Module 6: Materials

Google: drive, docs, pub

The lesson I created was based off of “Paper Interviews” from page 31 of Teaching Unplugged.   It was adapted to fit the aims of my course and the needs of my learners.  It was also adapted for teaching online.

I put the students in groups in separate breakout rooms.  Each group had to write a report on my eating and nutrition habits.  They could use a Google document to write down any questions that they wanted, but I would only answer correctly formed questions.  If the question was not well formed, they had to work in groups to reformulate the question.  I gave hints if needed.  Then, using this information, they had to write a coherent paragraph about my eating habits.  I gave corrections as needed.  Finally, the different groups compared their paragraphs to look for similarities and differences.

This activity was chosen for a number of reasons that have to do with topic, aims, and practicality.  In terms of topic, the topic was directly related to the topic of the unit and to the students’ upcoming unit assessment.  In my teaching context, it is necessary to link everything to the unit objectives. In terms of aims, the focus on written accuracy was also relevant to the upcoming unit assessment.  Also, this class was the reading and writing class, so it was desirable to create a materials-light lesson that focused on writing.  In terms of practicality, this activity was very easy to set up when teaching online.

I was worried that students wouldn’t react well to this lesson since it was a departure from the usual activities, but student participation on this activity was much higher than I expected.  Usually they are very slow to start participating in online activities, but almost immediately they started bombarding me with questions.  The problem ended up not being too little student participation, but too much.  I couldn’t answer the questions fast enough.  

Part of the problem was that as this activity was originally formulated in Teaching Unplugged, it involved slips of paper and a runner who brings the question from the group to the teacher, which probably helps to space out the questions. Obviously that doesn’t work in an online class, so I’ll need to think about how I will adjust this activity for future use in online classes.

From my perspective, I found the lesson to be exhausting from my perspective, but I’m happy the students were so engaged.  

From the students’ perspective, they seemed to really enjoy the lesson, or at least find it engaging.  And I suspect they found the feedback on written accuracy helpful.

The overwhelming majority of the language inaccuracies had to do with 3rd person singular s.  However, as these are pre-advanced students, I believe this is a slip rather than a systematic error. The systematic error seemed to be in the use of narrative tenses.  Particularly I noticed confusion about when to use past simple, present perfect and past perfect.  So I will follow this up with language work on narrative tenses.