Learners' Response to a Lesson

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this assignment is to describe and evaluate the learners’ responses to a lesson taught to twenty-seven students in eighth grade in Gimnasio Iragua whose average age is 13-14 years. Most of the students like getting involved in activities that foster competition or collaborative work. They also like getting involved in guessing and predicting activities in which they have to communicate to each other using the language. Regarding their oral proficiency, most of the students have an average fluency but still require improving their accuracy.

Description of the lesson and students’ responses to it

This lesson aimed to enable students to use tag questions to confirm or seek for information. Generally speaking, students show commitment with their learning process and willingness to develop the activities proposed for each one of the stages. For the first, fourth and fifth stages of the lesson, I prepared games to elicit and practice the grammar structure. The first game consisted of a team competition in which learners had to complete a tag question. To do so learners had to run, touch, and say the tag aloud. While learners were developing the activity, I could observe that at least six students were faster and more accurate to match the stems and tags because identified the language target pattern by inferring the short question added to the end of a statement by listening to the stem. On the other hand, at least twelve students found difficulty in performing the activity because they were unable to complete the sentences without reading them and not having the tag written to do it. For example, when they listened to the stem “You bought a car, ….” two of these students had to think the statement and c...

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...e whether they have successfully helped learners to improve their performance, I would apply authentic assessment strategies to check learners’ improvement. For instance, , I would ask learners to get involved in designing test to check understanding and application of the target language in different situations. For instance, visual learners could draw a cartoon in which bubbles are empty to be completed with the appropriate tag questions. In the case of aural learners and kinesthetic learners, I would ask them to prepare a role-play activity or a conversation in which they have to use tag questions. To encourage impulsive and reflective learners to check their learning process, I would foster the use of peer and self-assessment formats by asking them to analyzing their weaknesses and strengths as well as areas of improvement and planning actions to improve them.