My classroom observation is based on early year foundation stage (FS2), Repton School, Dubai. The classroom observation gave me the opportunity to reflect upon the understanding of various foci used in the multimodal semiotic analysis. The focus of my observation is on “the teacher’s voice quality, movement in the classroom and the layout of the classroom”(Kress et al, 2005:31). In my observation, I took into consideration literacy lesson based on weekly topic between two students (student A at mid-level group and student B at the high level group) who were named as perfect partners on the carpet.
The teacher chose the perfect partners for all the students in pair of two’s in the classroom. At the beginning of the lessons the teacher would ask the student’s to sit with their perfect partners on the carpet in front of her. She would read a book topic related to the students. The teacher would then discuss on topic related questions like sounds, counting, etc with the students.
She emphasized and pronounces the keywords in the story as she introduced the new sounds the students would learn in their lessons. I observed the tone of her voice showed clarity and confidence; influence the behaviour of the students that brought in the atmosphere of discipline. The seating arrangements on the tables were changed to group seating when the task was assigned at the time of learning. On the table the set up was 3 to 4 students on a table with the teacher sitting in the middle of the table. The teachers movement was however restricted as she hardly moved around to see how her students were working on a given task but only gave instructions vocally. The teacher would ask student A and student B to take turns to answer given questions.
I feel the teacher including herself within a group as opposed to dictating constructed a social interactive environment between Student A and Student B. I observed that in the end both students are socially interactive, supportive and could communicate with each other. This teacher’s restricted movement did not reflect on the classroom involvement instead to a teacher centred one on contrary to the seating arrangement one. I observed that the rising and falling tone of the teacher at the story time captured the student’s interest and made the topic more interesting. The impact of the tone influenced the lesson approach thus creating a friendly environment.
This type of classroom layout reflects a collaborative, communicative and supportive setting while learning. This way the teacher could equally observe, manage and support the group at the same time. Also, the way the teacher used various techniques in understanding and supporting the theory of communication in the classroom proved more effective in different parts of the lessons. I observed a lot of resources are used in order to work on a topic.
What impressed me is the way the teacher showed different mode of transmissions of multimodal semiotic analysis more effective in different parts of her topic.
