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.

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.

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.