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.