read /sn/, /tn/ and /fn/ and the groups raised
their hands accordingly. After this activity, she explained the concept of minimal pairs and asked
students to pronounce the words after her. Then she gave out the minimal pair bingo handouts to
the students and explained the game rules. Students chose 9 words from the minimal pairs the
instructor gave and wrote them in a 3 by 3 square. The instructor called out the words and they
crossed the words off as they came up and shouted out Bingo! when she said all the words.
The next activity focused on the pronunciation of the marker of the regular past tense
verb {-ed}. The class started with students presenting food preparation conversations that they
created in the previous lesson. The instructor asked students to put their fingers around their
vocal cords to experience the difference between a voiceless /t/ with no vibration of the vocal
cords and a voiced /d/ with a vibrating vocal cord. The consonants were listed except the
sibilants and asked students to repeat after the instructors pronunciation as well as to indicate
whether it is a voiced or voiceless consonant. After practicing the pronunciation, the instructor
wrote down the rules of the pronunciation of {-ed} at the end of a regular past tense verb that
ends in a voiceless consonant is /t/ or a voiced consonant is /d/. The instructor also pointed out
the different pronunciation /d/ after /s/, /z/, //, //, /t/ and /d/ after explaining the concept of
sibilants. After that, the instructor asked students to give examples of the regular past tense verbs
and pronounce the words. Certain students had the spelling-pronunciation problem such as
pronouncing looked as /lukd/ but were corrected immediately by the other classmates and did
not make the same mistake again. To assess what their retained from this lesson, the instructor

used an activity called Stand up If. Students need to stand up if the leader of the game
pronounced the words incorrectly and each student needed to be a game leader for once. For
example, the instructor pronounced walked as /wlkt/, none of the students stand up. But when
the instructor pronounced fade as /feydd/, all the students stood up and corrected her
pronunciation.
Through observing this class, I learned that integrating the TPR method or just simply
having the students getting up and moving around can greatly change the classroom atmosphere
and make the students more energetic. This would be a good idea to add on to the teaching
process, for example, to have students engage physically in class every 30 minutes or so to get
their attention back on the lesson rather than to bore them with long lecturing.