Session 2: Beginning French

The structure of the class was similar to the first session that we observed. There were visuals, student-student as well as student-teacher dialogues, as well as some textbook activities. But this session was where we observed more about her teaching style and how the students reacted to it.

This class is in a structure-based instructional setting. All of the material is presented one at a time in a sequence that builds on itself. Errors that are made are frequently corrected, and accuracy of speaking is stressed. The teacher is the only native speaker of the language, and the students native language (English) is used to stress instructional material as well as clarification and class management. Initiation/response/evaluation is very prevalent Ms. Vlasova’s class. She asks the students questions, the student(s) respond, and then the teacher evaluates their response. The text book is used to read dialogue or to use for a specific use, not just to read for content. Also, the students have limited exposure to the language, with only using it twice a week for an hour and fifteen minutes each session, as well as there is pressure to speak because the teacher will call out students to answer questions or to participate.

During this session, we also evaluated the dialogues during the class. We evaluated the types of errors, the feedback given, and the questions asked. The students’ biggest errors were in phonological and syntactical. They were struggling with forming the correct sentence structure while speak the most, which included their placement and usage of articles and adjectives. The feedback that was given from the teacher was mostly recast. She would just repeat the correct form, but without directly saying phrases such as “you meant to say” or “you should say”. She would also request for clarification, especially when students would say something in English. She would request for them to repeat what they said in French, or it was also used when the structure did not make sense, and she would give them a chance to self correct before she would correct it for them. She would also give elicitation feedback by giving context cues or using gestures to get the students to figure out what she is saying without having to say it in English. Finally, we evaluated the types of questions that were asked during the session. Ms. Vlasova asked display questions, wanting the students to show their knowledge and understanding, whereas the students would ask genuine questions because they did not know the answer prior to asking the question.

Suggestions:

This class showed some positive aspects of teaching a second language. But there are also things that we would suggest in order to improve the language learning. First, over the two sessions that we observed, there was no writing that took place. Although speaking is important in learning a language, that does not encompass the entire language learning process. This would also help with their syntactical errors, if the students were required to be writing out the sentence structures. Also, to help with their phonetic errors, reading just for content would be helpful. If the students had to read excerpts from popular cultural stories, including fairy tales, novels, or even well know picture books in the second language, they would be focused on the content and not just learning the material that it is presenting to them.