My Second Class.

              To use preposition of place correctly was my objective in the most relevant part of my second class which was the semi-controlled activity. First, by having the students in a horseshoe sitting arrangement, I asked them to work in pairs; then, I utilized the Conon projector for showing them an image of a room; also, everything in the image was tagged; for example, blanket, teddy bear, door, plant, table, chair, bed, brush, mirror, closet, and so on. Now, after repeating the words in the image, I asked some questions related to the topic such as where is the pillow, desk, vase, book, and so on; so I helped them by providing some answers such as the pillow is on the bed. Later, I asked student to formulate some questions and provide answers orally as the previous examples; I gave them around 10 minutes for them to describe the image using the prepositions of place. During these 10 minutes, I was monitoring the class in order to pay attention to some mistakes. After that, I asked some questions as the examples by naming some students, so they had to answer to my questions; for instance, where is the teddy bear, Astrid?, so she said that the teddy bear was on the closet and between the poster and the mirror. Knowing all the answers without mistakes, I could notice that they not only liked the activity, but also they understood the grammar phase perfectly. To finish, I fulfilled my objective in this activity because students showed to me that they can use prepositions by describing orally where the things are instead of pointing at them only.

I can mention that this activity was a success because students worked with enthusiasm, and I can also say that the class was not bored. Besides, I think this kind of activity is appropriate for students to develop their speaking skills; also, if they think how to form questions and how to provide answers in this activity, they will develop fluency rapidly when speaking or wanting to contribute with some ideas in future issues. Therefore, I think that to let students talk in their way is the most important part when teaching to beginners because it increases confident and fluency at the same time; however, after finishing the activity, teacher can correct mistake or even their classmates can sometimes support them by let them know their mistakes.

            Well, I have realized that my students find enjoyable activities in which they can interact among them; it can be because they are participative when working on a task. Besides, I know that they understand speaking activities better than writing or reading, and I confirm this because it is notable the motivation they have when working in pairs and speaking. Another aspect I have noticed is that they prefer to speak in English instead of speaking in Spanish during the class, so it is important to take advantages of this by having more speaking activities so that they will be also improving their listening skill. Therefore, I believe that the usage of realia helped me in this class because when explaining the grammar phase, I use some students in order to teach prepositions of place; as an illustration, I ask for some volunteers; then, in the teacher´s desk, I collocated a boy under the desk, a girl behind the desk, another girl on the desk, another boy next to the desk, myself in front of the desk, a ball between the laptop and the Canon projector, and everybody in the classroom; after, I created sentences such as Ernesto is under the desk; Karen is behind the desk, and so on. Then, using the same sentences but in the questions form, I asked them “Where are we? Where is the teacher? Where is the ball?” So, they had to answer correctly. By doing all this, I believe they have had a significant learning.     

            In the future, I will improve some details and control my anxiety. Besides, I will include more speaking activities in order to have a more enjoyable class in my future lessons; also, I want to make emphasis in the use of realia because it has been something notable that students prefer to manipulate things instead of just watching them, so for this reason realia has been something that I really want to take into account in every class specially for beginners. Regarding to the semi-controlled activity, I have though that I can make some changes as instead of having just a picture for student to describe it, I can have more than one picture and give a minute for describing the picture in order to do not stress student by watching the same picture, so I will do this the next time I teach this lesson.