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Field Experience D: Responding to the Needs Assessment Data

English Language Arts (ELA) educators often focus on deepening students’ comprehension of the English language via speaking, writing, and reading. In relation to this, the outcomes of the needs assessment revealed that learners had major problems when it comes to reading English. Students demonstrated a significant need in the areas of fluency and phonics. As such, the ELA mini-lesson plan focused on deepening students’ understanding of phonics and fluency. To accomplish this goal, the lesson plan focused on breaking down the process of reading into a sequence of skills, with every skill building on other skills until learners accomplished fluency. Besides, the lesson plan focused on enhancing students’ phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the comprehension that words constitute of sounds that can be combined in different manners to establish different words. To enhance learners’ awareness of phonics, the mini-lesson plan focused on further phonics exploration including decoding and blending sounds. This process was enhanced by integrating visual activities so that learners could not just be subjected to a process of reading, but also an interactive process with text aimed at ensuring that they acquire reading fluency.

The teaching experience was great and successful, as students improved significantly in their areas of weakness. The embracement of group activities and the delivery of instructions using visual activities, especially a projector, contributed largely learners’ acquisition of knowledge and improvement in their fluency and phonics abilities. Even though my mentor considered my teaching effective, he recommended that I should focus on supplementing visual activities with auditory activities, as this can greatly enhance my instruction delivery process and contribute enormously to students’ comprehension of phonics and fluency. In the future, I will focus on integrating visual and auditory learning activities when it comes to deepening learners’ knowledge and skills in the reading areas of phonics and fluency.