Observation report n° 3 – ESP

This observation was carried out at the Chemistry School. The teacher in charge

was Gabriela Diaz Cortés and there were 30 students in the classroom. The level of English

was pre- intermediate and students need to take the course before reaching 5th year.

The class in general terms consisted in solving guides that were already prepared

and were part of the students’ material. The teacher was quite organized and she wrote on

the left margin of the board the layout of the class. In the first activity the focus was

connectors; students had to translate into Spanish different chunks of the text that contained

different cohesive devices. To check the task, the teacher asked some students to come to

the board and write their own translation. They worked with connectors such as “on the

other hand”, “because”, “first”, “second”. The second activity was carried out in pairs, and

students were asked to read the titles, subtitles and look at the images of a text about DNA

to find equivalents in Spanish. While they were working, the teacher monitored and

encouraged them to use the dictionary. After that, students had to look for the equivalent in

Spanish of a list of terms; some of the related terms were “bases nitrogenadas”,

“nucleotidos” “apareamiento de bases”, etc. Once they finished, they needed to read the

text for specific information, and had to assign each paragraph a title. This was an

individual activity. They checked the activity all together. As students worked the teacher

answered questions as regards vocabulary and comprehension in general. What is more, on

the right side of the board the teacher wrote all the important words for students to include

in their glossary.

The main aim of all the activities was to further develop students’ reading

comprehension skills. The rationale for the first activity was for students to focus on

cohesive devices; that is, to understand and see the relationships of ideas within the text and

how sentences were linked in the text. The second activity aimed at students finding

equivalent terms in order for them to know the vocabulary, both in English and Spanish. As

regards the third activity, the rationale was for students to read for specific purposes since

they needed to understand each paragraph so that they could give each one a title. That is,

they needed to understand the content of each paragraph to choose a suitable title.

The class was quite organised, the teacher was committed to students and they asked

everything they did not know or did not understand. Moreover, the teacher encouraged

them to use the dictionaries and to have an organised glossary. When reading the text about

DNA, she asked students as regards the content since they already knew about the topic; in

that way, she showed students how important is the background knowledge they had. I like

the way the teacher conducted the class since she made students’ participation key for the

development of the lesson. Besides, students participated a lot and they seemed to be

working comfortably.

As regards my learning outcome, after observing three different ESP lessons, I

could see that teachers and the way they worked and structured the class is paramount to

the success of it. From this lesson in particular, I liked how the teacher gave a clear layout

of what the students were expected to do and the effective use of the blackboard. The

teacher kept a friendly atmosphere which also contributed to the success of the lesson.

Tolaba, E. Belén