Image retrieved from Google images on July 12, 2010
Today's conversation topic for the implementation was about a life experience. These were either positive or negative. As usual at the beginning of the lesson, I instructed my learners to write down the verbs in past they needed for the conversation as well as the words they did not know, so they looked up the words in their dictionaries or the gadgets they carry with them. Later, we went to the multi-media lab and they followed the instructions in the wiki. The students know how to do the entire procedure without getting me involved and this really makes me happy. Some of the students felt that they are not advancing as the way they should and I asked them why. They said that even though they knew some verbs in past, they usually forget to implement them during a spontaneous conversation. I told them that they needed to keep insisting in peer and self- correcting each other in order to raise awareness of their mistakes so they could avoid them in future conversations. When I asked them if they were reading their partners comments in the Nabble forum, some of them told me they had and others said that they either forget to do it or they think that my comments are more valid than a fellow classmate. In the next few classes, I will work on more controlled practice in order for students to produce utterances in simple past and to follow language models that they will write down in their notebooks so they could follow them in the susequent conversations. I also feel that they need to support each other in giving more feedback to their partners because most of them are still more concerned in getting their message across without paying attention to their performances. But not everything is dark as it seems, I am quite happy that they know how to use the wiki without depending on me and I have noticed that particularly Johana and Fabiola are improving their accuracy and they are self-correcting more than they used to! At the end, students filled up the mid-term survey and went home. Claudia missed this session.
