Entry 4.
Research writing
Imagine a young student teacher, full of enthusiasm and desire to demonstrate her or his knowledge on practice, who suddenly faces such unforeseen challenge as absolute lack of motivation of his or her students to their study at lyceum, and all that he or she can see in their eyes is the following: “Well, one more clown came to teach us… Now he or she is going to distribute silly tests to us and sit at his or her table doing nothing or playing games in his or her telephone”. That happened to me when I first came to my teaching practice in the Academic Lyceum #2 after three years of my study at my university. Certainly, when I was thinking about my teaching practice I fancied quite different situation. Actually, as I had been teaching English for three years in the educational center I was sure that it would not be so difficult for me to teach lyceum students. However, I did not consider the fact that in the educational center students were paying money for studying English, that’s why they were listening to me carefully, doing all the exercises that I was giving to them, while lyceum students knew that they would not lose anything if they came unprepared or treated their teachers with disrespect.
I was given two groups (03-13 and 03-14) of the third-year students, who received me quite coldly at the beginning. When I asked my mentor about the curriculum at their lyceum, he told me that all their students would have to have B1+ level in English upon their graduation from the lyceum, and therefore lyceum teachers were supposed to teach students according to CEFR, developing one of integrated skills during each lesson. However, I noticed that students were not ready for this, and their knowledge of English was not very good. In reality, some of them even could not speak or understand me while I was speaking in English. Besides that, their vocabulary was not rich enough to read and understand texts, intended for B1 level students. On top of all this, some students had already chosen their future profession and were saying that they would not need English in it. After that, I realized that my task was much more serious than just teaching English – I had to revive these students’ interest in their study, because when I was looking at them, I did not see this thirst for knowledge or eagerness to study, which I had when I was a student of college, and that made me feel sorry for them. So, considering the fact that students were bored with all these tiresome exercises in course books, which their teachers had been giving them for 2 years, I decided to develop students’ integrated and transferable skills and make our lessons more entertaining with the help of educational games.
As I expected, the use of educational games in teaching process allowed me to clear the atmosphere of tension in the class and very soon, my students started welcoming me. Moreover, being in friendly terms with my students helped me to make some significant achievements in my teaching: students were very active during the lessons and participated in all my activities with the great pleasure, but what is more important, they tried to use only English in the class. In addition, I found out that dedicating the whole class to teaching only one skill was not very effective. In fact, it did not work well when I was trying to teach reading or writing on the last pair, as students were tired and that’s why could not concentrate on their study. Therefore, I decided to change the curriculum a little bit conducting reading and writing only on the first lessons and adding exercises for teaching new vocabulary with the help of educational games in order to cheer my students up.
After two or three weeks of my teaching practice, I felt that my students’ attitude to study started changing. Many of them stopped skipping classes and tried to come in time bringing their homework. Besides this, all of my students supported our (my and my partner’s) idea to organize a speaking club on Fridays. Although they had to stay after the lessons those days and prepare necessary material, they took joy in doing that, because we organized our extra curriculum activities in a form of games and interesting discussions. So, we developed students’ integrated and transferable skills such as critical thinking, team work and the others and showed them that studying can be a great fun as well.
Besides conducting lessons, I had a chance to hold a midterm after 45 days of study from the beginning of the semester. I was supposed to examine my students’ knowledge of English according to FCE, checking their reading, listening, writing and speaking skills. I was proud, as all students who attended my classes and studied hard, got quite good results. Though, those students, who skipped some classes, did not want to disappoint their teacher and me and showed their best too. That’s why, assessing students was probably one of the most difficult tasks for me, because I was afraid to hurt or demotivate my students by bad marks or inappropriate feedback and criticism.
In conclusion, I would like to say that I enjoyed my teaching practice very much, in spite of some anticipated problems at the beginning. Having compared my students’ pre-test and post-test results we found out that all of them could improve their knowledge during these 2 months of my teaching practice at their lyceum, that’s why, I would say that the language teaching methods, that I had chosen, appeared to be successful. Also, numerous feedbacks with gratitude and best wishes from my students and mentor to me could serve as evidence of this. So, I would like to thank the administration of the lyceum, my mentor, supervisor and students for such great teaching experience and say that I really regret that time flew by so quickly there.
