As per the requirement of the course the Teaching Portfolio (TESL 42542) and Internship (TESL 42557), the student-teacher was expected to go through two observations.

The class profile was consisted of a group of 10 students in grade 8 which included both male and female, whose first language is Sinhala. The learners were different from each other in terms of their proficiency and the majority have difficulties in speaking fluently and accurately. They considered developing speaking skill as one of the major difficult area in English due to lack of continuous practice. Most of the students had the basic knowledge of working with computers and technology.

The first online teaching practicum observation was held on 08th of December, 2020 during the class held from 7.00pm-9.00pm. The topic of the lesson was “Let us work to a plan” and during this lesson, the writing skill was focused by the student teacher. The lesson started with a warm up activity, showcasing some pictures of ancient communication methods where the students had to guess what they were and to elicit the word ‘communication’. The pre-writing activity included a jumbled parts of a letter where the students were asked to annotate on the shared screen to place the parts of the letter in the correct order as an innovative technique. Before entering to the main activity, the students watched a video clip on friendly letter writing, noting down the special points. They completed their writing activity according to the DARE structure. The student teacher was given positive comments by the supervisors about the engaging and creative activities as well as the rapport.

The second supervisor observation took place on 24th of December 2020 during the class held from 7.00pm-9.00pm. The topic of the lesson was “Feathered friends” and during the lesson, developing bird related vocabulary was intended by the student teacher. The warm up activity included some silhouettes of different birds on the shared screen where the learners were asked to guess the bird by the silhouette and to talk about their favorite bird out of them, focusing on the much needed speaking skill. The lead in activity included a mind mapping activity where the students were asked to tell the words that spontaneously come to their head when they look at the word “BIRD”. A video-clip about amazing bird facts was used to complete a matching activity where the students were able to annotate on the shared screen to match the meanings of bird related idioms. Students had to build their conversation with an ornithologist about their favorite bird and send the photos of the answers through whatsapp media to be corrected. The student teacher was given positive and negative feedback on the session as using informative and engaging activities and being too fast in giving instructions.

The learners engaged in both classes enthusiastically for they enjoyed watching interesting video-clips and they loved to annotate on the screen when they were asked by their names to do so. The learners were allowed to ask any question using the chat-box to maintain better teacher-student interaction.