Fifth Journal

Some Uncomfortable Attitudes

This week I felt a little bit dissatisfied. As I have already told you in the previous journals that I am conducting English classes in two groups. There is a group in particular that seems to have a very slow pace regarding their learning process in contrast to the second group of younger students. In the group mentioned, there are some students who are the ones who start an unfavorable learning environment.

What I refer to, is to that uncomfortable attitudes that some students have towards the learning process of the English language. In some cases, if a student makes a speaking mistake those students make a lot of fun about it. At the beginning when I noticed it for the first time, I tried not to pay too much attention to this. Probably, I thought that it would be better to ignore them just like kids who are ignored and stop doing something unpleasant. Very soon, I could probe that I was wrong. Those conducts are repetitive.

 As usually, I pay close attention to even little details in every context. In this order of ideas, I decided to talk to those students who were making fun of silly things such as mistakes while producing speaking English. It is unsuitable to have a learning environment where students are shy and do not like to participate. I consider that learning English is a matter of having a good amount of input, and then taking that input to start producing output. But student won´t produce any sort of output if they are shy and if they do not feel secure. Learners have to feel that making mistakes is an important stage of the learning process, and that they are free to make them and what is more important, to learn from them.

In this sense, I decided to talk to those guys who use to laugh every time they heard a mistake. I told them that they were creating a learning environment where students do not like to participate because of them. Additionally, I told them about the implications that making mistakes brings. I let them know that it was not beneficial for none of us, and that I did not want them to keep doing so.  

Regarding to my speech´s speed, I decided to pay attention to it. I noticed that sometimes I tend to speak fast and students did not understand even a general idea about what I was talking about. In this week, I talked slowly and students seem to enjoy more the English class since they can understand what we are talking about. Furthermore, I asked them again to let me know if there was something that they would like me to change about the class development.