Kelli Scott

EDTE540 - Adam Mendelson

Classroom Observation Write-up
Nov. 6th, 2014
For this classroom observation, I attended a beginner-level ESL class at the Santa Rosa
Junior college Petaluma campus, taught by a veteran instructor named Bonnie. I met Bonnie
through the Santa Rosa Junior College ESL department. I have been shadowing her twice weekly
tutoring sessions at the SRJC ESL Help center in addition to observing her Tuesday/Thursday
English class at the Petaluma campus. Bonnie has been tutoring and teaching for decades and
says she prefers working one-on-one with ESL students to teaching larger classes. I was invited
to see for myself how Bonnies regular CP class in Petaluma compares with her one-on-one
tutoring in Santa Rosa. This write-up is a brief breakdown of my take-away from the class
observation in light of chapters 5 and 6 from Lightbown & Spada.
Form focus in task-based instruction and collaborative dialogue
Bonnies beginning ESL class is a three-hour class, twice a week in Petaluma from 7 to
10pm. There are about 20 students in the class, mostly young adults and a handful of middleaged adults, all beginning English learners of different language backgrounds. The students sit in
spacious rows of small, old desks and face a large, smudged whiteboard. Bonnie is tall with
colored spectacles, thin gray curls and a slow-paced, friendly way of speaking. She had written
the agenda on the left side of the whiteboard:
1. Announcements
2. Parts of Speech Assessment & placement test
3. Practice on board
4. Pronunciation of syllables.

The class is a task-based, form-focused, communicative instructional setting. This sounds

like it could be a theoretically contradictory description, however I observed that this
instructional grammar-focused class included communicative attributes including some studentstudent collaboration and negotiation for meaning. The class included mostly teacher-to-student
feedback on errors, genuine questions, display questions, and also provided opportunities for
student-to-student error correction, display questions and metalinguistic comments.
Learners talking to learners
After the first hour and a half of Bonnies class, I wondered if Bonnie would be
presenting instructions and interacting with the students from the front of the room for the entire
class. The tone shifted, however when she handed out graded placement tests, and assigned
pairs and small groups to look over their results together to discuss their different answers and
the explanation for the correct answer.
Long and Porter compared the speech of native and non-native speakers in
conversations, analysing the differences across proficiency levels in conversation pairs. They
found that learners talked more with other learners than they did with native speakers. Also,
learners produced more talk with advanced-level learners than with intermediate-level learners,
partly because the conversations with advanced learners lasted longer. ...Overall, Long and
Porter concluded that although learners cannot always provide each other with the accurate
grammatical input, they can offer each other genuine communicative practice that includes
negotiation for meaning. (Ch. 6, Long&Porter 1985).
Ready to learn

Pienmann (1988) interprets his results as support for the hypothesis that for some linguistic
structures, learners cannot be taught what they are not developmentally ready to learn.
Bonnie let me know after my initial observation of her ESL class that she was caught off
guard by students collective lack of previous knowledge of grammar. She told me that she was
not expecting the students to be so much at the beginner level, so she had to modify her lesson
plan to adjust to that and cover a lot more basic grammar, such as reviewing vowels vs.
consonants and distinguishing syllables, prepositions, etc. She said her impression of their level
of communicative competence was initially based on their writing and the results of a parts of
speech assessment and placement test given on the first day, but that they showed a higher level
of competence in speaking once the class got going. Most of the class was spent going over the
ten or so questions on the placement exam, discussing the rules of the parts of speech confronted
in each exam question. One student at a time would volunteer to be the next to write the question
and answer on the board and explain to the class why the answer is correct and what grammar
rule was being addressed.
The fact that readies benefited more from recasts than the unreadies suggests that the
type of instructional/interactional input is also important. The Spada and Lightbown study shows
how the learners first language may interact with developmental readiness in contributing to
learning outcomes. Perhaps because each student spoke a different first language, the class
seemed to ignore prior knowledge of any other language and discussed the rules of parts of
speech in English as though no universals or commonalities between different languages would
have been relevant to the lesson or helpful to activate the students schema of prior knowledge of
parts of speech.

Get it right in the end

Form-focused instruction as it is understood in this position does not always involve
metalinguistic explanations, nor are learners expected to be able to explain why something is
right or wrong. They claim simply that the learners need to notice how their language use differs
from that of a more proficient speaker. This was not the case when Bonnie asked the students to
take their turn presenting and explaining the answers and corresponding grammar rules to the
rest of the class, but it seemed to be the case when Bonnie went over syllables and pronunciation.

Bonnie gave feedback on all written errors of the students (on the board, so that
everything written on the board was correct), but no feedback on any spoken errors, except
during the final activity of going over syllables and pronunciation. During this last portion of the
class, Bonnie spaced out the numbers 1 through 5 on the board and asked the students if they
could think of a word with each number of syllables. Each student who could think of a word
with the correct number of syllables was asked to come up and write it on the appropriate
list/number and do their best to pronounce the word to the whole class. Students often
pronounced the word in a way it would not normally be said in native conversation, and for this
activity Bonnie corrected students pronunciation, emphasizing when there was a big difference
between pronouncing the syllables of a word and saying the word fluently as in a conversation.
One thing I noticed at the beginning and throughout the class was the active participation
of the whole class, even when Bonnie was speaking to the group as a whole. For the entire class,
students mumbled or spoke repetitions of Bonnies words, seemingly indicating engagement,
intrinsic motivation and voluntary or even subconscious output.

Reflection:
Because this observation was as beginner-level as can be, the observer and English
learners alike, it is difficult to draw a conclusion on how this class could have been executed in a
way that may have been more effective or engaging for the students. Even though the prior
knowledge of the students was less than what Bonnie expected, she was able to adjust her plan
without notice in order to better meet the students at their real current readiness level, provided
some input of new vocabulary and basic grammar rules, and included student-to-student
activities. Although her communicative material was limited, she used words that the students
thought of in attempt to make the learning environment somewhat learner-centered. I could tell
as an observer that the students home cultures and languages were not acknowledged, included
or considered in any aspect of the class, however every student was equally called upon to speak
and regarded equally with respect and confidence.