Final Assignment

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 I.      During the duration of this course, my teaching has changed in numerous ways.

In general terms, I think this course has made me a more reflective teacher.  Prior to starting this course, I had a bad habit of just following the textbook, and sometimes adding in some games just to keep my students awake.  However, doing this course has caused me to start thinking more about what I was doing in the classroom and why, and to try to design lessons with more of a purpose.

In more specific terms, the first way that my teaching has changed is that while doing this course, I became more conscientious about the use of lesson frameworks.  Although I had studied some of these lesson frameworks before on the CELTA, I had not continued to use them in my day to day teaching.  Instead, I had gotten into the bad habit of viewing my lessons as a series of activities rather than a framework.  But this course made me remember the frameworks, and I have started using them again.  Changing my lesson styles in this way initially caused confusion both among my students and my teaching assistant.  In one particular lesson in a beginner class, a teaching assistant asked me why I was not calling on individual students to produce the grammar point, and I had to explain to him that I was following a Present Practice Produce framework, and that it was still the presentation stage of the lesson.  However, after this initial confusion, the students and teaching assistants now seem to feel much more comfortable in the lesson now that they know it is following a framework.

In addition to being more conscientious about using frameworks generally, I have also started using the Test Teach Test framework more specifically.  I had previously been familiar with this framework in theory, but had never used it in practice.  However, I used it for Portfolio assignment 2, and because the student reaction to it was positive, I have continued to use it for several more lessons since then.  I have found it a very useful way to teach systems lessons such as grammar and vocabulary.

Also, as a result of what I have learned about guided discoveries in module 5, I have started to incorporate more guided discoveries into my lessons.  I designed a guided discovery for the portfolio task, and when I tried it out in the classroom, the students were engaged with the task, so I decided to try to make more.  It has been hard work making them, but the students seem to enjoy them and they have told me that it helps them to remember the grammar points better.  So I will try to continue making and using guided discoveries in the future. 

Another change that I have made is that I have started praising students more for their production in skills classes like speaking and writing.  This was a result of experimenting with a new error correction technique in portfolio 8: “only praising for good language use”.   Although I ultimately found the experimentation of only praising was too restrictive, and so decided that this technique did not work for me in the extreme form, there was no doubt that the students reacted positively to being praised for their language.  So this was a reminder to me that I needed to praise the students more in addition to correcting their mistakes.  The student response to the increased praise has been positive, and it has resulted in increased student participation in speaking and writing activities.  

Another big change for me was in Module 9, when I realized the importance of teaching my students about cohesion in writing.  As luck would have it, I was completing Module 9 at the same time that I was grading my students’ writing essays in a pre-advanced class, and so I was learning about the need to teach about discourse analysis features like cohesion and coherence at the same time I was realizing that these features were lacking in my students’ writing.  While writing my portfolio assignment for Module 9, I researched some useful activities on teaching cohesion and coherence from Beyond the Sentence by Scott Thornbury.  I have been using those activities since then, and not only has the quality of the student writing improved, but the students have commented that they find the activities very useful.

I also felt like I learned a lot of interesting things about different theories of learning from Module 13.  I was particularly interested in Krashen’s input hypothesis.  Although the pre-session reading made clear that Krashen’s theories were still being debated, it struck me that even if Krashen is wrong about the input hypothesis being the only requirement for language acquisition, input is still probably incredibly useful for language learning.  Therefore, since Module 13, I have tried to increase the amount of input my students have exposure to.  For my pre-advanced and advanced classes, I have started trying to get the students to do extensive reading journals.  Also, at the beginning of every class, I try to recommend some material to them that I think would be useful either for extensive reading or extensive listening.  The student reaction to this has been mixed.  It is always hard to get the students to do extra studying outside of class.  However, while it has not been 100% success rate, some of the students have been doing the extensive reading journals, and some of them have even been using my recommendations.  I think the students who have been doing this have been benefiting from it.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this course was not only the course materials, but also the opportunities to share ideas with my classmates.  For example, in Module 4, all the classmates shared their ideas for successful productive activities.  I got several ideas from this for speaking and writing activities, and I have even used some of these in my own classroom.  For example, a classmate suggested Taboo as a game to encourage speaking fluency.  I have since used this in my classroom, and I have found it works really well, and the students love it.

     II.    

Looking back at my action plan, I believe I have made progress in all of the main goals, even though I have not followed all of the specific actions.

My first goal was to make my receptive skills lessons more engaging, and I believe I have succeeded.  This was greatly aided by the reading materials in Module 3.  I particularly found the stages of a receptive skill material in that module to have many useful tips in terms of creating engagement.  The lead-in and prediction stage, for example, have been very useful in getting students involved.

My second goal was to get my students speaking more in my classroom.  This has also been a success.  In Module 4, I got a lot of ideas for productive activities, including speaking, from my classmates, and I have been experimenting with some of these activities in my classes.  The increased variety of speaking activities has helped to increase speaking more in my class.  In addition, the fact that I have started praising students more for good language use (as a result of Portfolio 8) has also resulted in students being more willing to speak in my class.

My third goal was to improve my ability to create clear lesson aims.   Although there was no specific module from the course that aligned with this, I think my ability to create clear lesson aims was helped by the module on lesson frameworks, at least in terms of the systems lessons.  Because the systems frameworks help me to focus the lesson towards one specific goal, this helps me to think concretely about the lesson aims.

However, although I think I improved on all my goals generally, I did not do all of the specific actions in my action plan.  I had written the idea of observing colleagues as a way to improve both my receptive skills lessons.  At the time I wrote this, I was expecting that I would return to face to face teaching before the course finished.  However, the Covid shutdown lasted longer than I expected, and I have not yet returned to in-person teaching, and subsequently have had no opportunity to observe colleagues in action.  However, observing colleagues in both receptive skills lessons (to see how they create engagement) and in speaking lessons (to see how they encourage students to speak) remains one of my post-course action plans.  

The other failing was in my reading plan.  As it turned out, I had enough difficulty balancing the weekly demands of this course with my full time teaching job, and I did not have time to read the books that I had planned to.  However, now that I am finished with the course, I expect to have more time for professional development reading, and reading these books.  For my post-course action plan, I would still like to read Teaching Listening Comprehension by Penny Ur for receptive skills, Teaching Speaking by Christine Goh and Anne Burns for speaking skills, and re-read Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener for creating clear lesson aims.

In addition to this, I would also like to create some new post-course action plans.  I have been actually discussing this question with my manager recently, and I mentioned to my manager that I sometimes had trouble putting my theoretical knowledge into practice.  My manager suggested I start requesting more developmental observations, where I can try out new activities in class and get feedback about their effectiveness.  So another post-course action plan is to request more developmental observations, particularly in speaking lessons and receptive skills lessons.

Module 12: Vocabulary

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For this assignment, I looked through the ideas in the pre-reading, and decided that “Dictionary Use” would be the best one to try.

There are several reasons why I thought “Dictionary Use” would be the most effective.  

The first reason is that it aligns perfectly with the instructions from the textbook.  The textbook always selects 12 vocabulary words from each reading, and presents these words to the students in a vocabulary box before the reading.  The students are instructed “Use a dictionary to define any new or unknown words.”  However, despite this being the standard instructions in every lesson, I actually have so far avoided just sending my students off to the dictionary.  I was worried that this would be seen as lazy teaching, and so I have always adapted this instruction into some sort of worksheet in which I provided the correct definitions, and the students just had to match the words.  But it occurred to me that with some effort made towards dictionary training, perhaps the textbook instructions could be used after all.

The second reason is that the 12 selected words do not fit any lexical field.  They all come from the same reading text, but are otherwise unconnected. So it was very hard to devise any meaning based communication activities around them.

Because this was an online class, I did the dictionary training by means of sharing my screen.  I showed the class one monolingual dictionary (Cambridge) and one collocation dictionary (Oxford).  I then showed them a Google Document in which the 12 words from the reading were put in a table, with columns for “part of speech”, “meaning”, “collocations”, “example sentences”, and “related word forms”.  I worked through all the columns using the first word as an example, showing the students how I was finding this information in the dictionaries, and explaining what I was doing.  

In retrospect, this is something I would change about the lesson.  I should have elicited more and explained less.  I should have first asked the students what online dictionaries they were familiar with, or asked them to provide what kinds of things can be looked up in a dictionary.  Perhaps I could even have had them create the columns on the Google Document themselves.

Next, the students were put into groups, and instructed to complete the remaining words on their own using the dictionaries.  (The dictionaries I had shown them were linked into the Google Document.)

Given that participation in these online classes can often be variable, I was pleasantly surprised to see that participation was high on this activity.  Each Google Document was a flurry of activity as students began filling out all the columns for each word.  

I was also surprised to see students making up their own example sentences instead of copying from the dictionary.  I was initially concerned that they would create wrong example sentences, and indeed a number of them did, but this actually proved to be a teachable moment.  I made comments suggesting changes and explaining the nuances in meaning, and students reacted positively to this with thumbs up and messages of thanks.

At the end, I asked the students if they would like to repeat this activity the next time we had new vocabulary, and they said that they would.

Module 11: Speaking and Spoken Interaction

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The speaking was based on the textbook Impact 3, page 131: Speaking Strategy.

This is labelled as a speaking lesson in the textbook, however I do have my doubts as to whether it is truly a speaking lesson, or if it is more of a functional language lesson.  The lesson revolves around learning and practicing phrases for feelings and opinions.  I believe my former Celta tutor would have classified this as a language lesson instead of a speaking lesson, and yet in my experience a lot of speaking lessons from textbooks are heavily based on functional language.  Perhaps the distinction between speaking lessons and functional language lessons is not clear cut. 

In the early stages of the lesson (see full plan below) I introduced the functional language and moved into a controlled practice.  

Then we got into a speaking activity with the less controlled practice, which was the speaking game from page 173.  In theory, this would have allowed the students to practice speaking by orally responding to the prompts, but it was largely a failure.  The textbook used a lot of prompts that the students had difficulty responding to because they were outside the students’ knowledge and interests.  Some of the more motivated students did their best to form responses anyway, and although there was some use of the target language, there was no extended speech.  I should have adapted this before the class by changing the prompts.

The freer practice went much better  The students found the task engaging, which was good.  They had some extended conversation with their partner as they not only used the functional language to ask and express opinions, but also in many cases argued their preferences with each other. 

In my opinion, the final activity was a success because it had a communicative outcome (the students had to find things in common to complete the task), and because it was personalized (the students were able to talk about their own likes and dislikes).

Some of the students got so into the task that they forgot to use the functional language we had practiced, but I think this was alright since they were definitely working on their speaking fluency.  I tried to remind them to use the functional language as I monitored, but upon reflection perhaps this was a mistake.  After all, the lesson was labelled as a speaking lesson, not a lexis lesson.  

On the whole, the students were satisfied with the lesson because they had an opportunity to practice speaking, and had also learned some language to use for expressing their feelings and opinions.

Although I was happy with this lesson, if I had carte blanche to do it again, I would have the lesson focus more on general fluency and less on pre-selected functional language.  I would listen to what language the students were already using, and then try to upgrade their language.  I would also like to run the final activity as a pyramid discussion--students could repeat the task several times as pairs become groups, and then groups become the whole class.  Each time they would have to find things in common that the whole group could agree on.  This would allow more speaking practice, and also allow me to give feedback and upgrade the language in between each repetition. 

Lesson Plan: 

Aims: For students to develop their speaking fluency in the context of talking about feelings and opinions

Sub aim: to learn the functional language for speaking about feelings and opinons

Lead-in	The students talk to a partner about what kind of music they like
Orientation to model text	The teacher sets up the characters and the situation in the model listening
Gist listening	Students listen to the audio.  They answer the question “What music do they decide to listen to”?
Detail listening	Students listen to the audio again.  They answer 4 detail questions.
Noticing target language	Students are given a partial transcript of the listening with the target language gapped out.  They must listen again and write in the target language.  Play the audio multiple times if needed.  Answers are confirmed in open class feedback and by handing out the complete transcript
Noticing meaning of target language	Students sort target language into two boxes “Asking for feelings and Opinions” and “Expressing Feelings and Opinions”.  Pair check, and then answers are confirmed in open class feedback.
Confirmation of target language meaning	Students open their book to page 131.  They look at the chart at the top of the page for confirmation of the meaning.  They listen to audio track 104, and read and listen to the target language
Drilling	Oral drilling of target language
controlled practice	Students read the dialogue, and complete the gaps with functional language from the target language on page 131
less controlled practice	Students go to page 173 in the back of the book.  They move around the game board, and take turns responding to the prompts with functional language
Freer practice	Students work in pairs.  They talk to a partner to find out what things they have in common.  They have to find out 3 things they’re both crazy about, and 3 things that they can’t stand.

Material

Listen again and answer the questions

1. When is the jazz concert?

2. Why is Alice crazy about hip-hop?

3. Who gives the boy vinyl records?

4. Where are they going to mix up some songs?

S1: Hey, Alice. (1)_________________ going to a jazz concert on Saturday afternoon? I have two tickets.

S2: Well, (2)_________________  jazz.

S1: Really? That’s too bad. I thought it would be fun. 

S2: It’s all right, I guess. (3)_________________ .

S1: Well, (4)_________________ .? 

S2: (5)_________________ . hip-hop because I love dancing.

S1: Yeah, (6)_________________ . of hip-hop, too! 

S2: Do you have a lot of hip-hop music?

S1: Yeah. In fact, I have some vinyl records with hip-hop. My uncle’s a DJ, so he gets them for me. (7)_________________ . on mixing up some songs on his turntable? 

S2: Sounds like fun!

S1: Hey, Alice. What do you think about going to a jazz concert on Saturday afternoon? I have two tickets.

S2: Well, I’m not wild about jazz.

S1: Really? That’s too bad. I thought it would be fun. 

S2: It’s all right, I guess. It’s just not my favorite.

S1: Well, what is your favorite? 

S2: I’m crazy about hip-hop because I love dancing.

S1: Yeah, I’m a big fan of hip-hop, too! 

S2: Do you have a lot of hip-hop music?

S1: Yeah. In fact, I have some vinyl records with hip-hop. My uncle’s a DJ, so he gets them for me. What are your thoughts on mixing up some songs on his turntable? 

S2: Sounds like fun!

Language for asking for feelings and opinions	Language for expressing feelings and opinions

Module 10: Writing

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 For this assignment, I used a product approach.  The primary reason for choosing the product approach is that my students had an upcoming writing exam in which they would be evaluated by a very prescriptive criteria when it came to paragraph structure--topic sentence, supporting ideas, examples and concluding sentences.  Experience has taught me that Vietnamese students have a hard time understanding how to use this structure, and that it helps to give them a clear example of what is required, so I wanted to give them a very clear model text.  This is, admittedly, an approach I was already familiar with, but then I feel like I was already familiar with all three approaches.   However, in some ways it was also a combination approach, since the productive part of the lesson included elements of a process approach, namely a brainstorming stage and an outlining stage prior to writing the essay.   The reason for including these stages is that, in my experience, students who do not brainstorm and outline their essays prior to writing cannot produce the required paragraphing structure on the exam.

Because this was an online class, the students did their brainstorming, outlining and writing on a shared Google Doc, which I was able to monitor in real time.

I knew from past experience that getting the students to follow the required structure would be difficult.  My students prefer to view writing as a form of self-expression in which they write in a stream of consciousness prose which follows their own train of thought along whichever path it takes.  They are resistant to the idea that their writing has to be structured.  This has been an ongoing issue all term.

On the other hand, the fact that the students are aware that they have an upcoming assessment provided some external motivation to learn the structure.  I attempted to take full advantage of this during the examination of the model text phase of the lesson.  With every feature of the model text that we examined, I reminded them that they must produce similar features on their upcoming assessment.  And I believe that because of this external motivation, the students paid close attention to the features of the model text, and this part of the essay was a success.

I also feel like the planning and outlining stage of the lesson was successful, although it required a lot of intervention and micro-teaching by me.  I was constantly commenting on the shared Google Docs about supporting ideas which did not fit the topic sentence.  However, I did not let the groups start writing their essays until their outline had been approved by me, and eventually all the groups produced outlines that I felt were good.  I was happy with this result.

Unfortunately, the final stage, the actual writing of the essay itself, was not good.  Most groups had thirty minutes of classtime left to write their essays, but they only produced one or two paragraphs.  I attribute this to student fatigue.  They just stopped working.  They were not inherently interested in the essay structure, and the external motivation of the upcoming assessment had worked during the first hour, but it was not enough to keep them motivated for the whole two hour writing lesson.

Appendix: Lesson Plan (materials)

Main Aim: Students learn the structure of a persuasion essay

Sub-aim: Students review the structure of a paragraph (which has been studied in previous lessons)

Stage	Stage Aim	Matching the stage to the chosen approach	Interaction Patterns	Description
Lead-in	Generate interest in the model text	Product approach	Ss--Ss	Students discuss with a partner whether or not it is important for children to play at school
Model Text: Gist Reading	For students to comprehend the model text generally before being asked to examine it in more detail	Product approach	Text--Ss	Students read the model text, and answer the question “How does the author feel about playtime at school?” Answers are confirmed in open class feedback.
Model Text: Reading for Detail	For students to gain a more detailed understanding of the model text before they notice its features	Product Appoach	Text--Ss	Students are given 6 specific information questions about the model text, which they answer. Answers are confirmed in open class feedback.
Noticing the structure of the Essay	For students to understand the structure of a Persuasion Essay	Product Approach	Text--Ss	Students match the paragraphs of the essay to their purpose. Answers are confirmed in open class feedback.
Noticing the structure of the paragraphs	For students to review the structure of paragraphs	Product approach	Text--Ss	Students look at the body paragraphs of the essay, and for each body paragraph they identify the topic sentence, the supporting ideas, the examples, and the concluding sentence.  This is a review of previous lessons. Answers are confirmed in open class feedback.
Writing: Brainstorming	For students to brainstorm ideas prior to writing	Process approach	Ss--Ss	Students are given 6 questions about video games to discuss in groups.  After the discussion, they try to organize their ideas from the discussion into two categories: arguments for letting children play video games, and arguments against letting children play video games.
Writing: Outlining	For students to outline their essay prior to writing	Process approach	Ss--Ss	In groups, students organize their ideas into an outline prior to writing.  The teacher monitors and gives feedback.
Writing	For students to practice writing an essay	Product and Process approach	Ss--Ss	In groups, students write their essay on a Google Doc.  The teacher monitors and gives feedback.

Module 9: An introduction to Discourse Analysis

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For this assignment, I will talk about the program I am currently involved in delivering.

In this program, the course content is the textbook.  Teachers are given the textbook at the beginning of term, and are expected to cover as much of the textbook as possible during the term.  Teachers naturally have some freedom to adapt and supplement, but this is done at the level of individual teachers, and not at the program curriculum level.

Each unit of the textbook is divided into sections on reading, vocabulary, grammar and writing.  The textbook does not have any sections which explicitly focus on discourse analysis, but elements of discourse analysis are often present within these other skills.  For example, the lesson on articles, although packaged as a grammar lesson, contains some elements of discourse analysis--specifically the analysis of the use of the definitive article “the” to refer to something that has been mentioned previously in the text, which is an element of grammatical cohesion.  In a similar way, several of the other grammar or vocabulary lessons also contain elements of discourse analysis.  

However, it is very apparent to me that students would benefit from more discourse analysis.  I know this because I just got done grading their essays.  Most of these essays are filled with what Scott Thornbury referred to as “Spaghetti Writing”, meaning that the sentences within a paragraph did not connect to each other.  I frequently wrote comments like, “This sentence does not connect to the previous sentence, because it is on a different topic.  You need to transition to this new topic.”  I thought these comments were self-evident, but the students were actually confused by them, and several messaged me asking me to explain.  I had to spend a lot of time explaining to students why their sentences did not connect to each other.  I talked about things like my expectations as a reader, and how I expected the text to develop.

It was around this time that I realized I was assessing students on cohesion and coherence, but I had not adequately taught them about cohesion and coherence.  I believe this is also a problem at the program level, because one of the assessment criteria for student writing from the university is “cohesion and criteria.”

In his book, Beyond the Sentence, Scott Thornbury gives several teaching suggestions for how students can learn coherence.  I would like to see three of these activities adapted by my current program.

Firstly, at the noticing level, students can do activities where they work with a model paragraph to identify the theme and rheme of each sentence.  Students can then be encouraged to notice how the rheme of one sentence usually becomes the theme of the subsequent sentence.

Secondly, at the simple practice level, students can do  exercises in which they are given one sentence and must select the best way of continuing the text from a series of options.

Thirdly. at the more advanced level, students could be given a series of sentences on a given topic which they must turn into a coherent text.  Hopefully by the time the class gets to this exercise, the students will already have a good understanding of coherence, but teacher feedback and discussion of these student created texts will be essential.

Module 8: Error and Error Correction

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I chose the technique of “Only praising for good language use”.  

There were several reasons for this.  Firstly, I was teaching a writing class, so I needed a technique that could be used with written work.  Also, it was one of the few techniques on the list that I had not yet tried.  Moreover, this was a technique that still allowed me to give students lots of feedback on their writing (something that is an expectation of both the university and the students).   Finally, because the task involved collaborative writing, I thought that it would be useful to the students if I highlighted the good language.  It would not only be a reaffirmation to the student who produced the language, but it would also be a signal to the rest of the group that this was useful language for them to learn. 

Another reason for choosing this technique is because I know praising student language is a weak point of mine.  A class had recently complained to me that I never praised them. 

Because this was an online class, the students did their writing task on a Google Doc, which I monitored and made comments as they wrote.  The students had become so accustomed to me using the comment feature to note errors that as soon as they saw me highlighting parts of their text, they immediately started trying to re-write it before they even saw my comment.  It took a while before they realized I was giving positive feedback.  Perhaps I should have let the students know beforehand that I was using a new technique.

I did, however, tell the students at the end of the class what I had been doing, and asked them for their feedback.  Six students responded with a “thumbs-up” in the chat, which I interpreted as approval.  Only two students gave more detailed feedback.  One student wrote, “I think it is very useful because it helps me to find more good language which can be used in the future.”  The other student wrote, “You should address our mistakes for us to improve, too”.

From my perspective, what troubled me the most about this technique was that there were some big structural problems with two of the student essays, and I really wanted to give feedback on this because essay structure will be part of their grade on the final assessment.  So it was painful for me not to address this.  (Although, upon reflection, maybe I could have addressed organizational issues.  Perhaps the phrase “only praising for good language use” is intended to be for language issues only.)

Another issue is that one of the groups left me with very little to praise.  Not a single sentence was correctly formed.  Albeit the reason for this was because they were experimenting with complex language, so I guess I could have praised their effort.  I also praised some of their vocabulary choices. However, the other three groups left me with plenty to praise in terms of both grammar and collocations.

Overall, I found the “only” in this technique to be too restrictive.  While I definitely need to incorporate more praise into my feedback, I would also like the freedom to be able to address major issues when I notice them.

Module 7: Testing

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 The program that I am currently working on is dealing with pre-sessional EAP students.  The students need to complete the program to enter their university courses, so consequently the assessments are very important.

There are two tests in each term-- a midterm test and an end of course test.  The midterm test is 30% of the grade, while the final test is 50%.  The difference in weighting is to allow students who fail the midterms a chance to pass the course if they diagnose their weak points and devise a study plan for the final test.

The reading and listening tests are created by the assessment team, who have had a lot of training on creating valid test questions involving gap fills, multiple choice, and matching headings.  Test questions are further piloted in practice tests, and data is collected on their reliability prior to the questions being used in live exams.  It is all beyond my personal expertise, but I have confidence that the reading and listening tests are reliable and valid.

There is, however, backwash created by the tests.  The curriculum planners want the class time to be focused on building general reading and listening proficiency, but students want to spend class time practicing how to answer the exam style questions.  The poor teacher is in the middle.

The speaking and writing are assessed by a different teacher than the classroom teacher.  Speaking tests are a one-on-one conversation with the examiner.  Writing tests are a formal essay on a given topic.  In an attempt to improve reliability between examiners, the criteria for scoring speaking and writing is incredibly detailed--much more detailed than even standardized proficiency exams like the IELTS.  But the problem with overly detailed criteria is that it is difficult to hold all the criteria in your head when conducting a speaking exam.  Furthermore, despite the school’s best efforts, marks can still often vary widely between examiners.  All exams are recorded and failing exams are second marked by a second teacher, and wide discrepancies are a repeated problem.

As far as continuous assessment, this is the first school I have worked at where daily in-class speaking and participation do not count toward the grade.  I suspect this is because the university is careful to check all failing grades, and daily participation cannot be second marked after the fact.  Also daily homework, such as extensive reading logs, used to be part of continuous assessment, but was removed after the university could not control widespread copying and cheating.

As a result, continuous assessment now solely consists of a couple big essays and speaking tasks.  The essays make use of process writing.  The first draft is 25% of the grade, and then the second draft is 75%, but the students must respond to teacher feedback on the second draft.  

The speaking assessments are similarly set up as process tasks.  The students video themselves doing a speaking task, the teacher makes comments, and then the students have to respond to the feedback on the next “draft”.  However, because speaking involves real time production, students often have trouble utilizing feedback while simultaneously producing.  Students also have difficulty improving on speaking criteria like rhythm and intonation in a short time.  Therefore, in my opinion, the process speaking tasks are not effective.

Module 6: Materials

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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.