Post-LSA2

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.