Second Session's Student Assessment Report

The following are my impressions about each of my students' performances:

Johanna reduced the number of errors a little because by that time she was just beginning the awareness raising process. During the first conversation she was not aware of using the verbs in past tense. Although she has not improved in the usage of the irregular verbs in the second conversation, she has tried to improve the regular verbs in spite of having problems pronouncing the ED endings. She also improved using the negative statements in past but she still has a lot of problems constructing questions accurately.


Johanna was able to raise awareness in the Subject + Verb agreement and experimenting with new irregular verbs successfully such as SAW, WON, TOOK and ATE. She also self and peer corrected a couple of times during the conversation.

Johanna did use the past continuous but the sentences were mostly inaccurate.

Examples:

• You lean about your behavior. (Possessive adjective)

• How much did you paid for this trip? (Formulating questions)

Fabiola continued monitoring the use of the past tenses though she made a few more mistakes than the previous conversation. She used the negative statements and asked questions correctly most of the times. In this conversation in particular, she did not have any problems conjugating the Subject with the verbs in past tense, but it was evident that she needed to learn more irregular verbs and the use of auxiliary verbs in questions.


Examples:

• Where was did you go on your last vacation?

• Because I sell a lot of Decameron hotels and they give me a prize.

Andres demonstrated once more that he is not making any progress at all in learning any irregular verbs in the past tense and in improving his pronunciation of the ED endings with the regular verbs. However, he improved a little in terms of using negative statements although he was accurate 50% of the times and inaccurate in the other 50%. What surprised me was that he was more accurate in formulating questions.


Leina also noticed that Andres was highly inaccurate in using the verbs in past tense in both regulars and irregulars. Andres is not doing a lot of the homework I assigned him during this cycle.

In this conversation, Claudia took more risks and produced more utterances than the previous interaction. Although she still makes mistakes in using the regular and irregular verbs, she managed to raise some awareness in the proper use of some of these verbs.


I noticed that she used the auxiliary verbs correctly in order to make negative statements, but she had problems using them when asking questions. Andres noticed that Claudia had some problems with some irregular verbs.

Second Implementation Session Feedback

There was a major participation in the second forum. Students maily focused on their partners' errors while they interacted with their classmates. They noticed errors in some irregular verbs and in the construction of negative statements and questions. I have noticed that they all have problems pronouncing the ED ending in regular verbs and they hardly ever use the past continuous to tell their stories. I noticed that Fabiola, Maritza and Michael master many irregular verbs they still has problems pronouncing the ED endings. Although some students are still struggling retrieving the verbs in past participle, most of them have succesfully managed to experimenting with new ones, but they still forget to use some of them or sometimes they implement them correctly and other times not. Most of them have problems in terms of conjugating the subject + verb agreement especially with the pronoun IT. For the next upcoming sessions I will have to quiz students in the use of the verbs they are supposed to know by now but they are not using properly during the recorded interactions as well as the new verbs they have been exposed to during each lesson in order to compare the levels of learning and acquisition (Krashen, 1983).

Starting Skills 2

I started the new course today and there were few changes in terms of population. Three students who started the course had left because they had problems with their schedules (Leina, Marcela and Javier). However, there is a new student in the group and she signed the consent letter (Victoria). She will take the initial test this week.

Skills 1 implementation conclusions and action plan

Image retrieved from Google images on June 16, 2010

During this first implementation stage, I learned that it is important to tell students what to expect from the project that they are being involved in. Although they have told me that the approach to help them improve their accuracy in the simple past and past continuous tenses, they still have problems giving that feedback to their partners because they are not used to correct others actively while their conversation partners speak and even worse when it is an asynchronous activity.

Another lesson I learned was to get students to prepare the vocabulary and language they need before they get on with the speaking activities even for virtual tasks, this way, they know what to use during their interactions having less probability to make mistakes in the tenses I am expecting them to improve.

Students told me that even though the system is quite creative, they have problems identifying the people they have to peer-correct and to find the comments in the discussion board. They also stated that they cannot find the time to do all the process at their homes and they suggested me to do it during classtime.

Second Implementation

Image retrieved on June 15, 2010 from Google images

Last Friday I implemented for the second time. After checking homework, I told students to prepare their conversation so they looked up their dictionaries to find the vocabulary they needed for the conversation and the pronunciation of each word. They also looked up their notebooks to find the verbs in past tenses they needed for the communicative event. This time, I considered the timing so we went to the audio-visual multi-media room for over an hour in order to have plenty of time to go over the entire procedure. At the multi-media room, I paired student with the partner they had the previous time.

I instructed the students to check the microphones and to do a sound check so they would not have any surprises after they spoke. Students were able to speak for the entire ten minutes and they also saved the recording without any problems, something a couple of groups had problems with during the last implementation. After the recording, students were assigned to listen to other conversations from other pairs and to take notes on their mistakes using the simple past and past continuous.

I had noticed during the last intervention that students did not record any comments on their partners' mistakes nor listened to the few that were recorded by some students so I decided to let them write their findings in the forum. For the next time, students will listen to their own recordings and to comment comment in Voxopop about their partners' mistakes. Another aspect I also need to consider is for students to write more comments regarding the usage of simple past and past continuous. There were some comments that were aimed at vocabulary or they were too vague.

Lastest tutoring decisions

During the last tutoring, Valeriya suggested me not to include the "monitoring strategies" construct because it was quite difficult to find previous research studies as well as state of the art. She advised me to focus on peer and self correction instead because these were more specific monitoring strategies and they were easier to find in online journals and in books.

Training process report

Image retrieved from Google images on June 7,2010

The students in the Skills 1 course have been working on the strategies I mentioned in my previous entry before they engage in a communicative event. Before the speaking activities, I trained students on how to use one strategy before they start speaking. The procedure has been the following: first, I elicited from them expressions that would be useful for the conversation and I wrote them on the board; if one of the students made a mistake, partners would correct one another or they would go to the board and correct the expressions. They also resorted to the conversation models in their textbooks, they opened their notebooks or they reviewed their notes and the substitution tables for the lesson's target grammar. This way, they would verify the grammar models before they began their conversations. Finally, I did a demonstration with a more skilled student so the rest would follow the model. As they were speaking, I noticed that some students were looking at their notes or at the board in order to monitor their own language production (Fabiola, Johana, Diana, Adriana, Juan Pablo, Claudia). The rest of the students did not follow the instruction and they just spoke disregarding the models or the previous preparation for the communicative event. I noticed that the students who were aware of looking at the models were more accurate than the other students in spite that both types of students managed to convey meaning clearly.

When we did a reflection about the use of the models, the ones who used them felt more confidence and at the same time they felt that they were using the language properly. The other students said that they were not used to follow models because they were more concerned about getting the message across, but they admitted that following them would make their English more accurate. As an action plan, they promised to follow them for the next speaking task and they also suggested me to give them a sign (such as a post it) to remind them to look at their notes or at the board.

I know that it has been three weeks since I started the course, but I feel that most of them are becoming aware of preparing the speaking activities beforehand as well as following models in order to improve their accuracy in the past tenses.