Internship: Teaching English as a Foreign Language

At the beginning of the internship I decided to observe the discourse of classroom processes. Discourse concerns the use of language and is important for teaching English as a foreign language: “discourse as real language use is the target of teaching” (Cameron 2001: 37). It occurs in the classroom, when teacher and learner interact. Therefore I chose discourse as my observation task.
I observed that children use a mixture of the first language and the foreign language if necessary. It is difficult for the children to learn a completely new language and so they often only have a partial understanding of the foreign language. However, this does not stop them from interacting. They seek sense and work out a meaning (Cameron 2001: 38). If children “want to share understanding with other people through the foreign language, they will search their previous language-using experience for ways to act in the foreign language” (Cameron 2001: 39).