During my first practice period I’ve been at Grim Ungdomsskole which is located in western part of Kristiansand. The English class I’ve been given is a rather small class which only consist of 16 pupils. Of these 16 pupils only 12 are attending my English class. The reason is that 3 pupils are attending a class for those who need extra help at learning English. The fourth pupil is a hearing impaired pupil who do not know enough English to attend either classes. One would think that since they are so few the threshold for speaking English would be rather low. Unfortunately this is not the case. The pupils seems to be too embarrassed over their pronounciation to speak English out loud in class. Since most of them don’t even dare to speak at all during any class, let alone in English, I’ve decided to focus on the competence aims which are aimed at oral activities.

The first competence aim I decided to focus on was “express himself/herself in writing and orally with some precision, fluency and coherence”. During a phase of trial and error that took place during the first week, I realized the pupils were more active during class if they didn’t have to speak in front of the whole class. Knowing this, I decided to make a game which took advantage of this fact. As homework for the class, the students practiced the glossary written in the textbook for a particular text. Then, during class, I split the class in two equal parts and gave them each a note. One group got a note with a Norwegian word written on it, and the other group got a note with an English word written on it. The point of the game was that, without saying the english word written on the note, they should find the equivalent word to the word written on their note. So say you had a note that said ‘bil’, then you would have to walk around the classroom and find the person who had a note saying ‘car’. Then in order to fulfill the competence aim, which claims they should “express themselves in writing” as well as orally, they had to write the English word on the whiteboard. If they spelled it correctly they both got a point. Now I should mention that I wrote all their names on the whiteboard, and they could always keep their eye on who was in the lead at the moment. I have to be honest, I was kind of expecting them to cheat and speak Norwegian during the game, but I’m glad to say I was wrong. All of them spoke English, and no one seemed embarrassed.

The second competence aim I decided to focus on was “master a vocabulary that covers a range of topics”. For this competence aim, we talked about the interrogative pronouns, what they meant, and how you would use them. We started of by writing them all on the whiteboard, and the pupils wrote them in their notebooks. Since this class took place the day Barack Obama got re-elected for President of the United States, the students were given the task of writing seven questions they would like to ask Barack Obama. These seven questions corresponded to the seven different interrogative pronouns; who, what, which, why, when, where, and how. Afterwards the other student from uia who also happened to participate during the class, got up in front of the class and pretended to be Barack Obama. The pupils then asked him their questions and we all got some laughs from his answers. I made sure everyone got to ask him at least one question before the class ended.