Glen Eira ELC

Glen Eira English Language Center is an English Center that welcomes new arrivals including international students and students whom require short term English Language instruction. The center focuses on providing programs for secondary aged students to acquire a high level of English through learning about Australia and its culture. After the completion of this 6 months program, the students are assisted into their transition to mainstream schools.

I was able to observe a language class in the English center and was very surprised at the teaching methods used within the class. The class contained 3 Chinese students as most students have left to mainstream schools. Students in the class were looking at paragraph writing and was trying to understand how to create topic sentences and separate writings into different paragraphs. The lesson was textbook based, as students were doing exercises within the book.

In this class, I was able to acknowledge that although the exercises were of primary school level, students did not understand the text. This is because the concept questions the teacher have asked did not receive an answer. Students were quiet and seemed rather clueless when the teacher was asking the questions about the text. Help and assistance is often needed in order for students to figure out the answer for each question, most of the time the teacher had to give students the answers.

Because the class consisted Chinese students, the teacher set a rule within the classroom, where students are forbidden to speak their mother tongue, and if so they were to be punished. I was able to observe this within this class, where a student made a comment to another student in Chinese and was made to stand up throughout the entire lesson. The student spoke Chinese to his friend again and was sent to the corner of the classroom where he had to stand and face the wall. However, the student did not learn his lesson and spoke Chinese again and was sent straight to the heads office.

Labeling and discouragement by the teacher was also witnessed in the classroom. The teacher consistently distinguished the student that was punished as "naughty" to the class and discouraged motivation as she tells the class that the exercises are "very easy" and stated to her students that the exercises are primary school level when students could not answer her questions.

In my opinion, i felt that the teacher was very harsh towards the students and discourages English Language learning through her methods. I think that these methods would discourage the students motivation to learn English and remove the fun out of learning the language. I also think that the teacher could have worked on better questioning skills as her questions were very complicated and not precise.

Fortunately i was able to observe another class which was able to give me a better comparison. The lesson was a vocabulary teaching sociology lesson. The vocabulary was themed based on a book they have read, and students were allowed to use their mother tongue for discussion and translators to translate to their own language to find definitions.

The teacher also catered towards individuals as students in the class are at different ages. The teacher used questioning skills effectively, asking more difficult and detailed answers in her questions for stronger students and easier for lower level students.

However, i noticed that although the class was conducted quite successfully, the teacher often searched for answers from the stronger students. Stronger students also dominated the class when it came to classroom discussions.