Portfolio of my practicum at l’EOI Cornellà

de Llobregat

Jenni Meinilä

UAB tutor: Oriol Pallarés

2.2.2015

Who I am and what I do in EOI?

I’m going to be a Swedish teacher in Finland, where Swedish is the other official

language and obligatory for everyone to study in basic education. I wanted to use the

erasmus stipendium before graduating from the University because I think that

studying abroad is a good way to become more international and learn languages. I

didn’t know what I would study before coming to Barcelona except that it would be

related to education. At the Universitat autonoma de Barcelona I was offered a chance

to do a practicum and I thought that it sounded like a good opportunity to get to see

what the school system is like and to see if teaching and language classes here in

Catalonia differ from what I’ve got used to in Finland. I’m also somewhat interested

in working in international environments such as international schools in Helsinki

area in the future so doing an internship in a Catalan school sounded nice and

beneficial for me.

After saying “yes” to the practicum I was told that I would be practicing in a language

school called Escola Oficial d’Idiomes de Cornellà helping out in English teaching.

This was nice but also a bit scary because I have not studied teaching English at the

university even though I have studied in English. I have taught in primary and

secondary schools in Finland as a substitute teacher so I have some experience from

there but to see what it’s like to teach and study in a language school was something

new to me and interesting because we don’t really have this kind of schools in

Finland.

Getting to know the school

In the beginning of the year I started observing the lessons and helping out a little if

the teachers thought that I could do something. Often when I told who I was the

students wanted (or were made) to ask me questions. On top of the basic questions

about if I liked Barcelona and the people here someone in almost all of the groups

asked about the Finnish school system because it’s famous here and people have

heard that it produces good results. I was a bit surprised about that because I though

that it’s something we teachers and student teachers in Finland make ourselves

believe and exaggerate the good results. I tried to give a short answer to the question

saying that there aren’t big differences amongst schools, we don’t have private

schools and it’s easy to receive special education so the difference between the best

and lowest performing students is small compared to other countries. In addition to

that teaching is a respected profession and the salary is relatively good which leads to

certain kind of people to gravitate to teacher education. Also all teachers in primary

and secondary education must have a master’s degree.

The students often approached me and wanted to ask questions, which made me feel

welcome in the school. When I talked to the students many of them said that they

really like the school and I could notice that the atmosphere at the school is good.

Level 1

I started to work in the level 1 class because it’s where my mentor teacher works and

in level one there is most need for extra help. I had heard and noticed that not all

people in Catalonia speak English but I was still surprised to understand that these

people really have just started to learn English from scratch and the language barrier

wasn’t just a vague metaphor. I had never been in a situation where I wasn’t

understood and in the beginning I had bigger communicational problems when I

didn’t know hoe to adjust my language to a level that they understand, using

simplified structures, preferring words that are similar to what they recognize because

of the similarities with Catalan and Spanish and also speaking more slowly and using

gestured to support what I was saying. After the beginning I think that I have learned

to talk in a way that is easier to understand but also getting to know the students has

helped the communication because I’m more relaxed and I believe that the students

are as well and they don’t get frustrated if we don’t understand each other right away.

I think that it’s good to have someone who you have to speak English with in the level

1 class so that you understand in practice that you need to learn this language in order

to communicate with people who speak English. Spanish is such a big language that

people speaking Spanish might not understand the need of other languages as long as

they don’t leave the Spanish-speaking world. When I have spoken with the students

many of them want to learn English because they have noticed that you need it when

you travel. The situation in Finland is completely different because Finnish is such a

small language that we have to learn other languages and especially English if we

want to communicate with people from outside Finland, which is increasingly

important in the globalized world. The presence of English in our everyday lives is

also completely different which has already made some people worried that the

Finnish language would be in danger.

In the beginning I started out observing the lessons and helping out by going around

in the classroom when they were doing exercises so that if they had a question they

could ask me for help.

Teaching units in English 1

Unit 3- Family & Friends

I used the book as a basis for my teaching bits in the practice even though in the

future I hope that I find ways to incorporate materials from outside the books to my

teaching in order to make it more authentic and varied. The first unit that I helped

teaching was called “Family & friends”.

I started the first lesson by telling the students that the next topic would be family and

friends, and asking them what family related words they knew already and I wrote the

words on the smart board. I turned out that they already knew almost all of the family

words there are, but of course not every one knew all of them.

On this lesson we had three other student teachers observing the lesson and the next

exercise was to work with the people in your table (5 or 6 people) and ask the student

teachers questions like “How many brothers/sisters/cousins/uncles… do you have?”

so that the students would learn to use the words in a very basic sentence. After this

first part of the exercise they had to report back to me, and the rest of the class with

what they found out about the student teachers.

The text in this unit was called “Shakespeare’s tragic families” and the text gives

short descriptions of the basic plot of Shakespeare’s five most famous plays. I have to

say that I didn’t like the text much because three sentences of a plot doesn’t really

make a reader interested nor understand what the plays were about if they haven’t

read or seen the play before. Also a big part of the text was strange names such as

Cordelia, Regan, Goneril and Gertrude that have little relevance for the students. I

would have liked to read for example a longer summary of one of Shakespeare’s plays

and an intro saying something like “Family is important but they can also be your

worst enemies…”

We read the text and the students then answered the questions about it in exercise

reading 2. The grammar of this part was the possessive ´s but because my mentor

teacher thought that they would pick it up automatically I wouldn’t have to explain

the rule. Oriol explained the use of apostrophe briefly during the lesson in a way that I

guess he is used to and thinks is suitable.

On page 31 there was two exercises that I combined so that they first talked about

their families with a partner like grammar 3 suggests and then they wrote a text about

their partners family using the phrases from writing 1 but instead of “My family is

from…” they would write “Her/His family is from…”

Picture of page 31

When I corrected the small pieces of writing they wrote about each other’s families

the use of apostrophes was plentiful but mostly incorrect. Also the plural forms had

often gotten extra apostrophes (for ex. Parent’s name’s/parents’ name’s).

The second part of the Unit 3 (Family & Friend) was still about Family and I wanted

to pass this part quickly because I felt that the topic was a bit far-fetched as it was

Clans and merged with the topic colors because there are different kinds of tartans (a

material of which they make kilts) with different patterns and colors.

I decided to skip the colors and just read the text and go to the exercises on page 33.

The grammar part was “Questions with do/does” and do and does is something that

they have been practicing on every lesson and it’s still difficult but the exercise 1 was

easy as we filled the gaps together.

Picture of page 33

Grammar 2 and Speaking were two connected tasks. We corrected the grammar 2

together and my mentor had a long list of other possible questions related to family,

which was good because the book as a resource is somewhat limited in terms of

vocabulary and expressions. The students practiced speaking about families in pairs

using the book’s questions and the questions on the list (below)

After having talked to a friend the students had to write a text about what they just

found out about their partner’s family.

After having practiced posing questions related to family in pairs I asked the students

to do the speaking exercise where they had questions to ask each other when walking

around in the class like the task suggests. I told the students that the first person to

find someone for each statement on the list wins. They walked around the class and

asked each other questions that had some relation to the questions we had just put

together in the previous exercise but since the questions were nowhere on show, it

was difficult for them to remember the whole sentences correctly.

After the exercise we had a winner and I asked her for the people she found with

questions like “Who has a big family and?” in front of the class so that everybody

followed and she would answer “(a name) does.” so that they would get a model for

answering this type of questions.

We started the next lesson trying to remember the questions they had learned on the

previous lesson and I think that this kind of a small revision is good for your learning

but also because it’s an easy start to the lesson when some people are still arriving and

you have to try to slowly get everyone’s attention.

As a revision of family words I draw my family tree on the white board and the

students had to write about my family in the collaborative document. This was a good

way to introduce some useful expressions like we think that, must be etc.

Part 3 in this unit was about friends and I found this part more engaging than the

previous ones. We had the same three student teachers in the class and because the

text in this part was about four people living in different parts of the world we student

teachers memorized each one small text and went to different parts of the classroom

and the students who were assigned a number from one to four came to us to listen

about how we like to spend time with our friends. We told the same information

maybe four times so that the students had understood what we said and then they had

to go back to their groups and report back to the other members of the group so that

everyone in the group would have all information. After this I made the students write

something about each of the four people and hand in what they wrote.

We read the text again with the actual text on the smart board and highlighted the

difficult words so that everyone would have an opportunity to ask if they didn’t

understand something.

Picture of the text on page 34

Exercise 3 was filling the gaps in the text with the correct sentence and we did this

exercise together. In this task there were expressions like/love/don’t like/hate.

We made a list of activities that you can do with your friends in the collaborative

document and the students wrote a text in groups describing the ways people in

Catalonia spend time with their friends. I asked them to use the expressions We

like/love/don’t like /hate that were a part of this unit.

Unit 4: Bed & Breakfast

Unit 4 was called Bed&Breakfast and it’s quite obviously about hotels, furniture,

foods and diets. I was involved in the teaching of the food part of the unit. On the first

lesson that centered on food we had another student teacher besides me so as an

introduction to the topic we talked about what we eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner

so that the students would hear some words related to food. We talked also little bit

about healthy and unhealthy food. That time I had to leave for a conversation group

but on the next lesson we talked about our diets and because we had an assistant in the

class who happened to be vegan we talked about what she eats and what I eat because

I only eat vegetarian food and the students got to vote whether they thought that our

diets were healthy or not.

The students got to practice talking about foods and their own diets but before we

could talk we made a list of possible questions to find out other peoples’ diets. They

came up with a long list with a little grammar assistance:

Picture. Beginning of the diet question list.

The students were very engaged in the task and I think that food can be one of the best

topics in class because there are so many aspects to it (culture, heath, money,

pleasure, environment, ethics etc.) and everybody has a relationship with food.

A task that was related to the topic was that they made a shopping list for their family

for one week. I found a website (www.netgrocer.com) where you can add groceries to

your virtual cart without having to register on the site. This part of the task was

homework. In class the students were asked to work in pairs and make a shopping list

together with their partners. We made up this imaginary trip to a mansion or dream

house that the students created in the former part that handled homes and hotels, and

the task was to make a shopping list for a week with both of their families’ groceries

included. After the talking part they wrote a text in the collaborative document with

the following instructions:

Instructions for the grocery task.

This task brought together food vocabulary, useful sentences like We

should/could/need etc. and quantifiers (a little, some, a lot of etc.) that were part of the

expressions in this unit of the book.

Evaluation of tasks

I wanted to add evaluation as a separate part because it is a big part of teaching and

probably the part of the job that I have most problems with. I have corrected the

students’ small writing task along the practice and given these tasks grades. I also

corrected some of the tasks in one of their exams. I have done some correcting before

in my practices and as I remembered it’s very difficult especially if you aren’t used to

it and you haven’t developed a routine to it. When correcting level 1 writing tasks the

mistakes are many and creative in ways that you wouldn’t think of. There are easy

errors and then there are more difficult ones, like when they translate something from

their own language and don’t want to believe that in English it’s said differently or

when they write something that is correct in theory but sound very unnatural. It’s

important to be able to use one’s elementary language skills and that’s why I wouldn’t

pay much attention to the unnatural use of language if the meaning comes across well

but on the other hand if they have written a text and make mistakes that are corrected,

it’s a good opportunity to learn because you can spend time analyzing your mistakes.

For me it has been a good way of learning and I still remember many single mistakes

(for example difference between waste/waist) I’ve made in my essays that then were

corrected and I wouldn’t do the same mistake again. Correcting the unnatural

language feels a bit unfair in the beginning of one’s language studies because if you

are a basic level student you have to use the language in a creative way in order to

communicate.

Correcting more straightforward and simple tasks is quite naturally easier but still

requires getting used to it and creating your own routine. My mentor teacher last year

in Finland told be that when I correct exams it’s wise to correct one task at a time in

stead of correcting one exam at a time. This probably is clear to all teachers but it was

a good piece of advice to me. Even though it might sound easy to correct tasks like

“make questions to get to know a new person” it can be surprisingly difficult. You

want to stay fair so that you treat each student equally, so I tried to create some kind

of rules for giving the one point for correct or 95% correct answers and half a point if

the use of question words and the auxiliary “do/does” was right but there was

something wrong in the rest of the question. Still I was surprised to notice how

creative students can be in terms of making errors. Well, I believe that you can never

be 100% fair and equal in evaluation because it’s not so straightforward as one might

think but I believe that I get better at it with practice. I have noticed that I find more

and more sympathy for my old teachers now that I’m studying to become a teacher

and realizing that it’s more difficult than what it looks like.

Like I said evaluation is for me the most difficult part of the job and I feel that I

would only like to give the students positive feedback and this is something that I do

in my personal life as well because I don’t feel that I’m in a position to give negative

feedback and I don’t see myself as an authority. This is something that I have to learn

to do in the future but I’m sure that practice makes perfect here as well and I fond

some kind of compromise with the way I think and evaluation.

Small presentations about Finland

One part of my practicum in EOI has been to give small presentations about Finland

in general or a topic related to Finland in different English classes as a part of cultural

exchange. I tried to incorporate the topics to what the classes were talking about so

that what I was saying had relevance for the students.

The Finnish alphabet

My first presentation was about Finland in general in a form of the alphabet because

the level one had been practicing the alphabet so what I did was that I came up with

words related to Finland for each letter in the alphabet. To talk about Finland in

general was nice also in the sense that the students got to know me and where I come

from, a bit better. I had words and pictures related to Finland and when I gave the

presentation I explained how the word was related to Finland.

I did the presentation using prezi because it’s nice way to make presentations more

visual. I had used presentations before together with my classmates at the University

so I wasn’t really good at it but I think that the prezi ended up being nice even though

if you look at it closer you notice that it still looks a bit funny. Since level 1 students

don’t yet have a lot of vocabulary I think this was a nice way to introduce a topic

because the pictures helped them a lot.

This is the link to the prezi: https://prezi.com/nif15fjpvvpj/a/

Here are some images from the presentations. There are 24 images in the

presentations so I’m only going to add some to this paper.

Picture 1

Picture 2. Finnish people drink more coffee than any other people in the world. I was

told that it’s not real coffee because it’s filtered. In the upper right corner you can

notice the rest of the presentation as small square shapes. I thought that no one would

notice.

Picture 3. Lapland is something that I thought would be exotic for the students

because of the snow, reindeers and the Santa Claus. It’s also important for me because

my parents are from Lapland.

Pictures 4 and 5. Natural phenomena like northern lights and the polar night are

something that people often ask about when I tell them that I’m from Finland. I think

that the level 1 group was also interested in these thing and asked additional

questions.

Picture 6. I wanted to present something surprising as well and I think that it’s not

commonly known that tango is somewhat popular in Finland and that there is an

annual tango singing competition.

After the presentation the students were asked to try to remember as many of the

words as possible in small groups. I was surprised that they remembered almost all of

the words.

I feel that the presentation went well and the students were interested in hearing

something new about Finland that isn’t a well-known country at least in here. I had

thought that the presentation would take 15 minutes but I think that we ended up

talking about the alphabet and working on the topic for more than 30 minutes. This is

something that often happens in level one, I’ve come to notice.

A Finnish moviemaker: Aki Kaurismäki

Level (joku) had been talking about movies and since I was going to talk about

Finland I wanted to present one relatively famous independent moviemaker whose

films have a unique style and I myself like them a lot. When I went to the classes and

asked if the students had ever seen a Finnish film the number of students saying yes

was three or four in total and these people had seen Aki Kaurismäki’s films. This

presentation was more difficult to give than the one before because I didn’t know the

students and the students seemed to be a little reserved as well because they didn’t

know me. I thought that this topic would be more interesting than for example the

alphabet but I think that I here mistook my opinion for a general opinion. Aki

Kaurismäki is very special and has a unique style and not even all Finnish people like

his movies even though I think that he plays with the stereotype of Finland in a comic

way.

Here is a link to the presentation: https://prezi.com/b1zuwjbmeyd_/aki-kaurismaki/

This is the front page of the presentation. Doing this prezi was already a lot easier.

The presentation consisted of two parts; Information about Aki Kaurismäki and a

video where he talks about his way of working, and a presentation of his most famous

film “the man without a past” that has won a lot of prizes and happens to be my

favorite film. In the latter part I told about the plot and prizes that the film won and

showed the students the trailer of the film.

Even though I had thought that the topic is interesting I had the feeling that it was a

bit far fetched especially when you only have a short period of time to talk about it. I

gave this presentation three or four times and I noticed that even though the groups

changed so the students were always unfamiliar to me I got more relaxed and forgot

less of what I had planned to say. I had planned what I was going to say but because

it’s very uninteresting for the audience to watch someone read a presentation strait

from the notes I didn’t want to do that and I ended up forgetting a lot of what I would

have wanted to say. Sometimes I have thought that if you plan something you teach

very thoroughly you might become stiffer in the actual situation and it becomes more

difficult to react to the situation and do changes during teaching if you notice that

what you have planned doesn’t work. When I tried teaching for the first times I

remember that because I was so nervous and had very exact plans I might get irritated

if the students didn’t act the way I had planned.

What I also notices was that I had made a presentation instead of more interactive

piece of teaching which is often more interesting for the students.

Finnish Christmas

Before Christmas I went to three classes to talk about Christmas in Finland. My first

assumption was that Christmas is celebrated more or less the same way in all of the

western countries and that the difference would we that some countries get snow and

some don’t. The teacher expressed that they might like to do something else but to

talk about the traditional Christmas that everyone is familiar with. I started by talking

about the pagan traditions before Christianity came to Finland because I found that

interesting when I did some research for the presentation. After that I talked about the

Christmas now. In this part I again noticed that if you talk about something that you

haven’t talked about before it’s very likely that you forget something important or feel

all of a sudden that you don’t know how to explain something. Also something that

you find interesting might start sounding irrelevant to the students while you talk

about it.

The goat figure that was the predecessor of Santa Claus. The name of Santa Claus in

Finnish is “joulupukki” meaning Christmas goat.

This is the modern Santa Claus who we say comes from Finnish Lapland.

A Dropbox link to the presentation slides:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/21wewy7t6xls7tm/AABI-m6Bj3TOI54hFNA7Zd6ba?

dl=0

After the presentation I showed the class a Finnish short film about Santa Claus and

his origins. The film is called rare exports and it’s a fiction story about how Santa

Clauses originally are wild animals who are hunted, tamed and taught to behave like

Santa Claus and there creatures are then sent to all the countries Santa visits.

Link to the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg7xbeiZf5I

I think that the video was nice because it was fun and a good example of Finnish

somewhat dry and harsh humor, and the students probably found it entertaining.

After my part the students wanted to tell me about how the Christmas is celebrated

here and I was really surprised that for example Santa Claus or Father Christmas isn’t

a part of the traditional Christmas in Catalonia. When the first group told me about the

“caga tío” and “caganer” and the three wise men I was really surprised to notice that

Christmas really isn’t the same everywhere. This was a nicer presentation compared

to the one about Aki Kaurismäki because everyone has a personal relation to

Christmas and a lot of experiences related to the topic so it was easier to make the

students tell their thoughts and share experiences.

I felt that the students were excited about telling me about the Catalan traditions

because I was probably clearly amused by the very original customs so they were

active and spoke more which is always good in a language class.

Conversation groups

One part of my practice is to give “racó de conversas” in which students who want to

practice their speaking skills come to speak for an hour with a leader who can ask

questions so that the conversation keeps flowing and help to express something the

students want to say but have difficulties expressing. I have liked acting as a leader in

these groups because I like to learn in unstructured environments and I believe that

the students also find it nice. Speaking is for the most people the most difficult part of

language learning so it’s important to offer chances to practice this part even though

in EOI the speaking gets a lot of attention on the lessons as well. The nice thing about

these speaking corners is that you can speak even if your skills aren’t that advanced

without being corrected so that you can forget that you are practicing and learning

while talking with your schoolmates.

In Finland I have had the stereotypical idea that Finnish people are especially afraid of

using foreign languages. There can be some truth to that idea but speaking in foreign

language seems to be more internationally unnerving than what I had expected and I

have noticed when leading speaking groups. Often people apologize for their English

if they think that it’s not good enough even though there wasn’t any problems in the

communication. As a teacher I would like to change this attitude so that my students

were more open and willing to use a language even if it means speaking making a lot

of mistakes. My own Spanish skills are at a level that I survive in almost all situations

when I need to take care of something but I can’t really carry on a conversation.

Sometimes I think that this can be nice for the students to notice because it changes

the position so that they are better at a language than me and to hear also the teacher

make mistakes I believe is encouraging.

I have heard before in my teaching practices that I should pay attention to discipline

more. I find it very hard because I don’t see myself as an authority figure and I find it

hard to make people do what I want and I’ve thought that this is partly because I still

identify with students a lot more than with teachers, and also because I have had a

mild authority problems myself. I believe that I’ll learn to control groups better with

practice but I found myself in a difficult situation when I had to lead one of these

“racó de conversa” sessions and when we started out I had eight students and the limit

is ten in these groups. Two of the students told me that they had a friend who had said

that they wouldn’t come so they had figured out that they could come as replacements

which is of course fine. What happened after this was that four students came 15

minutes late because they had been waiting in a wrong place. I knew that the limit

was 10 students but I didn’t know in that moment what would be the right thing to do

because some had been there on time but without signing up whereas some who had

signed up came very late, so I felt that I had to accept everyone. That time we ended

up being 12 people and what happened was that it was very hard to make everyone

talk because the group was too big to be controlled and this was when I thought that I

need to learn to set boundaries even if it feels difficult because being too easy-going

and flexible makes learning difficult and it doesn’t serve the students.

Conclusion

All and all the practice has been very nice. I have studied for such a long time that

doing something concrete and being with people instead of book at the library was a

nice change. I believe that I now have a wider perspective as a soon to be teacher

because I have seen some inspiring teachers who make school and studying very

engaging. I noticed that I thought that I myself would like to be a student in the

school! I have also learned that I can do things that sound scary at first and that you

don’t have to be perfect because in becoming a teacher (as in other professions as

well) practice makes perfect. I really enjoyed being in Level one with the very

welcoming students who wanted to communicate with me no matter how high the

language barrier was at times.