Task 5: Opening a classroom door

I remember when I was in high school, the role of the teacher was to be in front of the class giving us all this grammar knowledge and vocabulary, meanwhile we as the students were sitting listening to her carefully. Our teaching/learning process was a really poor one because it was only focused on grammar so the teacher was our instructor and if we paid enough attention we can learn, but in the case of my classmates who didn’t pay enough attention, they couldn’t reach any goal that our teacher wanted at the beginning of the school year. As I said before, our teacher was an instructor and we were waiting for the instructions to work for every class, we poorly have interaction between classmates only once in a while and for some evaluation, but in the daily classes, it was only self-learning. Every year at the end of the second semester we were asked to do a dialogue with a partner and that was all the oral interaction in a second language we have with our classmates.

Even the teacher was very close to us, I had some classmates who were very shy and suffered when the teacher asked something and they had to respond in English or when they had to read something aloud. I remember that she always corrected our errors in the best way possible, she never makes any of us feel bad to make a mistake or something like that, she always taught us in a respectfully way. 

I remember that during classes our teacher used a few different techniques, such as inductive exercises, memorization, transformation drill and sometimes roleplaying. For me, I think that all these techniques weren’t enough for us to achieve successfully an L2, because it was always the same idea during classes, she barely focused in reading, writing or speaking activities, and we did listening because we had to listen to her and sometimes she came with a radio and played us some activity.

She did different kinds of evaluation like; grammar test that included a little text to read it and answer some questions and true or false, as I said before she liked that we did dialogues and when we were in the last two years of school we had to do a play at the end of the second semester. I really enjoyed her evaluations because I have always loved English, but the grammar test was hated by the majority of my classmate and the quizzes of the list of regular and irregular verbs that she did every week during all our high school was hated to, but I’m very thankful because I learned every verb of the list and now I don’t need a list of verbs to work.