First Intervention (Video Recording)

Retrieved from Google images on May 30, 2010

Today I implemented for the very first time and I had a lot of mixed feelings about today's session. I will describe the lesson from different prespectives: first, I will compare the their performance of the initial test with today's activity, then I will reflect about the lesson per se and finally, I will reflect upon the video recording experience.

After checking homework, we went to the AVM lab and I prepared my students for the discussion board activity (see first lesson plan). During the pre-speaking task activity, I was surprised to see that my students actually understood the concept of the present perfect using "yet, already, ever and before" without any problems. They also understood that the past tenses were used to ask specific questions. According to Brown (2007) competence is the first step in order to acquire a concept; in other words that the learner has to understand the morphological aspect of a language such as lexis and grammar and understand how it works. The evidence of their understanding of the use of a present perfect and a simple past is shown in their workbooks and when they do controled practice exercises. They are really quite accurate in this type of activities. However, during the initial test, I noticed that they have difficulties performing the concepts in spontaneous conversations even though they are aware how the grammar works and how the structures are formed. This shows that learners' performance level is hindered by lack of monitoring strategies especially when they are constructing full-length utterances (Krashen, 2007).

In terms of how the lesson was set up, I think that I made the correct transitions between activities. According to Nunan (1989), task design should be dependent on one another. For instance, the initial activity, which was the vocabulary game, led to the grammar review of constructing questions in present perfect and asking follow-up questions by using the simple past. Then students rehearsed the actual exercise engaging into the main task. After they finished doing  the pre-speaking task they were ready to start using the voice message board in pairs (there was one group of three girls). I observed that they were not monitoring the use of the past tense just as I expected because I read that people do not monitor nor self-correct their own production mistakes while they are involved in a communicative event (Krashen, 2007). 

During the same activity using the discussion board, I detected that a few students were actually self and peer correcting each other, but not most of them. I suppose that they need more training on the use of these strategies until they raise awareness on how and when to implement them. I still need to listen to them carefully in order to detect the most constant patterns. I also need to give them more practice on the strategies I have taught them so far in order to raise more awareness. I only regret not having enough time for students to post their comments in their classmates' boards, but I will instruct them tomorrow how to do it in case they have not done it for homework and I will also check their reflections.

During the video recording, I did not run into great unexpected problems like not having Internet connection or students having trouble using Voxopop. The only problems I encountered were that one pair's microphone did not work (Diana and Juan Pablo) and the other one was that one group decided to pause the recording because "they did not have much to say" (Maritza and Michael), but I told them to to expand their conversation by talking about a memorable trip they made when they were children. Fortunately, they did not lose their first recording.

In terms of writing comments in the Nabble forum, none of the students did not do them due to time constraints so I instructed the rest to do this at home. Let's wait and see what happens.

I would like to thank my fellow co-worker Leandro for his great help during the video recording.