OBSERVACIN Y PRCTICA DE LA ENSEANZA II

ESP Observation 3

Student: Juan Pablo Mura

This observation task was carried out in a Mdulos de Idiomas course at Facultad de
Ciencias Qumicas, UNC. The teacher in charge was Gabriela Daz Cortez and the group
was made of about 20 students, aged between 18 and 40 years old. In this school, English is
an obligatory subject and students can choose to do it whenever they want but before they
reach their 5th year of schooling. That is why their level of expertise in the field of
chemistry is varied. In this report I am going to provide a descriptive narrative and the
perceived rationale of the class and a final reflection.
With regard to the activities students carried out, they were mostly text and
grammar - based activities, the aim of which was reading comprehension. Students worked
individually in most of the exercises but they were allowed to work in pairs too. In one of
the activities, students were asked to look at the title and images of a text about the
structure of DNA and comment with their partners on what they already knew about the
topic and what information they expected to find in the text. Then, they were asked to read
the text in a superficial way to get a general understanding of what it was about and
underline key words that were associated with its title. In another activity, students had to
read the same text carefully and assign a title to each of the paragraphs to ensure detailed
comprehension. Then, they had to underline the lines in the text in which they found the
answers to questions such as Qu mtodo contribuy a determiner la estructura del ADN?
and find equivalent terms in Spanish to words such as nucleotide, base sequence, base
rules, among others. Grammar was also dealt with in the class. The teacher explained the
meaning of some connectors such as on the other hand, because, first/second and
then, some students were asked to write on the board the idea these connectors introduced
in the text; for example, Segundo, y quizs ms importante, la gentica bacteriana era un
nuevo campo de estudio, ni siquiera estaba claro que las bacterias tenan genes.
With regard to the rationale of the class, all the activities students carried out were
short reading and sentence writing that aimed to the comprehension of written texts. The
course and the activities students carried out were designed taking into account their target
needs, as many of the books related to their field of expertise are in English, so they need to
have a good command of reading skills. The course is extensive as it runs parallel to other
specific subject courses related to the students field, and it has a narrow focus as its aim is

to develop students reading skill only. As the course is pre- experience because the learners
have not experience of the target situation they will function in, students delayed needs are
taken into consideration. Both text and grammar- based activities were dealt with the
purpose of improving the learners reading and comprehension skills. The class was
teacher-centered and the role of the teacher was that of provider of input as she controlled
the class, the language to be used and the sequencing of the activities. She activated the
learners background knowledge when she asked them to look at the title and images of the
text and also used the strategy of predicting content so as to engage them in the topic.
Students skimmed the text first so as to get a general idea of what it was about and then
they looked for detailed information when they had to underline the lines in which they
found certain key terms or when they had to assign a title to each paragraph. So, the
sequencing of activities was adequate to their purposes and ran smoothly. As what I could
observe, I once again noticed that although the main focus of the course is to develop the
reading skill only, at least some integration or combinations with other skills are needed to
increase students motivation. As a matter of fact, the teacher combined both reading and
writing skills when dealing with connectors, when the learners had to read, understand and
write the ideas the different connectors introduced. Despite the narrow focus of the course,
the teacher managed to include some variety. She also combined reading and speaking
skills when she made students comment on the title of the text, the images and the
predictions of what they were going to be reading about. I believe that follow- up writing
and pre- reading and speaking activities were worth their weight in gold as they truly aided
to the learners engagement and commitment to the activities they carried out.