Johana was not aware of the use of the irregular verbs but she was able to improve construction of affirmative statements compared with her initial test performance. This happened because she started to implement the accuracy strategies immediately and she also started to study more irregular verbs in her free time. Johanna was also more careful constructing predicates since she had problems such as confusion in the possessive adjectives, object pronouns and adjective + noun agreement. She is a committed student because she turned in her homework on time and she did some independent work at home by means of some web sites that I recommended the whole class.
Johanna admits that she still needs to work more on learning more irregular verbs, pronouncing the ED endings and using auxiliary verbs in simple past when she uses negative statements and questions. She is also aware that she needs to improve the use of articles.
Examples:
• Is far to Rodadero (Subject + Verb agreement)/ wrong preposition
• I try sierra fish. (ED ending)
Fabiola has some prior knowledge about constructing accurate affirmative utterances, but she lacked of accuracy in the use of negative statements and question forms. In the first conversation she managed to correct some of the problems she had concerning these issues. She also controlled the use of the past tenses (both regular and irregular). She informed me that she devoted some time everyday to study these verbs and to write some sentences using them. She has very few problems with the Subject + Verb agreement and she knows how to construct complements accurately.
Examples:
• I don’t have a lot of time. (Past tense)
• I eat fish and rice with coco. (Past tense)
Andres: This student in particular showed problems structuring Subject + Verb + Complement patterns from the very beginning of the course. He tended to not complete his ideas; he mainly used single words or incomplete utterances to convey meaning.
The student had poor background knowledge in the use of the irregular verbs in past tense and he mainly used verbs in present to express finished actions in the past tense. Another of his weaknesses was that he did not organize the parts of speech at the predicate level and this also affected his overall performance in the first conversation.The student in his reflection note admits not studying at home to improve his performance.
Diana is a high-risk taker. She usually expands her conversations without caring about accuracy. She does not know many verbs in the past tense and she barely conjugates the subjects with the verbs especially with the subject pronoun IT. She also uses a lot of verbs in present tense first person to express actions that happened in the past.
She was also somewhat inaccurate when she asked questions and when she constructed negative statements. Diana had also problems organizing predicates.
Johanna and Fabiola noticed that Diana was combining WAS + DID in the question forms. However, I noticed that this happened a few times.
Claudia did not do so badly in her interaction. She has some background knowledge of some irregular verbs. Just as like her other classmates, she does not know many irregular verbs, she does not pronounce the ED endings, there are problems conjugating the Subjects and the Verbs and she has problems organizing predicates. She tends to translate too much (L1 interference) while she is speaking.
