Today it was time for me to do my LSA2, and I had divided feelings on it. On the one hand, I would have liked more time to mull things over and make some decisions about what I'd be teaching in the class, but on the other hand, I really wanted to get it over with.
It now is indeed over with, and, although it wasn't a complete failure, there were certainly things that I wasn't happy with.
The first part of the class (a discussion introducing the topic of complaints) went well, although the students had less to talk about in terms of complaints than I'd anticipated. Perhaps it's just me, but when I think about complaints about services or products, I can reel off a massive list! My students seemed to struggle to really bring any personal experience of these kinds of problems into play.
My own presentation about a problem in a restaurant worked okay, once I'd given the Ss a push in the right direction. They predicted some of the general ideas of my letter of complaint to the restaurant.
I then handed out the text and students skimmed for the main ideas and to check their predictions. I messed up the instructions though, and didn't check their understanding of skimming skills.
A big problem here however is that my choice of a formal letter of complaint to a restaurant perhaps wasn't the best, for several reasons:
1) Who actually writes letters - of complaint or otherwise - these days?
2) Would Ss really write a letter to complain to a restaurant in real life?
3) Why would Colombian students - in the final activity- write letters to a Colombian restaurant in English? Not very authentic. An idea that occured to me was maybe something a little different where Ss write to an international airline on behalf of a friend who had some problems during a flight - the friend doesn't speak English, so needs this help for the Ss to write the actual letters.
Ss then looked at the guided discovery worksheet, and this is where things came apart a bit.
1) I didn't explain clearly what Ss needed to do, and wasn't clear about checking everything. I should have focused on ex.1, then ex.2 and so made it a lot clearer.
2) My wording and explanations on the ws were not clear, and caused confusion, with such words / phrases as deserve / sign off / the too subtle difference between an attempt at a solution, and a suggestion. In fact, I should have left off that third paragraph, and make it more straightforward for this level.
3) The guided discovery document didn't make clear reference to elements of formal style, such as not using contractions.
My boardwork and explanations in the plenary were also not the best, and could have been a lot clearer.
Students did then manage to brainstorm ideas, although some of this was a bit too chatty instead of really generating useful ideas. Again, I was surprised that students did not have such pre-existing knowledge of problems & complaints in restaurants as I was expecting.
Ss did however seem to be able to write successfully though. They were following a very strict structure, which I think was appropriate given the genre, but perhaps relied on too much copying from the model text. It might well have been better to not have them write the full letter, but plan and write part of it, and really focus on that section. I think that we were rushing to try to get the full letter done in class.
The strange thing is that the students did seem to really enjoy the class and feel that they had benefited from it! I was rather disappointed as things that I had put a lot of work into didn't work out as I had hoped, and it was only when they were put into use with the Ss that I realised how I could have improved my planning. The basic structure was okay, but in the future I would:
1) Be clearer on instructions.
2) Tailor the model and target texts towards a more authentic goal, such as the airline example.
3) Rework the guided discovery ws to make it clearer and more comprehensive for the specific elements of formal style.
Timing was also a plus, and the music helped as usual to give the classroom a relaxed atmosphere.
Monday, 3 December 2012
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
LSA1 all but a fading memory
I was observed for my LSA1 today, and on the whole, I think that it went quite well.
Each part of the class went smoothly enough, and the time restraints that I'd put onto particular activities, despite being on the strict side, and despite the fact that they could have been extended (and indeed would have been in any normal class which I teach), were fitting and respected. Students seemed to follow everything fine, and produced the target language at the end of the class.
Anyway, I'll look at the lesson here stage-by-stage:
* The warmer went well in getting students talking about technology and thinking about the subject area. I could perhaps have give students less questions though, and encouraged them to delve into their discussions a little more.
* The eliciting of what type of text the report was didn't do so well - could this be because the students don't have as much experience with (particularly English-language format) reports as I imagined? Or because reports are not such common classroom texts as newspaper articles, or diaries?
* The guided discovery seemed to go well and students got their heads down and had a good look at the target structures. Some of my wording could have been better on the handout though - when I referred to connectors, I rather took it for granted that Ss would understand that I was referring to the connectors in the model text. Instead, they started listing all and any other connectors that came into their minds.
* I was satisfied with the specific focus on comma placement and syntax; I think that the exercises on the guided discovery sheet allowed controlled practice and the chance for students to analyse form in a scaffolded fashion. The work with Cuisenaire rods reinforced this, and was both enjoyable and useful for the students. This was my first time using the rods in class, and I was pleased at how students took to them and used them to manipulate and look at the structures from another point of view. Indeed, when we finished the activity, it was difficult to get some students to give the rods back!
* The final production activity seemed to go well; from what I saw while students were writing, the target language was being used with some accuracy, and the texts were generally of a good length. I was concerned at first when students hesitated before writing, but perhaps this was merely their natural thinking time before they started the task. I could have perhaps generated a bit more interest in the report-writing activity before we leapt into it. I'll be able to see how they used the target forms when I look at their work in more detail tomorrow.
All in all, I feel happy that it went as hoped. There were a few rough corners that could be smoothed out, but I think that I was successful in giving students an interesting task with the right level of cognitive challenge, that the procedure that I chose for the class (both the Cuisenaire rods and guided discovery) was useful and worth exploring further, and that it ended with fruitful production of the target language.
Each part of the class went smoothly enough, and the time restraints that I'd put onto particular activities, despite being on the strict side, and despite the fact that they could have been extended (and indeed would have been in any normal class which I teach), were fitting and respected. Students seemed to follow everything fine, and produced the target language at the end of the class.
Anyway, I'll look at the lesson here stage-by-stage:
* The warmer went well in getting students talking about technology and thinking about the subject area. I could perhaps have give students less questions though, and encouraged them to delve into their discussions a little more.
* The eliciting of what type of text the report was didn't do so well - could this be because the students don't have as much experience with (particularly English-language format) reports as I imagined? Or because reports are not such common classroom texts as newspaper articles, or diaries?
* The guided discovery seemed to go well and students got their heads down and had a good look at the target structures. Some of my wording could have been better on the handout though - when I referred to connectors, I rather took it for granted that Ss would understand that I was referring to the connectors in the model text. Instead, they started listing all and any other connectors that came into their minds.
* I was satisfied with the specific focus on comma placement and syntax; I think that the exercises on the guided discovery sheet allowed controlled practice and the chance for students to analyse form in a scaffolded fashion. The work with Cuisenaire rods reinforced this, and was both enjoyable and useful for the students. This was my first time using the rods in class, and I was pleased at how students took to them and used them to manipulate and look at the structures from another point of view. Indeed, when we finished the activity, it was difficult to get some students to give the rods back!
* The final production activity seemed to go well; from what I saw while students were writing, the target language was being used with some accuracy, and the texts were generally of a good length. I was concerned at first when students hesitated before writing, but perhaps this was merely their natural thinking time before they started the task. I could have perhaps generated a bit more interest in the report-writing activity before we leapt into it. I'll be able to see how they used the target forms when I look at their work in more detail tomorrow.
All in all, I feel happy that it went as hoped. There were a few rough corners that could be smoothed out, but I think that I was successful in giving students an interesting task with the right level of cognitive challenge, that the procedure that I chose for the class (both the Cuisenaire rods and guided discovery) was useful and worth exploring further, and that it ended with fruitful production of the target language.
Friday, 26 October 2012
Time is a factor
There's not much time left in the semester now, and, although I'm quite happy with how things have gone so far, there's always so much left to do. Including my LSA1, which is interesting enough, but entails quite a bit of work. Not that this is particularly surprising.
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Post-viewing
Actually, watching myself wasn't as bad as I imagined! It all seemed to work quite well, and also gave me some insight into things that I could improve on. I think that I could have worked more on collocations with the emergent language, for example. Where we had "I was lost", it would have been good to work this into "to get lost", or maybe "to lose my way". Where we looked at "to concentrate", it would have been good to stress the dependent preposition, "to concentrate on". Quite happy with it overall though.
Two Dogmes and a Dictogloss
I'm pleased to now have done my EP class; it was certainly interesting to do, and there are things that I may well implement in the future. On the other hand, I wasn't sure how it would go down with my Ss, and how I would react under a certain amount of pressure as I scrambled to get together some useful features of Ss' emergent language to feed back to them. I had a dry run this morning with my 7am class and they seemed to catch onto it well; in the end, one of the things that we worked on was the difference between weird, strange, unusual, bizarre, etc. I think though that, perhaps particularly because of the specific framing that I used for the dogme activities, and how I set them up, this class was better prepared to take advantage of the activity. Firstly, they are mature students, and generally have a more critical and objective view of what they want to focus on and their strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, as they are a bit older, they seemed to understand more readily the genre of stories from their lives, and have ready-made stories that they could input into the activity. Also, their level is a little higher, so they found it a little easier to express themselves.
One thing that I was really able to tighten up after this dry run was my instruction-giving for the activity, which was particularly important given the lower level of the 3pm class. Another thing that I was able to reassure myself of from the dry run, and which ended up also being a feature of the later class, was that my focus on emergent language didn't have to be streamlined into a particular bite-size unit - as opposed to offering my students what Thornbury refers to as a "grammar mcnugget", my language focus was looser as befits a class with varying needs, and wasn't so easy to pidgeon-hole.
An interesting outcome from my 3pm student questionnaires was that there was quite a difference between how much students enjoyed the class - which was rather high - and how much they felt they had learnt, which is always harder to identify anyway, but which was quite a bit lower. I think that anyway, this type of class gives an interesting contrast to the usual textbook-directed class, and purely from the perspective of student enjoyment and motivation, is worth including in the semester.
I am going to watch myself in the video I made of the class shortly, so will update this blog later on.
I also did a dictogloss with my 1pm class, and was pleased that it seemed to work and get the students to look at the TL in a different way. I'm still unsure as to how I can best take advantage of the "compare & contrast" part of this lesson plan, although I was pleased that there was some ambiguity in the student texts between "she stopped listening to me" and "she stopped to listen to me" which provided fruitful discussion.
Friday, 12 October 2012
12/10/12 classes
12/10/12
7am class:
Generally I felt happy with this class. My aims (primarily to focus on and clarify the planning stage of argumentative essay writing) were appropriate, the students seemed to find them useful, and I was able to achieve what I had planned to. (nb. The only exception here was that my students weren't able to evaluate one of the model essays that I'd planned to, as I hadn't copied it. In retrospect though, this was perhaps serendipitous, as it wasn't strictly necessary, and by not doing this activity, there was more time to work on other tasks. This is one thing that I've seen quite a lot lately, particularly, but not exclusively, with this class - I do at times have to skip / leave out some planned activities, as they take more time / become more engrossed in a particular activity than I have envisioned). Ss responded well to questions about essay form and evaluation criteria, and I think that some ambiguities were cleared up. This was useful for the next part of the class, when Ss looked at their marked essays and tried to understand why I had given particular grades. Ss will now write a new opinion essay for Wednesday, so fingers crossed they will show improvement in terms of structure!
1pm & 3pm classes:
These generally floundered, due to a) student protests taking over Bogotá this afternoon, b) said protests causing widespread disruption to transport services, c) an important match for the Colombian football team being played mid-afternoon, and d) the perennial favourite - torrential rain! Turnout wasn't great, and it was hard to get students to focus on their work when there are explosions and such happening within earshot, and echoing up the street to the university. Some language work was possible at least, in terms of some presentation practice (although not taken seriously, and perhaps not of great use for the actual evaluated presentations which will be starting in a few weeks) and work on opinion essays (although really not as much as I wanted to work on - again, we'll see what they produce for Wednesday's class. I suspect that many may not do the essay, or indeed skip the class because they didn't do the essay. The quiz on the 22nd will still require them to write an essay, though) in the 1pm class. In the 3pm class, there was some vocab work, and some work on narrative skills through storytelling. In both classes there was a chance to work a bit on my dogme abilities ahead of my EP class on Wednesday - I did some focus on emergent language in the 1pm class, and some impromptu chat with the 3pm students. Glad to have that chance, but overall, it could have gone a bit better.
7am class:
Generally I felt happy with this class. My aims (primarily to focus on and clarify the planning stage of argumentative essay writing) were appropriate, the students seemed to find them useful, and I was able to achieve what I had planned to. (nb. The only exception here was that my students weren't able to evaluate one of the model essays that I'd planned to, as I hadn't copied it. In retrospect though, this was perhaps serendipitous, as it wasn't strictly necessary, and by not doing this activity, there was more time to work on other tasks. This is one thing that I've seen quite a lot lately, particularly, but not exclusively, with this class - I do at times have to skip / leave out some planned activities, as they take more time / become more engrossed in a particular activity than I have envisioned). Ss responded well to questions about essay form and evaluation criteria, and I think that some ambiguities were cleared up. This was useful for the next part of the class, when Ss looked at their marked essays and tried to understand why I had given particular grades. Ss will now write a new opinion essay for Wednesday, so fingers crossed they will show improvement in terms of structure!
1pm & 3pm classes:
These generally floundered, due to a) student protests taking over Bogotá this afternoon, b) said protests causing widespread disruption to transport services, c) an important match for the Colombian football team being played mid-afternoon, and d) the perennial favourite - torrential rain! Turnout wasn't great, and it was hard to get students to focus on their work when there are explosions and such happening within earshot, and echoing up the street to the university. Some language work was possible at least, in terms of some presentation practice (although not taken seriously, and perhaps not of great use for the actual evaluated presentations which will be starting in a few weeks) and work on opinion essays (although really not as much as I wanted to work on - again, we'll see what they produce for Wednesday's class. I suspect that many may not do the essay, or indeed skip the class because they didn't do the essay. The quiz on the 22nd will still require them to write an essay, though) in the 1pm class. In the 3pm class, there was some vocab work, and some work on narrative skills through storytelling. In both classes there was a chance to work a bit on my dogme abilities ahead of my EP class on Wednesday - I did some focus on emergent language in the 1pm class, and some impromptu chat with the 3pm students. Glad to have that chance, but overall, it could have gone a bit better.
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