Initial test (May 19)

Retrieved from Google images on May 30, 2010

Today's recording experience was both sweet and sour. I am happy with the fact that now I have 12 students in my class and the group is now officially opened (their names are Maritza, Michael, Diana, Juan Pablo, Johana, Fabiola, Claudia, Javier, Marcela, Adriana and Leina). There is a student named Andres and he did not show up today so I guess I have to start with him during the first recording session. The other good news is that everybody in the group managed to record their conversations, but on the other hand, a couple of groups forgot to save their recordings and there was one group that forgot to plug in the microphone and they talked during 10 minutes without realizing it. At the end, this group just talked for about 2 minutes before the bell rang. There were a couple of students who did not take the activity seriously (Maritza and Michael) because they were giggling all the time and they would stop the recording at least every 2 minutes to listen to what they were saying. This group did not manage to save anything at the end of the task. If I had the chance of piloting the test last week or so this wouldn't have had happened. Too bad I couldn't find anybody from any skills courses to help me.

When I heard all the conversations the first thing I noticed was that they all had serious mistakes in using the past tenses such as not knowing the past tenses of many verbs, confusion between "was/were", omission of "did" in question forms, incorrect pronunciation of regular "ed" endings and shifting aspect between simple and continuous. Another relevant factor I noticed was that most of the students barely self and peer corrected their mistakes while they were speaking.