Significance of Instruction-giving in L2 classroom



Today, I had my first experience teaching our first-grade class. I designed a lesson plan based on a shopping scenario to review previously learned food vocabulary and introduce the new sentence structure, "Can I have something, please?"

The review of vocabulary and the practice of the new sentence went relatively smoothly, despite some students not fully concentrating. My first attempt at teaching Polish elementary students entirely in English went better than I expected. As I mentioned in my previous blog, this was a challenge for both me and the students, who are learning English through a Polish-English bilingual approach.


However, I encountered an unexpected issue during the activity segment. Some students didn’t understand my instructions, leading to various reactions: some students became so frustrated that they cried, others gave up and started playing on their own, and some sought help from their peers and my mentor. The classroom quickly turned into a chaotic and noisy environment.


After class, I reflected on what went wrong and paid close attention to how my mentor managed similar situations. I noticed that when my mentor gave instructions in English, she spoke very slowly and repeated the instructions several times, checking for student understanding. She would often confirm understanding by asking the students to repeat the instructions to her and finally translate the instructions into Polish.


I plan to incorporate these strategies into my future lessons to create a more effective and supportive learning environment. This experience emphasized the importance of instruction-giving in activity.

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