CHALLENGES FACED IN THE LEVELS ALREADY TAUGHT DURING THIS YEAR

To begin talking about the challenges I faced in the level already taught, I want to say that in this two last months I realized even more that teaching is not as simple as some people see it because it requires not only subject knowledge, effort, and time but also patience, creativity, self-confidence, and some other aspects that sometimes we teachers don’t pay much attention to.

Besides, I established norms or expectations at the very beginning and I used some strategies in order to maintain a good environment inside the classroom. However, there were big challenges I had to deal with in the level I taught, and these were the following:

- USAGE OF THE MOTHER TONGUE: Since my students are non-native English speakers, they tended to use Spanish while they were in their English classes. However, as an ESL teacher, I encouraged them all the time for them to avoid it. This was a big challenge because they were still getting accustomed to listen, speak, read, and write in the English language.

- LATE ARRIVALS: My students used to arrive late to classes, and it was almost a headache for me because I needed to start classes. Most of the time, I began classes with few students, so I told them that late arrivals were going to affect their formative grade; little by little they  showed a small change. At the end of the course, it was no longer the big challenge it used to be at the beginning.

- NON-ACTIVE PARTICIPATION: Since I was a new teacher, my students were kind of afraid to participate in classes and to make mistakes in front of the whole class. Nevertheless, I used some strategies in order to make them participate in the different activities and classes I had planned for them to learn.

- LIMITED RANGE OF VOCABULARY: When students have a limited vocabulary, they cannot express their ideas because they do not have the enough vocabulary to do it; therefore, it may be difficult for them to find the words to communicate using the second language. Moreover, this can become one of the biggest challenges that a teacher faces through the teaching-learning process, and in fact it was a challenge I had to deal with in level 4-B.

- LACK OF THE REQUIRED ENGLISH LEVEL: It was such a big challenge to teach some students who did not have the required English proficiency level for being in the level I taught. In the first class, I felt disappointed to see that my students did not cope with the structures they had studied in the previous levels. From that moment, I realized I had to make an extra effort in order to succeed in the teaching-learning process.