Fourth Session's Student Assessment Report

These are my impressions from each of my students' performances during the recording sessions:

This was Johanna’s weakest conversation in terms of accuracy in the use of affirmative statements. There was an evident backslide because she seemed to have forgotten many verbs in past even though she had prepared her conversation beforehand in class before going to the multi-media lab. However, she improved the construction of negative statements and questions. Her most significant drawback was that she made the same type of errors at the predicate level and Subject + Verb agreement. I believe that she did not monitor her oral production that time. She only self-corrected a mistake once.


After having reflected upon her previous performance, Johanna admitted that she was careless throughout the entire conversation. She told me that the night before she had to stay up to late hours in her office and that this could have affected her performance

Examples:

• We say my parents I got married in March (Past tenses).

• I plan to when since December for to March (Coherence and cohesion)

Fabiola: This performance was quite similar to the initial test in terms of accuracy. In this conversation, Fabiola produced 50% of the affirmative statements correct and the other 50% incorrect. She was careless in terms of monitoring her production in the use of the regular and irregular verbs (she used the present form) and this also affected accuracy in the construction of negative statements (Vicky also noticed this). On the other hand, she improved her performance in terms of asking accurate questions. Fabiola also showed problems when trying to implement the past continuous. She knows the form, but she does not know when and how to use it.


Examples:

• She had another baby and this baby is beautiful.

• Is very hard

Andres had a great backslip in this conversation. He barely used any irregular verbs in the past tense and he did not make any effort to improve the pronunciation of the ED endings. He also did not conjugate the subject and verbs throughout the conversation. In this conversation, Andres had problems in verb TO BE + Subject agreement when asking questions.


Juan also noticed Andres’s underperformance especially in not constructing full-length utterances. He also heard that Andres was inaccurate in using the verbs in past tense. Andres is doing some parts of his homework but he is not studying to learn the verbs in past tense.

This has been Diana’s best performance to date. She used more irregular verbs accurately as well as asking well-structured questions. Curiously, she did not use any negative statements in this conversation. She also decreased the mistakes regarding Subject + Verb agreement. She also bettered the construction of predicates.


Diana told me that she has had some time to study at home by looking at her textbook and catching up with her workbook. Michael focused more on Diana’s mistakes rather than acknowledging her advances.

Fourth Implementation Session Feedback

In this recording session, I noticed that Fabiola suffered a great backdrift. When I asked her what had happend, she told me that she did not have enough time to prepare her topic the day before because she had a lot of duties at her work. Fabiola had a slight improvement but she has been experimenting with new verbs and the use of the past continuous more than before. This also happened with Diana. Andres was another student who suffered greatly in terms of using the irregular verbs, but he told me that he does not have enough time to study at home. This shows that learner autonomy is an essential variable in terms of learning and implementing new concepts. I observed that most of them went back to the Subject + Verb Agreement problem but they have advanced in learning new irregular verbs and they are more aware on pronouncing the ED endings in the regular ones.

Starting Skills 3

The final course started and there are four new students aboard (Alejandra, Mayi, Diana and Gabriel). Three students did not continue; one of them dropped out because of personal issues (Adriana) and two decided to postpone the course for a month (Maritza and Michael). I told students to accept the invitations to their learning community and to join the diffirent groups. I also instructed them to do a learners' profile in order to set up specific learning objectives according to their individual needs and to start a self-access portfolio where I can check their out-of-class process. I also told them that there are going to be surprise quizzes to check on the verbs in past tense and I instructed them to check the wiki's forum so they can see my comments regarding their discusion board's performances. The four new students read and signed the consentment letters.

Skills 2 implementation conclusions and action plan

Image retrieved from Google images on July 12, 2010

This cycle was particularly difficult to deal with in terms of involving students to become more autonomous in spite of being adult learners. Most of them would not do their basic workbook's assignments and they would show up late to class. Moreover, the peer-monitoring work in the use of the past simple and past continuous was too general  and the students' comments did not help their counterparts notice what their real problems in using these two aspects. All the students suggested me to quiz them daily so they can internalize the vebs; however, I have noticed that they know many verbs in simple past but they are not aware of implementing them properly during the conversations. I will do what they wish, but I will also intervene during the classroom conversation tasks by signaling them when to use the verbs in past. This method might raise awareness of accuracy but this only shows that there is a conflict between competence and performance. Tho ones who are actually using the peer and sel-correction strategies aret he ones who are really making progress.

I intend to start a learning platform where students can practice the skills they are having problems with since it is probable that some students might like to consolodate concepts outside the classroom. I will also include a link to a Voxopop talkgroup so they can practice the simple past and the past continuous tenses more intensively outside the classroom setting. I just hope that they will join the group and to actually take action without depending on me too much.

Fourth Implementation

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.

Third Session's Student Assessment Report

This is what I noticed about my students' performances during the third implementation session:

Johanna has improved a bit in the use of affirmative statements especially in conjugating the Subject + Verb agreement but she had more problems producing the regular and irregular verbs because she took more risks in implementing new ones in this conversation. She also omitted the auxiliary DID when she formulated some questions. However, she has improved the use of the verbs TO BE in past although Juan noticed that she still had problems using them during some passages of the conversation. Therefore, I believe that Johanna is starting to raise awareness of this aspect. She still needs to work on negative statements and asking questions.


Examples:

• No one was hurt/ We were at the hospital (Verb TO BE in past)

• The police picked up the body? (Question)

Fabiola improved her performance compared to the previous one. She was more careful in using the irregular verbs and switching tenses (from past to present). She also tried to use new verbs in past tense and she had some of them right. Although she did not use many negative statements during the interaction, she was completely accurate when she used these structures. She struggled in asking accurate questions in the past tense, but I consider that she was still in the awareness raising stage. She suffered a slight backslide in terms of conjugating Subject + Verb, but she made fewer errors in using the irregular and regular verbs. She started to pronounce the ED endings more accurately.


Examples:

• I don’t have anything accident in my life.

• I was staying for two hours.

This was Andres’s best performance in terms of accuracy. He used the irregular verbs more accurately, he formed full-length utterances and he also used the negative auxiliary verbs accurately most of the times. Andres’s main problem still is formulating accurate questions.


Johanna mentioned the opposite in terms of using the verb To Be and the past auxiliaries incorrectly.

Diana showed a little progress in terms of being accurate in using some verbs in the past tense. She still needs to learn more verbs in the past tense and to pronounce the ED endings in order to minimize her mistakes. Finally, Diana needs to organize the parts of speech when she constructs complements. Maritza noticed the same as I did.

In this interaction, Claudia managed to use more irregular verbs correctly and she was more coherent in organizing complements. She has also managed to reduce the number of mistakes when she conjugated the Subjects with the Verbs.


Andres pointed out that Claudia had some problems between the use of WAS and WERE

Third Implementation Session Feedback

In this session, I was surprised that most of the students had improved in the use of the verbs in past tense, although I also noticed some stagnation and backdrift in other ones. For instance, Johanna, Claudia, Andres, Maritza, Adriana and Michael have considerably improved in constructing affirmative sentences in past tenses. However, I observed a significant backdrift with Fabiola and stagnation in the cases of Diana, Leonardo and Juan. Johanna, Andres and Claudia told me that they have made an effort in studying for the daily quizzes. Whereas for the rest, they have informed me that they do not have time to study since they have other responsibilities during the day. The majority of the students are still having trouble using the auxiliary verbs in simple past when they are constructing negative statements and questions. Most of the students have become more aware of conjugating the subjects and verbs since they have confessed they tend to translate a lot so there is an overgenerlization of not using IT when referring to objects or abstract nouns. I will train students to use the finger correction technique to keep track of of each part of speech when they are employing negative statements and questions.