TEACHING SITUATION TEACHING SITUATION

2.2. Teaching situation

Cam Thuy 3 High School is located in a mountainous area with most students

from ethnic minority communities. The teaching and learning English in the school

has been known to be in difficult situation. Most students enter the school with low

levels of English. They often find it hard to practice the skills and to learn

grammar lessons. Therefore, they are often unable to meet the requirements of the

lessons if these lessons are not adjusted in some certain ways. As it can be seen,

the grammar lessons in high school are mostly based on revising the topics from

secondary school; however, for most students in mountainous areas in general as

well as in Cam Thuy 3 High School, these lessons must be treated as new lessons

instead of revision ones. Consequently, the students often have difficulties when

learning the lessons that require related topics such as reported speech, passive

voice, and tag questions, etc.

From my own teaching experiences and observing other teachers’ lessons, I

realize some problems for the students when learning this lesson as followed:

+ Most students cannot determine all the auxiliaries, therefore, the teacher often has

to spend time to give examples in almost every cases. As a result, they don’t have

much time for the special cases and practice in a 45-minute lesson. And they need

an extra lesson to use tag questions correctly as well as do exercises.

+ Students often get confused when the statement is in the affirmative form

of present simple and past simple.

+ If the statements are classified according to the names of the tenses, it will take

time, the presentation will get longer, and many students may make mistakes when

determining the tenses.

For the problems mentioned above, many students still find it a difficult lesson

and the result of the tests in this section is not high. In fact only the excellent and

some good students can do well. This has been proved by the tests after unit 15 and

the final semester tests containing tag questions that have been used in Cam Thuy 3

High School for years.