I have been working at Grimstad Ungdomsskole for my first work placement. Nearly five weeks have passed already and things have been crazy hectic- it really has been some intense weeks. I have had to wave goodbye to my social life, but hey ho,  it is definitely worth it as I have learned so much from it as well. In English I am teaching two different classes  of 8th graders, 20 pupils in each class. Their level of English is actually higher than I expected, and the two classes are quite similar in that most of the pupils are very well behaved and work well both in class and at home. I have had no conflicts and no specific situations.

As the weeks have passed, one thing has become quite obvious, and that is that my tutor likes to be in control. As a consequence of this, I have been left with not a lot of freedom when it comes to planning lessons, which was somewhat disappointing as there were many things I would have liked to try out in class.

The competence aims we have been focusing on over the past weeks, are as follows:

Explain features of history and geography in Great Britain and the USA.

Use basic grammatical and text structures of English orally and in writing.

The main topic over the five weeks I have spent at GUS has been The British Isles. The pupils have learned about three out of the four countries in the UK, leaving Northern Ireland an Ireland. In week 47, the pupils will be having an individual oral presentation on one of these countries. Therefore, the focus in my lessons have been on the pupils gaining more information abot these countries, as well as some history dating all the way back to the Scots and the Picts.

This has been done in a variety of ways. As I didn`t find the texts about the British Isles in Crossroads very inspring, I have been trying to avoid using them. I have made PPTs providing the pupils with photos and both fun and interesting facts as opposed to just «statistic facts» that I felt that the book was focusing on. The pupils seem to take in a lot of information by listening to me talking and looking at the pictures on the projector.  This is proved in the various tasks I have given them successing the PPTs. I try to keep the info on the actual PPT to a minimum as I find that long sentences somewhat distract them. I might then choose to print out a fuller version of the PPT providing them with more information that they can keep for upcoming tests etc. I have also tried handing out a handout of information on London saying nothing about the topic myself, but making sure it included a lot of photos and good facts. The pupils were then to discuss the handout in pairs. I found that this worked extremely well. My biggest challenge in my English classes has been making the pupils talk English. They still don`t seem comfortable and will switch to Norwegian as soon as I turn my back to them in a group setting etc. However, this exercise worked very well and the pupils very enthusiastically spoke of the photos and the info- some of them had been there and were excited about  talking about it, some of them had something to add to the given information etc etc. This lesson really made me realise that the pupils can learn so much by themselves- I try to remember to keep what I say in a lesson to a minimum, but it is not always so easy to follow through! I have also been using news reels from BBC as I find that using authentic texts and clips and in that sense giving the pupils indirecte information about something, is just as valuable as getting information in the traditional way- i.e. through reading texts with badly disguised information…. When it comes to the British history, I found that this was a matter that was difficult for the pupils to comprehend. Therefore, I prepared a Prezi presentation including photos, clips etc to try to help the pupils see the bigger picture and again, getting information in a way that hopefully leaves an impression that is easier to remember than an outdated black and white picture in a book. Having said that, we have still been using more traditional ways of learning as well- we have read some of the texts in Crossroads, listened to the texts on CD, read in pairs, translated, made questions to the text etc.

When it comes to the grammar part, there seems to be quite a clear divide in both classes; the pupils either love it or hate it. For some pupils grammar clearly is quite a challenge- and so it becomes a challenge for me as well. I have tried both the inductive and the deductive method, and it seems to me that the pupils that actually like learning grammar prefer the deductive method, whereas the pupils that dislike grammar and perhaps struggle a bit more, seem to prefer the inductive method. I feel that they get an understanding of the grammar in a different way when they actually have to get stuck into it and try to find their own perspective and their own way of looking at it.

My overall feeling so far, having nearly finished my first work placement, is that there are so many things I would have liked to try out and now time is running out. Hopefully though,I will have plenty of opportunities in future to try them out…