Observation report n2

This observation was carried out at the Bussiness School. The teacher in charge was
Graciela De Federico and there were 40 students in the classroom. The level of English was
intermediate and students needed to have passed 20 subjects before taking the course.
The class consisted in students resolving guides that the teacher had given as
homework. They first checked an activity that focused on the passive voice but before
answering the questions, the teacher explained the topic. She explained the meaning and the
structure with all the forms of the verb to be. The second activity was a reading
comprehension exercise in which students had to read about the history of the banks and
then put sentences in chronological order. The sentences made up the synthesis of the text.
To carry out this activity, the teacher read aloud and asked students for the answer. The
teacher pointed out some important vocabulary such as charter. Then, the teacher
emphasized the importance of the chronological order and temporal markers. In the
following activity, students had to read a different text and identified the ideas contained in
a chart. Some interesting words were short supply and buck. The last activity required
students to find in the text the defined terms and asked them to give an equivalent in
Spanish. They had words like barter, curreny, buck, coin, supply and note. The last activity
presented students with different sentences in the passive, and required them to translate the
words in bold. For example, the coin was split into smaller units.
The main aim of all the activities was to further develop students reading skills. In
the first and last activity in which the focus was on the passive voice, the rationale for those
activities was to put emphasis on the uses of the passive, and for students to recognize this,
to understand better this structure and its importance in texts. The second activity
highlighted the importance of temporal connectors. The rationale for this activity was that
students recognise the temporal moves within a text, so that they could rearrange a
synthesis of a long text. The next activity aimed at students reading for specific information
and the rationale for this activity was to make students aware of the specific vocabulary as
well as look at the similarities or differences of the terms in the mother tongue.
As regards the class, it was quite teacher- centered because she was the one who
read the activities and answered when students did not know. Many students participated

actively and some others were out of task. Another interesting issue was that most of the
activities were done as homework; that is, students did not have the chance to work in class
very much. They were asked to read and report what they had already done. There were
few instances in which students worked in the class, and when they did it the teacher
required them to remain silent. The level of students was intermediate so the texts they read
were more difficult than a beginners course and the structures they were learning were
much more challenging.
After carrying out this observation, I consider quite interesting the different ways in
which teachers face an ESP class. In this school, for example, most of the work was carried
out at home rather than in class. On the one hand, I did not like it very much since I felt that
those students who had not done the homework just copied the answers or were lost at
some point in the lesson. On the other hand, I realized that having students read the
homework may be time saving. The teacher may decide to use that time to resolve doubts,
for instance. The lesson was quite effective, especially for those students who had done the
exercises.

Tolaba, E. Beln