Sixth Implementation Session Feedback

Based on what I agreed with my Action Research teacher (Liubava) and my Thesis Director (Valeriya), I will only focus on the five students who lasted the entire implementation stage. This means that I will mention about Johanna, Fabiola, Andres, Diana and Claudia's performances in the last recording session. I have seen that there has been a positive and negative performance patter depending o the students' believes and attitudes towards the system and their autonomy I employed to help them overcome their problems in terms of accuracy using the simple past and the past continuous. Curiously, the three students who were new at the Colombo at the beginning of the process did better than the ones who had taken other courses with other teachers before they started taking the Skills 1-3 courses with me. That means that only Johanna, Claudia and Fabiola were the ones who had faith on the system and learning from their partners' comments in the online forum plus they did a lot more than the others outside the classroom such as doing all their home work assignments and doing some independent work in the online community I set up at the beginning of Skills 3. However, Diana and Andres who started taking the English course three or six months before felt that the system was not too reliable in terms of learning from their peers' comments in the online forum. They thought that it was better that the teacher to intervene in the error correction stage rather than peers. However, it seems they have forgotten that I provided them with rubrics and feedback on their general performances not just during the implementation sessions, but with the regular classes on a weekly basis.

When I asked these students to whatever happened to their learning autonomy which is part of the Centro Colombo Americano's principles, they answered back with the same excuse as always: they did not have any free time to complete all their homework assignments, check their partners' comments in the online forum, do extra work in the learning platform I had set up for them four weeks ago and so on. When I also asked them if they devoted enough time to study during the weekend, the three of them said that they hardly did any independent work because they had other plans with their friends and family members. It is my opinion, that learners' believes about traditional methods on how to teach and learn a second language hindered their progress.

Last Day of the Course and Conclusions from the Implementation Stage

Retrieved from Google images on August 13, 2010

I felt that this final course (Skills 3) went smoother than the previous one because I did not only set  action plans for the implementation stage but also for solving the problems that arose with some students during the three-month cycle. It is important to reflect on what happens in the classroom on a day-to-day basis and to intervene as soon as possible in order to take the proper measures to improve the teaching practice. This is the reflection that I would take with me from the implementation stage. As far as what I used to improve my students accuracy in the simple past and the past continuous tenses, I still need to analyze the data that I gathered during this stage. Then I would surely know if what I did actually helped them or not. I must say that it was an interesting process with its ups and downs. I am sure that if I were to do a second cycle with this experiment I know that it would be much better since I have learned from my mistakes.

Sixth Intervention and Final Test

Retrieved from Google images on August 11, 2010

Today was the last day I implemented. At the beginning of the lesson, I instructed the students to take some notes of the vocabulary they needed to use during their conversations as well as writing the verbs in past tense. When we got to the multi-media lab, students automatically paired up with their usual partner and they rehearsed what they were going to say for a few minutes. Later, they recorded their conversations and saved them; there were no setbacks since I prepared the computers, the platform and the microphones 10 minutes before the class started.

While they were interacting, I noticed that they were enjoying the conversation (it was about a personal dilemma). Some of them actually used the grammar models without me telling them to see them. After they had finished, they saved the conversations in the discussion board and I instructed them to fill out the final survey.  When I told them to work with their partners to talk about their childhood memories, they said that they had already made that chat before, but I reminded them that the first one was the initial one. As homework, I assigned them to listen to their two test in order to compare their performances so they could assess themselves.

Fifth Session's Student Assessment Report

This is what happened with my students' performance during the fifth recording session:

Johanna improved accuracy in this conversation in terms of constructing affirmative and negative statements. She was much more attentive to what she said and to how she organized her utterances. She followed the models I wrote on the board (and she also wrote them down in her notebook). It seems that this helped her raise awareness in accuracy in affirmative statements since she did a practice round with Fabiola before the recording. This was one of her best recordings during the whole process. Andres suggested Johanna to learn more irregular verbs in order enrich her stories. I noticed that she still has some problems asking questions, but she has improved in constructing negative statements.


Examples:

• My mother is a generous person. I admired her because she has been working in a business at home since she retired from her work.

• What did she do last week?

Fabiola: Although she did not talk as much as the other times, Fabiola committed less mistakes than the previous conversation. She barely made errors in constructing affirmative and negative statements, but she still had problems asking questions not in terms of structuring but in employing accurate vocabulary. She learned a wide range of irregular verbs and she is improving in terms of pronouncing the ED endings.


Examples:

• Who is in your life the most very important person?

• What did she work in Bucaramanga?

Andres has showed signs of stagnation when he is trying to convey meaning in the simple past tense. He has not made any effort to learn new irregular verbs, improving the pronunciation of the ED endings and to construct complete ideas. At this point of the process, most of the students notice his incorrect use of grammar whenever he talks to other people.

 In this conversation, Diana suffered a great backslip. She was not focused in the S+V+C agreement, verbs in past tenses, organizing predicates and so forth. She seemed more focused on getting her message across rather than finding a balance between meaning and accuracy. She went back to square one. Vicky noticed that she was not using the verbs during her conversation.
 

Claudia had a backslide in this conversation especially in three aspects: using the irregular verbs, conjugating subject + verbs and organizing the predicates.

 

Fifth Implementation Session Feedback

In this session, I noticed that some of the students (the ones I feel believe in the system) showed great improvement in terms of accuracy in both affirmative and negative statements as well in formulating questions whereas the ones who are still skeptical on having their classmates correct their own errors instead of the teacher are the ones who are falling behind especially in learning the irregular verbs in past. I think that it does not matter what system is used to learn a foreign language, but if a student does not believe in it I think that he or she will not progress. Not all the methods and approaches are made to fit every sigle student. I also believe that adult learners should be the ones who should take charge of their own learning processes and not the teacher. Most of them haven't taken the time to study new verbs or have taken risk to use new ones during the different conversations or to prepare their conversations beforehand to see how to include new vocabulary or tenses for their upcoming interactions. That's my conclusion.

Fifth implementation

Image retrieved from Glogle images on July 23, 2010

Before going to the multi-media lab I wrote some grammar models in the simple past and past continuous in affirmative, negative and question forms so they could follow them during their interactions using the voice message board. During this implementation the students who had been in my group did not have many problems engaging into the activity. As usual, they got together with their activity partner and they reheased what they were going to say. It took some time for the new learners to get into the activities because first I needed to explain them how the implementation, the voice message board and the wiki worked. Then they had to sign in to the Voxopop web site and do the initial test. Finally, they worked on the conversation assigned for the day which was about a very important person in their lives. Some students had problems recording their conversations because they had some problems with their microphones. They did not check if they were on or plugged in the CPU. When most of the students finished, they wrote their comments in Nabble. I noticed that they were still too superficial and they do not really help their peers to improve the target structures.

Action plan follow-up

Image retrieved from Google images on July 23, 2010

After quizzing students for a week and listening to them speak during the in-class conversation tasks, I have found that students have learned more verbs in simple past and that they are self-correcting their mistakes more than before during the speaking activities. I just hope that they will do the same next week during the fifth intervention. I have noticed that even adult learners need to be gradually let go as well as being constantly graded and informed about their work until they will eventually become more autonomous. That was supposed to be their previous teacher's job, but it seems that I had to do this process all over again and it is working.