didactic proposals to deal with lack of motivation in the english classroom

SECONDARY EDUCATION TEACHING MASTER

DIDACTIC PROPOSALS TO DEAL

WITH LACK OF MOTIVATION IN

THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

VANESA JUÁREZ PARÍS

FINAL PROJECT

ENGLISH SPECIALITY

2012/2013

1

INDEX

Introduction

� Presentation of the Final Project in the English teaching specialty in the

Obligatory Secondary Education ............................................................................ 3

� Centre and group where the innovative didactic suggestion is applied ......... 4

Proposal of the educational innovation

Objectives and justification of the project ................................................................... 6

Theoretical Framework

� Dealing with lack of motivation ....................................................................... 9

� Teaching-learning strategies of the project ..................................................... 9

Observation and proposals of every session ............................................................... 11

� Session one – 4th

/April

o Observations ........................................................................................ 12

o Methodological and didactic suggestions ............................................ 13

o Description of an alternative session for R3 ........................................ 15

� Session two – 11th

/April

o Observations ........................................................................................ 17



� Session three– 18th

/April

o Observations ........................................................................................ 21



� Exam Unit 6 comments .................................................................................... 26

� Session four– 25th

/April

o Observations ........................................................................................ 27



� Session five – 2nd

/May

o Observations ........................................................................................ 31



2

� Session six – 7th

/May

o Observations ........................................................................................ 34



� Session seven 16th

/May

o Observations ........................................................................................ 37



Conclusions .................................................................................................... 40

Bibliography .................................................................................................. 42

Appendices

� Appendix I : ....................................................................................................... 44

� Appendix II : ...................................................................................................... 45

� Appendix III : ..................................................................................................... 46

� Appendix IV: ..................................................................................................... 47

� Appendix V: ...................................................................................................... 47

� Appendix VI: ..................................................................................................... 48

� Appendix VII : ................................................................................................... 49

� Appendix VIII : .................................................................................................. 50

� Appendix IX : ..................................................................................................... 50

� Appendix X : ...................................................................................................... 51

� Appendix XI : ..................................................................................................... 52

� Appendix XII : .................................................................................................... 54

� Appendix XIII :................................................................................................... 54

� Appendix XIV : .................................................................................................. 58

� Appendix XV : ................................................................................................... 61

� Appendix XVI : .................................................................................................. 62

� Appendix XVII : ................................................................................................. 62

� Appendix XVIII : ................................................................................................ 63

� Appendix XIX : .................................................................................................. 63

� Appendix XX : ................................................................................................... 64

� Appendix XXI : .................................................................................................. 65

� Appendix XXII : ................................................................................................. 66

� Appendix XXIII : ................................................................................................ 67

� Appendix XXIV: ................................................................................................. 68

� Appendix XXV ................................................................................................... 69

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INTRODUCTION

Presentation of the Final Project in the English Obligatory Secondary

Education teaching specialty.

The present project is a collection of didactic proposals that in the form of improvements of

the methods often used to explain, practice and present the activities done in the English

language Secondary Education class, tries to be an innovative way of teaching English,

without changing the curriculum already set by the Catalan Educational Department. These

proposals are aimed at a particular student profile that lacks academic motivation and

shares the classroom with students with the same problem by the decision of an educational

centre.

During my Practicum I and II, I had the chance to observe three different groups of a same

ESO year, each defined by its own level of difficulty, which was established by the student’s

limitations that the teachers of every subject thought they had. In the case of the English

language subject, the group Rhythm 1 (R1), the one supposed to have the higher level of the

three, followed a course book in a traditional way, by explaining the contents of every unit

and completing the corresponding activities proposed by the book. In Rhythm 2 (R2), the

teachers tried to follow the same strategy, but the students lacked a lot of motivation and

their bad attitude did not let the teachers make considerable progress. Rhythm 3 (R3) was

normally more submissive in attitude terms, but their self-esteem was very low and they had

assumed the idea that going to school was useless and dull, so their effort to pass the

subject was minimum, and therefore, the teacher had to follow an easier course book and

demand significantly much less than to what was demanded to R1.

During my practicum, I worked with 3rd

of ESO R1, but I had a chance to observe all the other

groups of R1, R2 and R3 of different years. Many times I had the feeling that if the activities

were presented more attractively and in a way in which the students could participate more

as individuals, the tasks could become more dynamic and interesting, not only for them, but

even for me as an observer and sometimes a second teacher, since I would get bored many

times during the classes. I never had the chance to teach a R3 group during my Practicum,

and yet, I would become very intrigued with 2nd

of ESO R3 in particular, because I would

wonder if those students had an age in which academic motivation could still be instilled

through the idea that learning could be interesting, fulfilling, or even fun sometimes. A big

change in the maturity of the students could be seen in 3rd

of ESO R3, since they seemed to

be less innocent than a year before, and therefore, more reluctant to change their negative

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ideas about school. 4th

of ESO R3 was already a very difficult group in which many students

had very deeply assumed their academic failure and their poor prospects for the future in

economic terms, especially those who did not believe they would get their Secondary

Education certificate.

So, from these reflections during my Practicum at the educational centre I was assigned, I

got the key idea to start and develop this Master’s Final Project. I decided I would make

research to learn about methods and activities that could beat more successfully the lack of

motivation while being effective enough to teach the same content and skills indicated in

the official curriculum that students of 2nd

of ESO are supposed to learn in their English

language subject. Then, I would go every Thursday to the centre, observe what 2nd

of ESO R1

would do in terms of activities and instructional explanations, and then compare it to what it

was done in 2nd

of ESO R3. Finally, I would try to become creative myself and transform the

activities observed in both groups taking into account the research I had made, and design

proposals to be applied to 2nd

of ESO R3. This seemed to me a very enriching task personally

as a future teacher, but also a useful project that could motivate other teachers to be always

creative with the preparation of their lessons, especially if they are aimed at difficult

students that need their teachers not only to learn English and accomplish the official

curriculum, but also to stimulate and inspire them, so these students believe more in

themselves and get motivated again with their academic experience.

Centre and group where the innovative didactic suggestion is applied

The educational centre I was assigned for my Practicum I and II, and in which I take my

observations in order to develop the present project, is the IES Miquel Crusafont I Pairò, a

small Secondary Education centre placed on the outskirts of Sabadell. It is a CAEP centre

(Preferential Educational Attention Centre), which means that it is a centre located in an

unfavourable social and economic surroundings and in which students generally have

difficulties to achieve the general objective of the basic education due to their social and

cultural conditions. The centre decided to have only two administrative lines in ESO and one

in Batxillerat, but choosing a grouping based on rhythms which made diversity attention

easier to work with in the case of the ESO students.

A R1 group is made of the approximately thirty better-focused students of a year, whereas a

R2 group holds the others that are supposed to create more trouble in class and have worse

academic results. Because of the difficulty found by teachers when dealing with the latter, a

third group is created, R3, and holds the ones that are not that difficult to deal with in terms

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of attitude, but are supposed to be much slower than R1.The R1 group is assessed mainly in

terms of concepts and through the grades students get from their written work along the

trimester and from the unit exams. In the case of the R3 group, students are assessed taking

into account mainly their attitude and the effort shown to complete activities in class. Exams

are not taken so much into account and students know it, which could be a reason why the

R3 group normally does not study to pass these tests.

The group to which the innovative proposals of this project are applied is 2nd

of ESO R3,

which normally is formed by 8-10, – there are two students from the Open Classroom (Aula

Oberta) who only attend from time to time. I also observe the group 2nd

of ESO R1 and

compare what they do in class with what the group 2nd

of ESO R3 do. The English lessons of

the R3 group take place on Wednesday at 9:00, on Thursday at 13:30 and on Friday at 12:30,

whereas those of the R1 group take place on Monday at 9:00, on Wednesday at 10:00 and

on Thursday at 11:30. I was only able to go to the centre on Thursdays and observe only one

hour a week of both groups.

6

PROPOSAL OF THE EDUCATIONAL

INNOVATION

OBJECTIVES AND JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROJECT

The majority of obligatory education centres in Catalonia have several lines of the same ESO

year due to the big amount of students of the same age. In each line of an ESO year, they are

taught exactly the same contents and procedures which are programmed by the teacher,

which is normally the same one for all the lines. However, there are some centres in which,

due to the huge difference in diversity and level of cognitive development of the students,

they decide to divide the lines taking into account this difference of rhythm of learning. The

same way that it seems fair that in a standard centre every line of an ESO year receives the

same education than the others, I think that in centres where students are separated into

rhythms it is fair to apply the same curriculum as well, in every subject of their curriculum.

Another matter is the need of adaptation in terms of methodology, so that, in the rhythms in

which students are less mature or have more concentration difficulties in comparison with

other students of their own age, they can learn the same content and develop the same

competences that they are supposed to acquire during the ESO years in an easier way for

them. This is not always the case in centres in which students are separated by rhythms,

since teachers many times confuse the idea of adaptation with a change of contents so they

are easier for the slower lines, especially when they are teachers that have spent many years

teaching this kind of groups trying to apply the same methodologies they apply to the faster

ones and are disheartened by the poor results they get. At this point, teachers assume the

erroneous idea that these adolescents belonging to these lower rhythm groups are totally

unable to be good students, due to their lack of concentration and, in many cases, their

ability to take to pieces the class because of their belief that school is not useful for them

and it is just an obligation they have to endure as they can, even if it is misbehaving every

time they get bored.

The problem with these students from lower level rhythms is generally one of lack of

motivation, which does not let them see the need to make an effort to get good marks in

their studies in order to have a better future when they finish school. In fact, there are a few

students with this profile also in the higher level rhythms, but because these groups tend to

be bigger in number, these students may get neutralized in attitude terms, although they

never really follow the class as their classmates, and lag considerably behind. When that is

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the case and they cannot follow the level, they do not complain as students from lower

rhythms many times do, because they feel too embarrassed in front of their classmates. It is

true that the lower rhythms sometimes admit the participation of students from the Open

Classroom (Aula Oberta), who are adolescents that have a real cognitive problem that does

not let them follow a normal class rhythm for their age. These students need a specially

adapted curriculum and many times, an extra educator next to them to be able to follow

what the teacher is explaining.

However, the majority of students belonging to the lower level rhythms are capable enough

to follow a normal class, but they just do not see the point because they have never had

good study habits and do not know what it feels to fulfil academic challenges, normally not

even from the Primary school years. This should not be a reason to let them achieve their

Obligatory Secondary Education with a poorer acquisition of the contents and basic skills

they are supposed get when they are sixteen years old. Since these students cannot be

motivated in terms of getting good marks because they do not have confidence enough to

stick to long-term rewards, as it is getting their ESO certificate, they could be motivated in a

different way, by showing them that every day, in every class, they can achieve more

immediate rewards, such as learning something interesting and prove to themselves they

can acquire it and use it with a particular purpose.

English is a subject these students find particularly difficult and boring, since they cannot use

this foreign language in a practical way until they have learned the features of the language

itself. That is why teachers usually follow traditional methods of learning English such as

asking the students to translate a lot of vocabulary with a dictionary, or complete many fill-in

activities in a book, even if they know these methods do not really work unless students

memorize such vocabulary or practice their grammar in oral activities. But to ask the

students to concentrate and work on the same book for 50 minutes – which is not very

advisable anyway but that could work with students which are motivated by the idea of

passing the subject – does not work with students who are sent to these slower rhythm

groups and who lack any kind of academic motivation. In the English class, these students

soon get bored and lose concentration during a task; they do not see the point of what they

are doing and stop working and desperately look for possible distractions such as talking to

other classmates, drawing pictures on their notebooks, or even getting up and walking

around the classroom with the excuse of throwing something to the bin or having something

“very important” to say to a classmate that is sitting on the other side of the room.

The students of lower rhythm’s groups need a better set of strategies that can make them

forget about their frustration with studies while they are in class. Normally, these students

8

have been in this situation for years and not only with the English language subject, but with

their general academic performance. That is why such strategies should allow the teacher

draw their attention to the present moment and set more immediate and simple objectives

that students can easily spot and want to achieve. The strategies chosen and the way in

which they are adapted to a group in order to increase their attention and their motivation

can vary a lot depending on the kind of students. That is why all the proposals suggested in

this work are illustrated taking into account a real case, 2nd

of ESO R3, which is described in

the previous section. As I mentioned before, this 2nd

of ESO group is considered to have a

very low learning rhythm when teachers have tried to apply the same strategies used with

the students of the 2nd

of ESO R1. Also, it should be taken into account that in this

educational centre students are used to a way of teaching that tends to be less audio visually

supported, less related to the students’ personal interests and more monotonous and

mechanical in terms of activities than it should be when adapting the curriculum to students

that lack autonomy, motivation and an ability to concentrate on academic tasks.

In this project, all the activities observed in 2nd

R1 are therefore refined in all these aspects

that can be useful to abstract students from their self-conscious lack of motivation and their

self-beliefs related to what they are capable of doing with English. A strategy I now consider

very important after observing this very same group during my practicum II is to make the

students feel they are not doing conventional class activities. I do not mean that students

have to believe they are just playing games, but they need to feel they are doing something

different that can challenge them in a different way. When this has been the case, in some

occasions during the practicum, I have seen students more motivated feeling that they had

the opportunity to prove their capability with studies in a new way, especially if it gave them

the chance to contribute in the class in a more personal way. When they could contribute in

that way, they could feel as important as the rest of their classmates, something crucial to

increase their self-confidence and contribute to a more positive creation of a possible self.

I think this ideal situation should be constantly recreated in class so that, little by little,

students consider the classroom a space in which they relate learning English with having a

good time in which they can be themselves. The way in which the activities are prepared and

presented by the teacher is very important to make students feel such relation, regardless of

the content and the procedures indicated in the curriculum that the teachers are supposed

to teach. Creativity and the need to keep improving when preparing the classes are also

basic requirements to be a good teacher. These teaching principals want to be the base of

the following proposals, along with a solid base of knowledge of the didactic methods that

could work better in a specific situation, which in this case are gathered in the bibliography

that appears at the end of this project and which are summarized in the following section.

9

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Dealing with lack of motivation

When preparing the alternative sessions in this project, I always kept in mind a set of

principles dealing with the motivation of the students in order to reduce the effect of

previous academic failure and frustration on the student’s future performance. There are

two main ideas that define these principles. The first idea, and a one that the teacher always

needs to take into account in class, is that students get more interested in the learning of

English if the topic seems new for them and is presented in an attractive way (Escaño, Gil de

la Serna, 2008). The second is that the experiences that are lived in an emotional way are

better recalled and remembered in a longer term, so what is learned in an emotional way

becomes better consolidated by the students (Gallego, Gallego, 2004).

In order to attract the students to the topic of the class, the teacher has to include significant

communicative situations in all the sessions. They are perfect to get the student’s attention

and to make them see that they have the opportunity to participate and be active in an

environment that the teacher is presenting as interesting and comfortable for them (Besalú,

Tort, 2009). In these class conversations it is when the students can get involved in a

personal and emotional way and the knowledge can be cognitively better consolidated. This

also helps to improve the level of the self esteem of the students, since it is in these

communicative moments that the teacher has the chance to create situations in which the

students feel valuable and become aware that what they achieve in class is useful for the

rest of their classmates (Thorne, 2008). The objective is that students create new and more

positive expectations about their experience with the study of the English language. To

achieve that, the teacher has to encourage the students to talk about themselves and listen

to others, and share their reflections and aspirations with the English language in a friendly

environment (Fukada, Fukuda, Falout, & Murphey, 2011). That is why such significant

communicative situations become basic to motivate the students.

Teaching-learning strategies of the project

In the present project I also include a series of strategies dealing with teaching and learning

English in order to improve the dynamics and methodological results of the sessions.

Consequently, these strategies will help the teacher achieve the objectives dealing with the

students’ motivation. The first suggestion is that the teacher makes sure that there is an

alternation of different kinds of activities during the sessions, so students feel stimulated

and willing to participate (Besalú, Tort, 2009), and also that they have the opportunity to

10

develop all the communication skills needed to learn English – reading, listening, speaking

and writing. Also, the teacher could organize the sessions in terms of time, including some

moments that were repeated and turned into routines, and in terms of space, so every task

had its own class distribution and the sessions were more dynamic (Escaño, Gil de la Serna,

2008).

Another important suggestion made in this project is that most of the alternated activities

carried out during the sessions are significant communicative situations. Therefore, the

classes could begin with a presentation of the topic – or recapitulation if started in previous

sessions – to make it interesting and catch the attention of the students. Then, the students

should be encouraged to talk about the topic and explain what they already know and what

they would like to learn about it. This kind of class discussion helps students develop critical-

thinking skills and their English communication skills in an authentic situation (Escaño, Gil de

la Serna 2008). Another routine to be included in the sessions should be to finish the classes

by getting the students together – it could be with the chairs in the shape of half a circle so

they could see the teacher in the middle for a better experience – and all the students were

encouraged to recapitulate and reflect about the session. This way, the students have the

opportunity to comment about the sessions and feel they also have a voice. Moreover, the

teacher can learn about the student’s experience with English and see what strategies

worked and which did not, in order to improve for the next sessions (Ferreiro, 2006).

One more important suggestion is to always make students aware of the objective of what

they do in class so there is a chance for the students to get motivated and creative, and feel

responsible about the current task (Bernaus, 1995). In order to turn the tasks into an

attainable objective for the students, it is very important to make such an objective very

clear, because sometimes it may not be that obvious for the students (Escaño, Gil de la

Serna, 2010). It is advisable to give a realistic context to the tasks so they become enriching

in regard to the competences and skills to be developed, and so the students feel challenged

enough without feeling disheartened (Vilella, 2013). Apart from the objectives of the

session, it is important that the teacher makes the students aware of the logical connections

between what was learned in the previous sessions and what is going to be learned in the

next ones (Mercer, 2001), and that he/she creates zones of proximal development that

make it easier for the students to understand the new knowledge and to build their own

learning process (Onrubia, 1993). It could also be interesting to involve the students in a

discussion in which they give their opinion about the assessing objectives and tasks that

appear in the exams, so they feel more encouraged to prepare for their evaluation (Onrubia,

Fillat, Martínez and Udina, 1998). Another way to stimulate the students for the wish of

more English language knowledge is to make evident the relations between what is learned

at school and how such knowledge can be used in real life (Perrenoud, 1999).

11

Moreover, in this project it is suggested that learning strategies are taught to the students,

so they have tools to deal with the English learning and feel more autonomous when

studying. Some of these strategies are to categorize the new vocabulary into kinds so it is

better memorized by the students (Nogales, Sancho, 2008), to take notes while watching a

video or doing a listening, so the activity is not passive and the new knowledge becomes

better processed by the students (Ferreiro, 2006), to make use of repetition but in a

consistent way, so it is processed in the long-term memory of the students (De Jong Perfetti,

2011), or to focus on the vocabulary without forgetting the grammar, since that helps

students to get more fluent with their English when participating in class (Hilton, 2008).

Another invaluable learning strategy that the students should be taught is cooperative work.

By working in groups, students that have more trouble working alone because they get more

distracted or find the tasks too difficult to be solved by themselves can find the help of their

classmates and feel more satisfied with their own contributions (Pujolàs, 2008/Torrego,

Negro, 2012). Also, cooperative work is a perfect strategy to create a constant significant

communicative situation during the sessions. A summary table of the theoretical framework

can be found in appendix I.

OBSERVATIONS AND PROPOSALS FOR EVERY SESSION

The classes last fifty minutes approximately, especially those of R1, in which students come

after the break and may not all of them be ready until 11:35 and not completely

concentrated on the task until 11:40. The teacher also has to spend some time turning on

the computer, in both groups, something that can take around 5 minutes. Both groups

normally start correcting some homework, although if that is a rule in R1, it is not always the

case in R3. So, while the computer is turning on, the teacher is usually checking table by

table who has done the homework, and afterwards, prepares to correct the homework

along with the whole group. All the R1 sessions described in this paper take place in a big

room that can gather the thirty students comfortably, and they never get to work with

laptops or in the computer room because there are more students than computers. In the

case of R3, most Thursdays go and work in the computer room because it is a small group

that never surpasses the fifteen students.

In terms of attitude, the R1 group normally has more patience when dealing with activities in

which one student participates at a time than the R3 group. In the latter, there are always a

couple of students that disrupt the class on purpose because they get bored and restless or

because they need to get the attention of the rest of the class. In the R1 group there are also

12

two or three students that are normally told off by the teacher, but these are more

neutralized by the presence of many other students that are behaving correctly. As for the

materials normally used, in the R1 group they use the Interface course book, both the

student’s book and the workbook, and sometimes photocopies from other sources chosen

by the teacher. In the case of the R3 group, and by the decision of the English department of

the centre, they use a simplified version of the Interface workbook called Interface basics,

which is designed by the same publisher to help students with special needs. However, the

teacher giving these lessons considers that this workbook is very limited and boring, so she

prepares many photocopies from other sources, especially the Internet, where she searches

for many other activities related to the topic they are dealing with at a particular moment.

Session one – 4th/April

� Observations:

Both groups had just started unit 6 from the book – called ‘make a difference’ – and before

this session of the 4th

of April, students had already been introduced to the first vocabulary

topic of the unit, which is ‘jobs’. However, the homework that the R1 group corrected at the

beginning of the class was a reading that had to do with the world’s water day and the water

crisis, which is in the second page of the Student’s book of the unit. Most of the students

had read the text and completed the activities in their notebooks for homework and, in

general, it seemed a topic that students found interesting and had comments and questions

to make about. On the other hand, for homework, the R3 group students had to bring a

piece of paper with ten names of jobs they wanted written down and with the translation

next to every word. The idea was that these jobs were new words for them that they had

looked up at home, although most of the students just wrote the ones they knew plus others

they had translated directly from Spanish and were wrong. Three students had not even

done them, so the teacher gave them a piece of paper and a pocket dictionary and asked

them to do it in class before passing to the next activity.

The main task in the R1 group was to create a class discussion about jobs and what students

would like to do in the future by using the Bureau of Labor Statistics website from the United

States department of labour (appendix I). This educational website is nicely presented with

the general question ‘What do you like?’ and some of the possible answers could be

‘reading’, ‘social studies’, ‘building and fixing things’, ‘maths’, ‘helping people’, etc. The

teacher asked students to choose one, and then have a look at the different options at every

field. If the students chose ‘law’, for example, the teacher opened the hyperlink and

different options came out, such as ‘police officer’, ‘court reporter’, ‘judge’ or ‘paralegal’,

and these jobs were commented among the whole class. Some of these jobs were totally

13

new for the students because they were not the usual ones taught at this age. That seemed

to make students more interested and willing to ask questions. Every job had a summary of

quick facts including the median pay, the entry-level education, needed training or previous

work experience, etc. This information caught the students’ attention, especially the median

pay and the outlook, probably because the topic made them start thinking what kind of job

they would like to have in the future, not only in terms of what they liked doing, but

economically. There was a particular moment in which students got very much into the class

conversation because many of them could not believe that to be a farmer it is needed to

have an education, even though it was specified in the website and the teacher

corroborated it. This was a perfect significant communicative opportunity to ask students to

speak in English to discuss and overcome some worth commenting stereotypes. It was

interesting for the students to see how jobs work in the United States, but maybe it would

also had been engaging to talk a little bit about the situation of the jobs in Spain.

The main task for the R3 group was to complete every multiple choice activity about ‘jobs

and professions’ listed in a website called Agenda Web, which is a page where there are lots

of activities gathered from different websites. Then, students had to type the score they had

got next to the name of every website in a word document. They also had a table under the

list in which they had to fill it with ten names of new jobs they did not know before doing the

activities on the computer. Some examples of these online activities can be found in

appendix II. Students were supposed to use an online dictionary when they did not know the

meaning of the words and then relate the jobs with the tasks related. The teacher had

looked for as many activities as possible in order to fill the whole hour, all very similar and a

bit repetitive, which just had to do with vocabulary related to the topic. Students were fine

doing this task at the beginning, since they appreciate a change of classroom and the

possibility of using computers. However, after completing one or two activities, they got

bored and some started looking for the attention of other classmates to entertain

themselves. The teacher and me, because I offered as a volunteer to help, were going table

by table checking that the students were actually working and had no problems to continue

their task. Nonetheless, even though they were only ten students, two teachers were very

few in order to help students that were working individually for the whole hour.

� Didactic suggestions:

One main problem with this session given to the R3 group was that it was made of just one

long activity, which was to complete a long list of online multiple choice vocabulary

activities, a task that can become never-ending and dull for any student. Because of this,

even though the teacher could have thought that these activities could be completed in a

short period of time, the students would make it longer, because they needed to get

distracted every time they did not feel motivated to continue and needed to start talking to

14

other classmates. Another main problem was the difficulty of the activities. It may seem

adequate to make students start with an activity that just deals with the names of jobs (see

activity one, appendix II), and then continue with a more complicated one in which the

students have to relate these names with a description of the work done in every job

(activities two and three in appendix II). However, since these students have a very low level

of English because they have never done an effort to study for their exams, they have a lot

of trouble to understand these descriptions by themselves unless they use a dictionary.

Because the students were using the computers, the teacher allowed them to use the

Google translator, which is a dictionary that lets the users write a whole sentence at a time,

even though it does not translate very accurately most of the times. Students did not have

the patience to look up word by word in a proper dictionary, so they used the Google

translator all the time and asked the teacher to help them understand the inaccurate

translations in order to complete the activities. The whole thing became very repetitive and

boring, for the teacher too – and even for me, since I was actively helping students because

one teacher was not enough to help ten students individually –, so students opted for

completing the activities randomly many of the times. It could be though that, even though

students did not understand every word, they were receiving a lot of written English input.

However, this input was never significant for them, among other reasons because the goal of

the task was just to write all the scores got in the activities in the piece of paper, so they

never got to recapitulate or revise that input, which was probably easily forgotten.

The R1 session, even though it seemed to allow students to participate more dynamically

and in a more significant way for them, it had its disadvantages for applying it to the R3

group in the same way. The teacher had to do an effort to lead and supervise the

conversation drawn from the American Jobs website, but it worked because jobs and

professions is an interesting topic and many students were paying attention and taking part

in it. These significant communicative situations are perfect in order to get the attention and

motivation of students, since students like being active in an environment in which they feel

comfortable. Therefore, it would be advisable to encourage these situations with the

students of R3 as well. Still, in the R1 session, there were many other students who were just

listening patiently because they could not completely follow the class or were embarrassed

in front of other students that they thought were better at English than themselves. Of

course, it was difficult for the teacher to try to avoid that and help thirty students participate

at the same time, and at the same level. There was no while-task during the presentation of

the website, such as taking notes about some jobs or other information that the teacher

could have specified and which could have been useful for the students to understand better

the new knowledge that was processed. Such notes could have been used for the students

to write a short text or summery for homework that helped them recapitulate and reflect

15

about what they had been doing in class. On the other hand, it was good that students could

concentrate on their speaking, but the other students that did not actively participate were

totally passive, which makes the task not as effective as it could be.

To create communicative situations is a group as the one described in this paper is a difficult

task, because these students have been used to understand the English language as a

subject that is difficult and dull to learn, probably from primary school. Also, some of them

have bad attitude habits and ways to boycott the classroom when they get bored, by

creating ‘accidental situations’ in which they pretend to have a problem that the teacher

needs to solve, just to break the English classroom routine. Therefore, I would suggest that

the teacher organized the session in terms of time, including some moments that were

repeated and turned into routines in every session – such as a moment of recapitulation at

the beginning of the class, or a moment of reflection at the end of it –, and also in terms of

space, so every task had its own space and the session was more dynamic. When organizing

the class in terms of time, it is important that oral and written activities, along with listening,

video or computer tasks, are alternated, so that students see that the class is functional and

interactive and they can feel stimulated and willing to participate.

� Description of an alternative session for R3:

Taking all this into account, the 4th

of April session suggested for R3 in this paper would take

the steps explained as it follows. The class would begin with a presentation of the topic to

make it interesting and catch the attention of the students. Therefore, instead of starting

telling the students what activities have to be done during that session, the teacher would

first ask interesting and disturbing questions or give new recent information about the job

situation in Spain and how it could affect the students in the future. Then, she would

encourage the students to talk about the topic and explain what they already know and how

they think the topic is attractive. This kind of class discussion helps students develop critical-

thinking skills (e.g., determining cause and effect relationships, hypothesizing, drawing

conclusions, etc.), and their English communication skills in an authentic situation. It could

be interesting for the student’s motivation that the teacher also mentioned the idea that the

school is the tool of the student’s personal development and their future work in the society,

since many students at this age do not seem to realize this fact. Of course, all this should be

done using both languages, English and Catalan, so everybody could follow the class.

The teacher could draw the topic to particular job or profession cases, so the new

vocabulary came up in the conversation. The same Bureau of Labor Statistics website from

the United States department of labour used in the R1 session or a similar one such as the

16

British one shown in appendix III, which may have easier words for the students, could be

used here as a visual support, but without going in depth with it too much. However, it could

be asked to write down some information during the oral conversation, such as the main

types of jobs named in the website used in class. In the case of using the British website just

suggested, they could do six columns starting with ‘creator’, ‘do-er’, ‘helper’, ‘organiser’,

‘persuader’ and ‘thinker’. Then they could categorise every new job they encounter during

the session and finally have a vocabulary schema that will help them study the new words in

a more effective way.

The next task could be to work with the computers individually. It should not be to complete

a long list of random activities though, but just a couple that were significant for the

continuation of the session. They could be ones that just tackle the name of the jobs, such as

the number one in appendix II. Another example could be the one in appendix IV, which

relates the names of the jobs with the names of the job places. Because they just have to

look up only a word at a time, students should not have trouble with the online translator.

However, the teacher should encourage the use of a different online dictionary, such as the

wordreference.com, which is more reliable and comprehensive than the Google translator.

The teacher should give a limited amount of time to do this task, so students did not fall into

their old habit of delaying finishing the task. The goal would be that students had some jobs

organized in the columns created before, in order to continue with the session.

The next task suggested is called ‘Possible selves sharing activity’ (Fukada, Fukuda, Falout, &

Murphey, 2011). This task has two parts, one that is orally carried out by the whole class

sitting together, and the second is done in pairs. In the first part, every student is asked to

brainstorm their possible future careers imagining at the same time if there are any settings

or situations where they could use their English skills in those careers. A conversation

pattern could be given to the students to make the task easier (A: What would you like to be

in the future? / B: I would like to be a /an __________). Since the students will be

participating actively and hopefully being honest about their future expectations, which is a

personal and emotional issue, the new vocabulary gathered during the computer task will be

cognitively better consolidated. In the second part, students have to gather as many

‘possible selves’ as possible from their classmates, by getting in pairs as if it was an

interview, and writing down what these classmates would like to be in the future. The

teacher should encourage as many different pairs as possible, so students also interacted

with classmates they never talk to, so a friendlier work environment was promoted in the

classroom.

To enrich the ‘Possible selves sharing activity’ a bit more, the teacher could explain with

simple English the tasks involved in the jobs that came up during the brainstorming part. So,

if a student said ‘I would like to be a doctor’, the teacher should help the student to reach to

17

the conclusion that doctors ‘take care of patients’. Or if a student said he would like to be a

chef, the teacher could help him to find out that in English chefs ‘cook and prepare meals in

a restaurant’. This activity is about the level of the more complicated online ones that the R3

students did (number two and three appendix II), but in this case, because these sentences

are used in a more specific situation, they become more significant input for the students.

Finally, in order to consolidate all the new knowledge learned in this session, the homework

for the next day could be a short piece of writing to be handed in to the teacher, in which

the students explained what they and some of their classmates would like to do in the future

and what tasks are involved in those jobs. There are certainly many ways of presenting the

topic of jobs and professions to students of 2nd

of ESO, but this is a suggestion that tries to

include the content and skills practiced by the R1 group session without disregarding the

work that the teacher wanted her R3 students to do.

Session two – 11th/April

� Observations:

The R1 group had done the whole grammar page 72 of the student’s book for homework

(Appendix V), with the help of the theory in the book next to the activities and also some

explanations in Catalan of the ‘going to’ structure at the end of the book. The teacher had

expected that the students would be able to understand the grammar of the unit by

themselves, because she had already explained it during the previous session. However, the

students needed to ask once more what was the meaning of the words ‘going to’ and their

use. To make sure the students consolidated it, the teacher asked each one what they were

going to be in the future. This activity was effective to get the students attention because it

involved them in a personal and emotional way. Most of them wanted to say what they

would like to be in the future so they practiced the grammar structure in English in order to

be allowed to say it in front of the class.

Previously to the session, the teacher had told me she had wanted to start the second part

of the vocabulary of unit 6, which deals with ‘health’, but since she had not had time to

prepare it, she was going to do a listening from the book and leave the vocabulary for the

following session they had during the week. However, she asked the students to do page 76

from the student’s book by themselves for homework (appendix VI). This page included

words related to health problems issues (headache, temperature, broken arm, sore throat,

etc.), which supposedly the students had to look up at home in case they did not know them.

The R3 group had some words related to the ‘health problems’ topic to be translated for

homework. After checking they were correct, the teacher suggested watching a video with

more ‘health problems’ vocabulary the students could listen to and see written on the

18

screen at the same time (appendix VII). The problem she found with the video was that she

wanted students to be able to follow it but at the same she did not want it to be too

infantile. Therefore, I suggested using the video to do a dictation game in which the students

tried to write down the vocabulary while watching the video. This way, students would see

this activity as a game and they would be fully engaged with the vocabulary while watching

and listening to it. That would reinforce their skills to focus and take notes in class. Also, by

having the students busy writing what they understood, the task would not be so passive an

activity as it is normally to watch a video, and the new knowledge would become better

processed by the students. There was a bit of confusion among the students when the

teacher explained the task, maybe because it had been my idea and she was still not sure

about it herself. Since the objective of the task was not clear, the students got a bit

frustrated at the beginning, and thought the task to be more difficult than it was.

After the task, some students commented that the video had appeared a bit childish to

them. However, some others expressed the idea that it could have been, but that they knew

so little English that it was fine for them to watch it even if it was a bit infantile. This

discussion was interesting in order to see how little confidence with English students from

R3 had. The video included vocabulary such as ‘Band-Aid’, ‘bruise’, ‘bump’, ‘fever’, American

words instead of the more British ones that the group R1 had for homework in the student’s

book. Once every student had written every word of the video in their notebooks, the

following task was to turn on the computers and do a couple of online activities very similar

to the ones done in the previous session described in this paper (example in appendix VIII).

To finish these activities took the students until the end of the session. As can be seen in the

excerpt of one of them in appendix VII, one of the activities uses the word ‘temperature’

instead of ‘fever’, which was a bit confusing for the students, who had to deal with two

different ways of naming something new for them. At a particular moment, the teacher

explained the meaning of the word ‘constipated’, which all the students thought to be to

have a cold. This kind of peculiar explanations about words shows that students can actually

be interested in the English language if the topic is new for them and is presented in an

attractive way.


The fact that the teacher has to repeat the explanation of some simple grammar concepts in

the R1 classroom proves that students from R3 are actually as intelligent as those in R1, and

that the R1 students keep forgetting the concepts just like the students of R3 do. The

difference resides in that the students from R3 never get to study seriously before the exam

because of a lack of motivation to pass, especially knowing that they do not need to pass the

exams if the subject is assessed in terms of attitude and class work. As can be seen in the

19

oral activity with the R1 group in which they have to say what they would like to be in the

future, the teacher is putting in practice a similar activity to the one that is suggested with

R3 in the previous session described in this paper. What it is not understandable is that the

teacher does not do it with the R3 group, as I suggested doing in the alternative session for

R3, since for them it could have the same benefits it had for the students of the R1 group.

Another strategy that the teacher uses a lot with the R1 group is to ask the students lots of

homework that take a long time to be corrected in class, as it is the whole grammar page

they correct at the beginning of the session and which takes almost half of the class, and the

vocabulary page about ‘health’ that the students are asked to do for the next session. This

may work with the R1 students, because they are used to it and they know they are

penalized if they do not bring them all. However, too much homework is not always

advisable if the students are likely to need the help of the teacher, as it could happen with

grammar activities (Perrenoud, 2006). In any case, it cannot possibly work with the R3 group,

since these students are not motivated to do a lot of work by themselves and need the

teacher to guide them. That is another reason to believe that a variety of tasks should be

alternated during the session so the students feel stimulated and feel they are doing a lot of

work without needing to finish it at home.

My suggestion to vary this session so that it is not as monotonous for the students as the

one of the 4th

of April given to the teacher before starting the session, resided in the idea of

having a while-task during the video. This suggestion of lengthening the task of watching a

video that the teacher only expected to be introductory, by turning it into a dictation game,

appeared to be effective for the students to remember the new vocabulary longer, at least

until the end of the session. It also compensated the distribution of time during the two

tasks, the one of the video and the one on the computer, making the one of the video more

productive, and the computer one shorter and less monotonous. Still, these two tasks could

have been improved in order to be more effective and could have included issues done in

the R1 group session, as I suggest in the next section. One of these issues is the practice of

grammar, which as can be seen, is given a lot of importance in the R1 session, but is not

mentioned at all in the R3 one. The teacher told me that the students had worked with the

‘going to’ concept in other sessions I had not been able to attend, so it is not that the R3

groups do not tackle grammar issues at all. Apparently, the teacher likes to have sessions

with R3 devoted only to vocabulary, maybe because of the easiness of just focusing on one

particular issue. It is not bad to focus a lot on the vocabulary, since there are Second

Language Acquisition studies that prove that a good base of vocabulary helps students to be

more fluent in their second language (Hilton, 2008) and also improves their pronunciation

intelligibility (Bundgaard-Nielsen, Best, Kroos & Tyler, 2012), rather than a good base of

grammar with poor vocabulary knowledge. Still, it would only be beneficial for the students

20

if they had the possibility of remembering the new learned grammar concepts in every

session even if it is briefly, so they are recapitulated and better processed in their long-term

memory.


As I explained in the didactic suggestions section for the session of the 4th

of April, I propose

to instil some routines for all the sessions. One of them could be done at the beginning of

the class, in which the teacher, instead of explaining the main task of the day first thing, she

could start an stimulating conversation about an interesting issue related to the topic of the

day. So, in the same way that in the previous session I suggested talking about the work

situation in Spain and how it affected to the students, in this one I suggest bringing the topic

of health to the students in a way that can catch their attention. Another thing that would

be advisable doing first of all would be to decide what vocabulary we really want the

students to learn. If the video we want to play to the students includes American words such

as ‘band-aid’, ‘bruise’, ‘bump’ or ‘fever’, then the teacher should make sure that she uses

them when giving examples and that they appear in the rest of activities, since the repetition

of a consistent vocabulary in the input throughout the same session increases the chances of

being processed in the long-term memory of the students. Therefore, if the video is used in

the session, examples of the pre-task opening questions that the teacher makes to activate

the student’s schemata could be: “have you recently been ill?”,“what do you do at home

when you have a fever?”, “when you have a cut on your finger, do you use a band-aid?”, etc.

After the conversation with the students, in which the topic is then clear for them, and the

new vocabulary has been commented on orally, then the video task is explained in a way the

students find it easy to understand. The teacher tells the students that some of the words

they have been talking about will appear in the video, and that what they have to do is to try

to write down as many as they can on their notebooks so at the end of it they can say who

has caught more. The fact that the new vocabulary has appeared at the beginning of the

session should make it easier for the students to catch the words, and shorter, so there is

more time for other activities during the session. Also, the fact that the goal of the task was

explicitly described, instead of just saying that they were going to watch a video, probably

makes the students less doubtful about the age at which the video should be aimed.

Instead of continuing the session by going to the computers and working individually, the

teacher could encourage them to work in groups – since the students attending the class are

always around 8 or 9, never more than 10, the groups could be made of four or five

students. This way, the students that normally have trouble working alone and get more

distracted, will feel the help of their classmates and be more satisfied with their own

21

contributions. Therefore, I would propose that the teacher prepared her own activity, had it

printed so they did not need the computer, and gave a pocket dictionary to each group if

needed. The activity suggested could be the “pencil in the middle” Llapis al mig (Pujolàs,

2008), in which every group has a piece of paper and every member has to write the answer

to one question or problem appearing in this paper. Before writing it, the student has to

read the problem aloud and make sure that his/her classmates help with contributions, until

the whole group reaches a consensus about the answer. An example of an activity with

sentences to be completed can be found in appendix IX.

The activity would be comprehensive if the teacher asked the students to remember the

meaning of ‘going to’ and asked them to use it every time they answered a part of theirs on

the piece of paper by saying first “I’m going to answer_____”. This way, the students would

be practising their grammar and vocabulary at the same time, and using their English in a

realistic situation, that is to say, with an obvious objective. To finish this session I would

suggest getting the students’ chairs in the shape of half a circle so they all could see the

teacher in the middle, and have a last class conversation of not more than five minutes –

using both Catalan and English – in which all the class activities could be recapitulated and

reflected about. Some questions that could be asked are “what did we do?”, “how did we do

it?”, “how did you feel?”, “if I did that activity again, what would you change?” etc. This

reflection at the end of every session could be very beneficial for the students to be more

aware of their work carried out in class and their own useful participation, and consequently,

to increase then their self-confidence. Therefore, I would propose this final activity as

another routine the students could get used to do after every session.

Session three – 18th/April

� Observations:

The R1 group session started once more with the teacher checking that everybody had done

the homework. This time was exceptional because, apart from asking the usual homework,

which was to correct the page 77 of the student’s book, the second grammar part of the unit

dealing with the modal ‘should’ (similar to appendix V), the teacher had also given some

optional homework. This voluntary homework was a photocopy with vocabulary activities to

do with jobs on one side, and with sickness and health vocabulary on the other (appendix X).

The students that completed the homework, who were the majority, got an extra point for

the next evaluation. After checking the homework, they started correcting page 77, and

surprisingly, one or two students asked once more the meaning of ‘going to’. The teacher

explained that again, and afterwards, the use of ‘should’ so it became clear for the whole

class. Then, the photocopy was corrected too. The main task of the session appeared to be

to keep doing activities from the book in order to revise for the exam. The teacher asked to

22

do page 117 from the workbook, which was to complete repetitive grammar activities

dealing with ‘going to’ and ‘should’, and make questions if the students had any doubts. For

those who finished before the end of the class, the teacher asked them to already start

vocabulary activities from unit 7 from the student’s book.

For the R3 group session, the teacher thought it would be enough if the students were able

to complete the same photocopy that the R1 group had as optional homework (appendix X).

However, the students found themselves again involved in a long and boring task translating

lists of words from the photocopy with the computers. Therefore, most of them just

completed the side of sickness and health, going very slowly, and wasting a lot of time by

talking to other classmates instead of working individually.


The R1 session was spent completing and correcting many activities from the book, whereas

the R3 was spent trying to complete just one activity that for the students seemed incredibly

long. The R1 students are used to having to deal with a lot of mechanical activities, which

they know are similar to the ones that will appear in the exam. On the other hand, the R3

students find having to do many mechanical activities by themselves very disheartening.

They do not have the incentive the R1 students have, that if they know how to complete the

activities they will pass the exam and therefore the subject. Still, the methods used to teach

English to the R1 group are not always effective, because by passing these exams, the

students may be learning English grammar and vocabulary, but not acquiring it and

practising it in a real way. However, the teacher feels obliged to evaluate the students with

these written exams decided by the English department of the centre and, therefore, to

make the students practice with mechanical fill-in activities.

As the DECRET 143/2007 set by the Catalan Government’s Education Department establishes,

all the basic competences should be developed in every subject, including the

communication skills, especially in the case of the second language subject. Taking into

account that the English subject is given only three hours a week, actually a very short

amount of time to learn a second language, it would be advisable to set different kinds of

activities in one session, as I already suggested for the previous class. Every session should

include at least one activity that tackled the practice of the speaking and listening skills and

maybe a short one that tackled the practice of writing skills, even if they are not the main

task of the session in question. Teachers should not forget that to get their students to

acquire the English language in order to be able to communicate with other people is the

main goal when teaching this subject.

23

In any case, the teacher is not in the least forced to prepare the R3 students with lots of fill-

in grammar activities from the book to pass an specific exam, so I would suggest that the

teacher took the advantage of this and planned the session with more real English situations

in which the students could use the language in a more practical way. As a rule, I think it

would be beneficial for the students to reduce the amounts of vocabulary appearing in the

activities, so they had time to process the new knowledge in class, and then they could put it

into practice in pairs or small groups, or even the whole class sitting all together in the shape

of half a circle, as I have suggested previously in this paper. This is more than advisable in

this particular session, since the R3 students were not able to finish both sides of the

photocopy they were asked to complete due to the long lists of words they included and

which the students found dull to translate. It is true that some words had already appeared

in the two previous sessions described in this paper, such as ‘broken arm’ or ‘cut finger’, but

the teacher did not establish a relation between what the students had learned in the

previous session and what they were going to learn in this one. The students were only

asked to sit in front of the computers and complete the activities, the goals of which they did

not quite understand until they had translated most of the words.

It is a probable cause of school failure to expect that the students do all the logical

connections between what they learned, what they are learning and what they will learn,

even if for the teacher they seem evident. That is why it is important that the teacher always

makes these connections, and also that helps the students learn to use the language as an

instrument to understand the class experiences in a joint and coherent way. Another

problem with the materials provided by the teacher, as I mention for a second time in this

paper, is that some of the vocabulary appearing in the photocopy were things that the

students had learned in the previous session but named with a different word, such as

‘temperature’ instead of ‘fever’, or ‘sticking plaster’ instead of ‘band-aid’. I would suggest

two possibilities, either the teacher made an explicit connection between the words learned

in the previous session with the ones they have to learn in this one, or that she modified the

photocopy so the students saw they already knew some of the words of the activity and felt

motivated to learn the ones that they did not yet. In the next description of an alternative

session I opt for the former option (appendix XI).

24


Since the R3 students had already done some vocabulary dealing with ‘Health and illnesses’,

the first routine of the session to activate the schemata could be centred on asking the

students what they remember from the previous session in which they tackled such

vocabulary. The teacher could also ask questions such as “what is that thing you put on your

finger if you have a cut?”, or “what do you use to know your temperature?” This way, the

teacher is recapitulating the previous vocabulary while introducing the new one: “Who

knows what ‘temperature’ is?”, “What would you take if you have a high fever?” etc. After

this introduction to the session, the photocopy they are supposed to complete should look

easier for the students. Still, to make the task seem less dull for the students, it could be

carried out by cooperative work so, as I mentioned in the previous session, the students feel

more confident with the activities by sharing the work with their classmates than just facing

it alone. In this case I would suggest using the activity called “the number” El número

(Pujolàs, 2008), in which the class is divided into small groups, but every student has a

number of their own. So, when the activity is finished, the teacher takes a number written in

a piece of paper from a bag at random and the student who has that number has to give the

solution to the rest of the class. This way, it is made sure that every student has worked as

much as the others because nobody knows who will have to explain it to the class until the

time given to do the activity is over.

To adapt this pedagogic strategy to our task, we could divide the class into two groups, and

ask one of them to complete the first activity of the photocopy – the one in which the

symptoms and the remedies need to be related – and ask the other group to do the second

activity – the one in which the sentences have to be completed with a verb (appendix X).

This way, the activity becomes less dull and can be completed in less time. However, so all

the work is not done by the same student of a group, as it could happen, the students need

to know that after this activity, one person of one group will go with a person from the other

so they can put in common the answers of both activities and be able to deal with the next

task.

From the moment in which the students get in pairs after completing the activities of the

photocopy, they all get an individual number and start the next task, which is to create

sentences combining the answers of the first previous activity with the sentences of the

second one. Then, if one student has the answer “cut finger – band-aid” and the other

student has “put on a band-aid”, they can form the sentence “If you have a cut finger, you

should put on a band-aid” and write it down on their notebooks. When the teacher explains

the task, also explains the meaning of the modal “should”, which at this particular moment

of the session should not be difficult to add to the task. This is so because, at this moment,

25

the students are confident with the vocabulary, so to understand some new grammar is a

manageable challenge. It is always advisable to create zones of proximal development like

this, because it makes it easier for the students to build their learning process. By including

the modal “should” in the task, the R3 students are including the practice of grammar

concepts that the R1 students worked with in this session.

After the teacher has let the pairs of students some time to write as many sentences as

possible, then she can start saying numbers randomly and one student after the other can

read aloud one of the sentences they have written. Still, the goal of this task remains a bit

poor in terms of being significant for the students and a bit mechanical, far from the idea of

creating real communicative situations. Therefore, the idea would be that the students could

practice these sentences they have written in pairs in a realistic situation. The second side of

the photocopy dealing with jobs is too difficult to ask the students to do it in what is left of

time in this hypothetical session I am suggesting, especially if it is without a good scaffolding

preparation as it has just been done with the topic of ‘health and illnesses’. However, what

the students already know about the ‘jobs and professions’ topic could be refreshed and

used to create this realistic context we need. This could be a great example for the students

to see that everything they learn in the English classroom is relevant and can be useful at any

time. Therefore, the teacher would check that students remember previous knowledge

about the topic by asking questions such as “What is the name of the person that cures

illnesses?”, “Do you think you are going to be a doctor?”, “What about being a nurse?”, etc.

Then, she would explain the task to the students, which is to create a mini-dialogue in pairs

including the sentence they have prepared before, and represent it in front of the class. For

example – A: Good morning doctor/B: Good morning Andrea, what’s wrong? /A: I have a

high fever/B: Well, if you have a high fever, you should drink cold water. /A: I tried that/B:

Then, you should take an aspirin.

We could also tell the students the objectives of this task and explain why it can be useful to

have this knowledge and be able to use it one day in a real situation. We could say that now,

if they are ever ill in a foreign country, they can go to the doctor’s and say what’s wrong with

them in English. To make evident these relations between what is learned at school and how

this knowledge could be used in real life can only be positive for the stimulation of the wish

for more knowledge (Perrenoud, 1999). Finally, I would include the routine to recapitulate

and reflect about the session I had already suggested for the end of the previous session.

That every session ends with an opportunity for the students to give their opinion about the

just received class is a wonderful way for the teacher to evaluate what worked and what

could be improved. For the students, it means to be able to feel they also have a voice in

their education, something that can positively contribute to their self-confidence and

motivation for the subject.

26

Exam Unit 6

During the other sessions between the 18th

and 25th

of April that I could not attend, the

students from both groups R1 and R3 took an exam to be assessed from unit 6. Having a look

at the two different exams, it can be seen the modifications that the R1 exam undergoes in

order to fulfil the expectations the teacher has of the R3 students (appendices XII and XIII).

Both exams follow the same structure with a vocabulary, a grammar and a reading section.

There is no listening or speaking task, which means that they are incomplete in terms of

assessing all the communication skills needed to acquire a second language. The activities in

the R3 exam are simplified even though they attempt to assess the same vocabulary and

grammar concepts, including words related to the ‘jobs’ and ‘illnesses’ topics, the future

tense with ‘going to’ and the modal verbs ‘should’ and ‘must’, the latter modal having been

studied in sessions I did not attend.

Most of the grammar activities in the R3 exam are multiple-choice, which apparently makes

the activities easier for the students to understand. However, the multiple-choice system

can be answered completely randomly, which makes the activities fail as a reliable

assessment of the real grammar level of the students. The text from the R3 reading section is

the same as the one appearing in the R1 exam, but shorter. The R3 group did not practice

their reading skills during the unit 6 sessions so, even though the text is simplified, the

students had difficulty dealing with it in an exam situation. Therefore, this exam’s construct

lacks validity for both groups: it does not assess listening and speaking skills, even if the R1

group practices them during the sessions; and it assesses reading skills, even if the R3 group

never practices them during the sessions.

� Didactic suggestions for the R3 exam:

Knowing that the exam is not the most important grade in order to pass the subject in the

case of the R3 students, the teacher should be more creative and include more real English

when designing it. Also, provided that the students could practice their listening and writing

skills during the unit 6 sessions, I would suggest including fewer mechanical grammar

activities and have different grammar concepts mixed in one activity so the students had

time to do a listening and a short writing as well. The teacher should avoid creating an

atmosphere of anxiety by explaining to the students that this test is just an evaluation to

check the progress they are doing with their English. In fact, the teacher should involve the

students in a global discussion of what kind of activities should appear in the unit test in

order to make the students more interested in their own evaluation. She could remind them

of all the different tasks they have been doing during the unit and explain that it is fair that

27

similar activities appear in the exam for the teacher to know if they have improved from the

last time they started working on such activities. It could also be a good idea to devote one

previous session to the exam to talk about the kind of activities that the teacher is planning

to include, and discuss with the students which ones they find more difficult, in order to

repeat them in class if possible before the actual day of the test. Therefore, the students

would feel more comfortable with the examination and more motivated to fulfil the

expectations the teacher has made explicit and attainable for them.

Session four – 25th/April

� Observations:

In the R1 session, the teacher wanted to introduce the first grammar part of unit 7, the

future tense using the auxiliary ‘will’, but this time she wanted to tackle the grammar in a

different way than just following the book. She gave the students a photocopy that

explained how to read the future of a person by having a look at the main lines of their hand

(appendix XIV). It included a guidance to do a prediction of someone, and a prediction of

someone’s partner. The students easily understood the use of ‘will’ and ‘won’t’ and it did

not take a long time for them to be able to orally practice the predictions. The teacher also

had the idea of making the students prepare a dialogue in groups that could be performed

for the rest of the class. During the rest of the session, the students got into groups and

started to prepare it so they could do the performance the next Monday. They thought of

bringing clothes to dress up and decided it could be a wonderful opportunity to be recorded

with a video camera. The majority of the students got motivated with the task, since it

involved a change of routine from just working with the book to fulfilling an exciting project

in which they could take decisions and use English in an authentic way. For homework the

students were given a photocopy with a cartoon that showed a story of a man and a fortune-

teller with no dialogues. The students were expected to write a short text explaining what

they thought was happening in the cartoon.

To start the session with R3, the teacher presented a very illustrative Power Point that

introduced vocabulary and expressions having to do with the different stages of life, such as

‘grow up’, ‘move home’, ‘start school’, ‘leave school’, ‘get a job’, ‘get married’, ‘have

children’ and ‘die’. She explained the meaning and use of every expression appearing in the

slides, adding some examples in which the students were the protagonists. Therefore, in the

case of ‘be born’, the teacher would ask the students to write the expression down in the

notebooks, along with the definition and an example with the name of one of the students:

‘Andrea was born in 1998’. Then, the teacher explained the use of ‘will’ and ‘won’t’ and the

difference with ‘going to’ in order to express the future tense. She explained the form on the

28

blackboard and put examples such as ‘Andrea will come to my house’ or ‘Roberto won’t

come to my house’.

After the explanations, the teacher gave a piece of paper to every student and explained

how to origami it in order to create a paku paku (appendix XV) which is kind of a flower

paper that depending on how it is opened – depending on what colour and number a

partner says – it opens and gives you some information or another you have written inside.

The idea was that students wrote some expressions learned in the Power Point and

practiced the future tense with ‘will’ acting as if they were fortune-tellers to their

classmates. They were not very creative when writing their own future predictions, so they

wrote very similar sentences to those given by the teacher at the beginning of the session. In

order to practice the oral activity, one example could have been that a student asked to

another ‘choose a colour and a number’, the other said ‘red and two’, and the other read

from the paku paku ‘you will die in 2040’. However, students ran out of time when preparing

the origami, so they did not have time to practice the oral part.


What the R1 students were preparing in this session could be considered a short English

project (involving two or three sessions), which has the advantages of motivating the

students into completing a particular objective and be creative in the process. The students

feel they have a responsibility organizing their own parts of the play, they are developing

communication skills, and they are learning to work in groups. Setting a project is a

wonderful way to motivate the students and develop their skills to learn by themselves.

Also, it should not be forgotten that the experiences that are lived emotionally more

intensely are better recalled, so hopefully, the new grammar and vocabulary they learn

during the project will be remembered in a longer term. It is very probable that the R3

students need more help from the teacher to progress in a project, but still, it is a learning

strategy that should be used with them as well, so they eventually develop abilities they

sometimes lack, such as work autonomy or decision-making.

The Power Point used at the beginning of the R3 session was a very good introduction to the

session, in order to illustrate the new vocabulary to be worked with. In fact, it could have

been good visual support if the teacher would have started with the opening routine I have

been suggesting in the previous sessions, the conversational strategy to catch the students’

attention and to start connecting their previous knowledge to the new one to be learned in

this session. However, when the teacher gives all the examples of sentences made from the

expressions directly to the students, she is disregarding the possibility of asking the students

to try to construct them by themselves, and therefore, the chance of going through a

29

cognitive process that makes the students better understand the new knowledge. The

teacher should think their students capable of doing such a task, since they already have a

starting, some tools and strategies already given and some previous knowledge, which

makes it possible that the student makes the learning process of new knowledge. In this

case, the students have the tools because the teacher has shown them the new terms and

vocabulary they need to create the sentences. They could also have had some previous

knowledge if they had been working with the modal ‘should’, as I suggest doing in the

previous session. This is so, because the construction of ‘should + infinitive’ is like the

construction of ‘will + infinitive’. Telling this to the students and guiding them on the

blackboard by using some activation strategies such as asking them to try to finish

incomplete sentences, so they have a starting point to construct with the language, is a

better stimulus to activate their learning process than just telling the students to copy some

examples and expect they completely understand them and are able to repeat them.

As for the task with the origami construction and the oral activity to tell the future to a

classmate, as good as it is for the students to be creative and practice their communication

skills, there is no reason not to be enriched as a project with the students being recorded as

the final objective, just as it is done with the R1 group. The whole task will be more

interesting and fun for the students if they know that after writing their sentences and

practising, they will be able to perform them as in a play, dressing up and being recorded. Of

course, from my own experience trying to prepare similar activities during my Practicum II, I

know that there are students who like to be recorded, and others that do not. Therefore, it

should be optional and the teacher should explain that no one but her will have the

recording, which will never end up in the Internet and will only be used to be played in class.

If the teacher had time to play the recordings in class and the students watched themselves

speaking in English, at the same time that they are congratulated by the teacher for doing a

good job, the students could gain a lot of self-confidence and motivation to keep improving

their English.


As I have explained in the previous section, the session could start with a conversational

opening routine with the Power Point as support material, in order to catch their attention

and connect their previous knowledge to the new one. The next step could be the

construction of examples by the students with the help of the teacher on the blackboard,

also explained in the previous section. Once this is done and the students start feeling

comfortable with the future tense with ‘will’, the teacher would explain that they are going

to do a project that is going to last two sessions, the current one and the next one, the

objective of which is to perform a play in pairs written by themselves. The story has to

30

revolve around a situation in which a fortune teller tells the future to someone, and it can

involve doing an origami paku paku, to read a palm – they could follow the photocopy used

by the R1 group if they liked (appendix XIV) – or any other way they can think of in order to

tell the future. It is advisable to give choices to the students so they feel they also participate

in the elaboration of their own work structure, something that makes them feel much more

responsible. This being the case, the teacher has to adopt a much more flexible attitude

towards the work of the students, and her task has to be to guide, help and, especially,

motivate the students during the project.

During the rest of the current session, the students should choose their partner and

elaborate the idea of their story. They should think if they could dress up with some clothes

they may have at home or bring some objects that can give an atmosphere to the play. Then,

they should write some dialogues with the help of the dictionary and the teacher when she

is asked or simply passes by their table to have a look at the progress of the work. Five

minutes before the end of the class, the routine of reflecting about the session should focus

about the progress of the project and for the students to comment if they are enjoying it.

Also, they could talk about their expectations of what they think their performance is going

to be like and how well they think they will do it.

The second session should start with the teacher recapitulating what they did during the

previous session and how this second one will progress. The students should devote the first

half of the session to practice their dialogues while the teacher goes table by table to see

they are correct and to ask the students if they have any difficulties. During the second half

of the session, every couple of students would perform their short play and would be

recorded if they liked. This is normally a moment of fun but also of tension for the students

who are performing, so the teacher should give them as much positive support as possible,

and should ask the rest of students to do the same. When the plays have been performed, it

is a moment to make a reflection about the whole project. The students could be asked how

they felt during the performance, if they liked the experience, what plays they liked most

from those performed by their other classmates, etc., always encouraging them to use the

English language, even if it is mixed with Catalan. The teacher should guide the conversation

so the students can compare their opinions at a time, and listen to their classmates when it

is not their turn.

31

Session five – 2nd/May

� Observations:

In this session, the R1 group started correcting a reading they had for homework (appendix

XVI). The text covered expressions having to do with stages of life, similar to the ones that

the R3 group did in the previous session described in this paper. However, this reading was

very interesting because it also compared the expected life stages of the UK, Spain, Japan,

the USA, Iceland and other countries, which meant that students were also studying content

related with multiculturalism. After the reading, students were asked to do a listening about

life ambitions, in which a girl and a boy explain what they expected in life and what they had

really achieved after fourteen years (appendix XVII). The teacher played the listening twice,

and in the second time, she stopped the track after every sentence to make sure the

meaning was understood. After clarifying expressions such as ‘I didn’t become a DJ’ or ‘my

dreams came true’, little by little the students got the information and were able to

complete the activities.

Then, the teacher thought of a different and motivating way to make students participate in

the revision of the form, meaning and use of the future tense used with ‘will’ in comparison

with ‘going to’. She said she would give an extra point to the student that would explain that

in a perfect way, but the first to try would be allowed by a raffle. The teacher would write a

number from one to ten and the first to say it would try. This peculiar way of asking students

to remember grammar seemed to be quite effective and, taking into account the attention

the teacher got, once the answers were achieved, the students probably learned better the

grammar than in a traditional and sometimes boring for them oral explanation on the

blackboard by the teacher. Finally, the students were asked to complete page 88 from the

student’s book for homework, which dealt with the future tense with ‘will’ in a similar way

to the page appearing in appendix V.

As for the R3 group, in this session they did the second part of vocabulary of unit 7, which

had to do with musical instruments. The teacher had skipped this part in the case of R1

because of its lack of difficulty and in order to have more time to make progress with the

grammar of the book and introduce the present perfect, something that the teacher did not

expected to do with R3. The work that the R3 group had to do was to translate – with the

online dictionary in the computer – and answer a series of questions in relation to music that

they were given in a photocopy (appendix XVIII). Even though music and musical instruments

could be an easy topic to work with in English, the sentences that the students had to deal

with were quite complicated ones. However, the problem with this activity was not probably

its difficulty, but that the list of questions was very long and dull, and the students got bored

32

and made the time to finish them longer than needed. Therefore, there was no more time in

this session to do more activities.


In this session, the R1 group worked with the topic of ‘life stages’, the one with which the

teacher had started the previous session with R3. However, with the R1 group, the teacher

used activities from the book that dealt with multiculturalism. That perspective of the topic

could have been tackled as well with the R3 students, but it was not, even though it would

have been positive to develop cross-cultural and self awareness in a group in which there is

quite an ethnical diversity that sometimes may create conflict in class (Philips, 2001).

Another thing that the R3 students do not normally do is readings, writings or listening tasks.

They may have been watching videos, such as the one of the previous session, but they only

listened to individual words or expressions, and never to a real dialogue. The same was true

of the writings and the readings: the English teacher assumed that if the students learned to

write or read chunks of language, it was the same as writing or reading several sentences

forming a text in one go. If the students do not practice these skills in a gradual way and

always towards the goal of writing and reading more complex texts every time, it will be

understandable that when they find a text in an exam, they do not have strategies to face it.

The connections between how to deal with chunks of language in order to reach the real

objective, which is to deal with authentic texts (readings and listening situations they could

find in real life) are not always obvious to the students, so the teacher has to help them to

make the connections. For this reason, I suggest including a writing task on this 2nd

of May

session, a listening task on the 7th

of May session and a reading task on the 16th

of May

session, and then give ideas on how to deal with the practice of these different skills. As for

the long music questions that the R3 students had to do for this session, I would propose to

use them as an introductory task. Before the start of the class, I had suggested to the

teacher that these questions could have been used to do an interview activity, in which the

students asked each other as if they were journalists. She thought this to be a good idea, but

the list was too long, and for when the students got to translate all the questions, the class

hour had finished. That is why I would reduce the amount of questions so every student had

to deal with fewer of them, they could practice them orally, and there was also time to do

the writing task I want to propose.

33


The session could start with the opening routine in which the teacher encouraged the

students to comment on the first four music questions from the list (appendix XVIII). They

would then brainstorm on music genres and also talk about new technologies such as the

MP3 and other formats they knew. As for the other eight questions from the photocopy, so

it is not such a long list for the students to translate them, the teacher could use the strategy

of the Peer Tutoring (Torrego, Negro 2012). This is a cooperative work strategy in which one

student that has some knowledge can teach it as if he/she was the teacher to another

student that does not have that knowledge. It is very effective for the inclusive education

because it has very positive advantages for both students, not only for the one that is being

taught. It teaches the students some important values such as that we all learn from each

other, and that the teacher is not the only one who has the knowledge in the class, so the

students feel mature enough to help their classmates when needed and, also, let others help

her/him without feeling proud. A student can use vocabulary that is easier to understand by

another student, which becomes very positive for the latter in order to learn new

knowledge; on the other hand, the student that is helping, feels more responsible and

involved in the class, which increases his/her self-esteem.

To adapt the Peer Tutoring to this session, I would suggest that both students taught and

were taught. Therefore, I would put students into pairs and would ask each of them to

translate four of the eight remaining questions from the photocopy. After the time given by

the teacher to do so, both students would get together and one would explain the meaning

of his/her four sentences to the other student, and then vice versa. This would make the

task of working with the questions much more dynamic and interesting for the students, and

they would not be working alone, so they would practice their communication skills. Once

this was done, the teacher could change the pairs of students, so nobody worked with the

same person again, and could ask them to interview each other with the questions and write

the answers given by their classmates.

After that, the task could be to write a report that looked like a short text with the answers

of their classmates. The teacher could help them have a common start for the text, and then

the students could work individually, facing the difficulty of writing a text by themselves.

While they were working, the teacher could go table-by-table suggesting improvements to

their texts but in a way that rewarded the already progress of the task, and consequently,

motivated them to continue (Castellà, Comelles, Cros, Vilà 2007). If there was some time left

before the end of the class, the teacher should not hesitate to congratulate them for their

work and even make the suggestion of having the texts hung up in the class on a poster

board with a nice title saying ‘music in the English class’ or something similar the students

34

wanted to paint. To decorate the classroom with work that the students have done is a great

way to create a nice environment in which the students get motivated to make progress

every day.

Session six – 6th/May

� Observations:

Due to the education strike on the 9th

of May, I decided to go to the centre on the 7th

. The R3

group had the class at 9:00 o’clock and in this session they did not have access to computers.

The teacher started revising the form of the future tense with ‘will’ on the blackboard and

asked the students to copy the same in their notebooks. The main task of the session was to

watch an extract from the film ‘I, Robot’ and complete some activities. This task was already

prepared in an educational blog created to practice English grammar by watching films

(appendix XIX). The pre-task was to answer eight questions about the future in 2035, the

year in which the film is set. The students liked the activity and the fact that they were able

to participate, even if they found it hard to do it all in English. Then the teacher asked the

students to write an answer for question number two, in which they had to imagine their

city in the year 2035 and think what changes they thought it would undergo. Some of their

ideas were a bit negative sometimes due to the current crisis Spain is going through, but

some students were very clever, with comments such as that “Sabadell won’t have shops

because people will buy on the Internet”.

After the pre-task, the main activity prepared in the website made the students watch the

video and then change the sentences that were not true into the negative, as it can be seen

in appendix XIX. The teacher, to make sure that the students did the whole activity, asked

the students to copy all the sentences before watching the video. It took some time for the

students to do so, and some students complained about it because they thought they were

too many sentences. Then, they watched the video, but the scene was very difficult to follow

due to the fact that what they could hear was the narrator talking very fast and saying

information that was not relevant for the exercise. Then, the students realized that only by

watching the images they were able to answer the activity. Unfortunately, the teacher

realized that some students had not copied all the sentences, but still, she proceeded to

their correction. For homework, the teacher asked them to turn all the sentences of this

activity into the future tense with ‘will’ and write them in their notebooks.

The R1 group started correcting three grammar pages similar to others shown in other

appendices that they had for homework in order to revise the future tense with ‘will and

35

won’t’. Once that was finished, the teacher introduced the first conditional on the

blackboard using mostly the Catalan language. After some examples the teacher gave so the

students try to finish them, they started understanding its use and structure: “You _______ a

heart disease if you eat too much meat (will get)”, “If you _______ so much sugar in your

coffee, you won’t put on weight (don’t put)”, etc. After doing many more examples like

these taken from the Internet with the whole class, the teacher decides to put and end to

the session by asking the students to do the first page of activities dealing with the first

conditional of the unit 7 from the student’s book.


For the session of the R3 group, the teacher had thought that the activity from the movie

segments website could be a good listening task, but in fact, it was not a task in which they

could develop such skills, since the activities could be completed only with the images of the

video. In the listening task carried out by the R1 students on the 2nd

of May session, there

was a gradual awareness of the language they could hear by playing the track several times

and stopping at different points of it. The teacher should choose some listening materials

more adapted to the level of English of the R3 students that could provide them with a

learning experience more similar to the one had by the R1 students. Still, the pre-task to the

video in which the students commented on the possible changes in society by the year 2035

was an interesting topic that engaged them very productively.

Nonetheless, when the students got to the moment in which they had to copy all the

sentences that had to be checked while watching the film, they lost time and interest.

Against what the teacher believed, copying all those sentences did not guarantee that the

students paid attention to their meaning, because they mechanically wrote them as fast as

possible, and such moment certainly stopped the flow of the class. The teacher could have

checked the meaning of every sentence on the blackboard with the help of the students

instead, before and in between the different times she played the video, to make sure every

student was aware of what was being asked in every sentence. I suggest using a listening

from the student’s book used by the R1 group instead of the video from the Internet the

teacher uses. It deals with the topic of musical instruments, which is ideal because it

continues with the topic from the previous session, and also, fits in the actual English level of

the R3 students (appendix XX).

36


The session could start with the teacher asking the students to recapitulate what they had

done in the class in which they talked about music – provided they had followed the

alternative session – and to remind her who had been interested in learning to play a

musical instrument (that was one of the questions that was worked in the class that day).

The teacher could describe a situation in which they decide to learn an instrument and go to

a shop in which they have to buy it in English. She could challenge the students to ask her

questions as if they wanted to buy an instrument from her, and when a student said

something right in English that could be used in such a situation, she could write it on the

blackboard for the other students to learn it as well. To connect this speaking activity with

the listening, she could tell the students that they were going to listen to a conversation in

which a child like them wants to buy a guitar. In order to motivate the students, she could

try to convince them that by analysing the recording they were to learn very useful language

to be able to shop in English. As I have mentioned before in this paper, to make the objective

of the task explicit to the students helps to awaken their interest to learn.

The teacher could ask the students just to listen with attention and try to remember any

words or chunks of language they could for the first time she played the recording. Then, she

could write these words on the blackboard and congratulate the student that heard them.

The second play could be done as the teacher did the R1 group, by stopping the recording

after every sentence so the students had time to process what they heard and could repeat

it. At this point, the teacher could give a photocopy with the transcription of the listening in

a photocopy and ask them to read it in pairs. It could be suggested that the students thought

of a different musical instrument instead of a guitar and they wrote their own dialogue in

which someone wanted to buy the instrument in question. This work could be done in pairs,

and once the teacher passed table-by-table helping the students and checking their

dialogues were right, the students could perform what they had written in front of the

classmates. The teacher could compliment those students that tried to be more creative

with their dialogues in order to motivate them and make them aware that she actually cared

about their work pieces. The session could finish with the discussion routine in which

students shared their experience with the listening and said if they had found it easy or

difficult, and the teacher could conclude with the idea that the more they practiced their

listening skills, the more they would find English an easy language to understand.

37

Session seven – 16th/May

� Observations:

The R1 session starts correcting a photocopy they had for homework about the Murphy’s

Law in which they completed sentences using the first conditional by describing a bad

consequence to an action (appendix XXI). Then they corrected some sentences of the same

style they had to write from scratch. On the side of the photocopy, they had to write ten

sentences from scratch about superstitions with the first conditional. Before the teacher

asked for volunteers to read their sentences, she asked several students if they believed in

superstitions, which lead to a productive class discussion about the topic. After that, they

corrected another grammar page they had to do at home with many fill-in activities also

dealing with the first conditional and similar to appendix V.

During the correction of all this homework, the students kept asking questions about the

first conditional because they had not processed its meaning and use, even after having

done lots of grammar fill-in activities. For this reason, the teacher decided to devote the rest

of the class asking more activities for the students to solve their doubts. However, the

students seemed a bit bored with so much mechanical activity, so many of them started

misbehaving by talking among themselves instead of working individually. The teacher felt

that she was losing the control of the class so she threatened the class by saying that if they

did not stay in silence she would put more pages from the book for homework apart from

the ones she was going to give.

The R3 session also started with the correction of a grammar page from their Interface

Basics book with fill-in and multiple-choice activities dealing with the first conditional

(appendix XXII). However, the teacher discovered that nobody had done the last two

activities, some because they did not know they had to do them, and others because they

had found them too difficult. Therefore, the teacher asked them to do them in class using

the Google translator if they liked. I was there to help the students to solve the activities and

noticed that most of the students had great trouble with activity number four. It was first

conditional questions divided into two and mixed up for the students to join them back. I

had to explain that to each student and sometimes several times because they did not

understand it the first time. Once a student had this grammar page finished, the teacher

asked them to continue until the end of the session with online activities such as the ones

appearing in appendix XXIII. Because these activities were difficult as well, I stayed in the

same situation as before and had to give lots of individual explanations about how to

complete them.

38


Just as I explained in the session of the 18th

of May, the fact that the teacher has to

constantly repeat the use of the grammar concepts the R1 students learn, proves that this

kind of repetitive activities she asks the students to do are not effective. It also proves that if

the R3 students have the same problem, maybe in a more conspicuous way that the R1

students due to their lack of motivation to pass the exams, that does not mean that the R3

students are worse students that the ones belonging to the R1 group. It was understandable

that the R3 students had trouble with the activity number four (appendix XXII) because it

was confusing and the students had only started to work with the first conditional two

sessions ago for the first time. Instead of going table-by-table explaining the exercise, the

teacher could have dealt with the activity with the attention of the whole class, both

because it saved time for doing other activities and because it is more pedagogical to explain

problematic concepts with the contribution of the whole class, especially if they are only

eight students.

The topic of the Murphy’s Law or the one of the superstitions are perfect to teach the first

conditional because they help the students understand better the use of such grammar

concept. Also, they are more engaging topics for the students in which they can practice

their writing skills and their creativity by writing their own superstitions, to put an example.

Therefore, I do not think there is a reason not to use these topics with the R3 students as

well, and using the same photocopies as the ones used in the R1 group. However, as I

mentioned in the suggestions section of the 2nd

of May session, I would like to include a

reading activity in this class, so the students practiced all the different language skills during

the unit. A perfect topic for the reading could be the one of the superstitions, or others

related to vocabulary topics worked in previous units, such as the one of the life stages, the

one of ‘jobs and professions’ or even the one of ‘health and illnesses’.

I would include two related factors in order to design the task: the first one that the texts

offered to the students were significant readings, since it is proved that the brain only

activates its more complex areas when it receives messages that make sense to it (Gertrúdix,

2013); secondly, that the students could make choices in their reading task, because

otherwise, such a task will have fewer chances of getting the students involved and make

them find it significant (Perrenoud, 1999). Also, I would not expect students to understand

every single word of the texts they are given and, instead, I would focus on their experience

when facing a new reading in English. A good strategy to gradually make students

comfortable with such an experience could be to ask them to read in groups and negotiate

39

the meaning of the text with their classmates. Therefore, students could put their

knowledge of English in common and enjoy the task of reading together.


The session could start with the opening routine in which the teacher encouraged the

students to comment about superstitions. She could make questions such as if they believed

in superstitions and if they knew any popular ones. The idea could be to write some on the

blackboard by using the first conditional to construct the sentences and finally to draw the

attention of the students to the grammar structure in question. Then, the teacher could

explain the main-task of the day: to read a letter and answer it. The students should feel at

ease with what the teacher expects from them, so they did not feel anxious facing this new

task. In fact, reading a text and writing a letter is an open activity that contributes to the fair

treatment of diversity, because every student can go as far as they can. The teacher could

also explain that, so they were aware of the task’s flexibility and they learned in a relaxed

environment.

The students could get in groups of three or four and could choose one of the three texts

provided by the teacher. The examples of letters I provide in the appendix XXIV are adapted

to the previous knowledge of the students – provided that they have been following the

alternative sessions – and are about topics they have worked with before. The three texts

tackle the future tense with ‘will’, but the first one also revises the future tense with ‘going

to’ and the modal ‘should’, and the other two texts revise the first conditional. Every student

could write their name after the introductory ‘Dear’ at the beginning of the letter and read it

for themselves for at least two minutes. Then, with their group, they could comment on the

letter and draw conclusions about what they think every sentence means.

The teacher could be going table-by-table to give them hints about it. When the time set by

the teacher to do this activity finishes, she could encourage the students to explain their

letter to the rest of the class in turns. Then, she could tell the students that the person that

supposedly wrote that letter is expecting an answer and that they could write it. This writing

should be the proof that the students have understood their readings, and is the perfect

realistic situation to put their communicative skills in practice on the paper. The students

could have the rest of the session to write such letter and have the last five minutes to

comment on their experience dealing with it with the rest of the class. It would be advisable

that the teacher congratulated every student that has made an effort to do the task in order

to motivate them for the next time they do a similar reading-writing activity.

40

CONCLUSIONS

After comparing the description of each of the sessions I attended with their corresponding

didactic proposals designed to fulfil the objectives of this paper, it is by the personal decision

of a teacher to choose to use some of the strategies suggested to improve the learning

experience of their students. Such proposals may seem only moderately changed in respect

to the original sessions, because tasks such as working on a course book’s listening or

working with a vocabulary photocopy already provided by the teacher in the original

sessions are still recommended in this paper. However, I hope readers understand that the

main objective of this project was to adapt these strategies to the students that lack

concentration and academic motivation, such as the 2nd

of ESO R3 group, but without

decreasing the level of English that would be expected from an R1 group.

The alternative sessions suggested for the R3 group now promote the development of all the

communication skills that are important when learning a second language, which are

‘speaking, writing, reading and listening’. These skills may have been worked in the R1 group

but not with the R3 one, because they seemed unconceivable without some proper

adaptation and preparation that this paper is encouraging. Now there is a better connection

between the previous knowledge and the new content made explicit to the students every

day, so they can be more aware of their learning progress and can rectify the belief that

school is boring and useless. The repetitive task of translating words and sentences with the

Google translator is avoided and an alternation of a variety of tasks is suggested instead, in

order to stimulate the student’s participation in class. In short, the sessions for the R3 group

are now more dynamic, interesting and interactive for the students.

What is also relevant in this project’s suggestions is the role of the teacher as a motivator

and mediator of the students and their work with the English language in emotional terms.

As can be seen in the description of the original sessions, many times, teachers just explain

what has to be done at the beginning of the class and hardly ever justify why or specify the

objectives of the task. That way, students understand the English subject as an hour in which

they are forced to work because otherwise the teacher tells them off. Instead, the teacher

should have a closer relation with their students and show that she/he cares about how the

students feel in class, so they found the classroom as a place in which they have a voice and

a right to know what they are learning and for what. That is why in my suggestions I keep

encouraging the teacher to keep a dialogue with the students at least at the beginning and

at the end of the session, in which the teacher can motivate the students about the work to

be done in class, define its objectives and explain why it is useful and good for them. At the

41

same time, the teacher can ask about the students’ preferences and about how they feel

before and after dealing with the tasks, so they eventually find the classroom as a space in

which they can also participate. These strategies belong to the emotional education field,

which is a subject the teachers should learn about and know how to apply in class as much

as possible. Sometimes teachers do not take the time to put it into practice because they

consider that the three hours a week of English should be completely devoted to the

learning of such a language. What they do not understand is that, when the problem is the

lack motivation, students appreciate to know that the teacher really cares about them and

their education, and that very same thing is what encourages the students to fulfil their

teacher’s expectations and, therefore, improve their academic performance.

In general, there has been a real improvement of the teaching-learning process, especially

by the enrichment of the tasks and their change into activities that can make the English

language interesting and motivating for the students. As can be seen throughout the project,

the suggested sessions try to introduce gradual changes to the habits of the students, as it is

the case with the routines or the fact that they have to work in groups. The idea was to turn

the activities into ones that can actually provide the students with a challenge they can

accept and try, so eventually they feel confident enough to go a bit beyond. This way,

students get to feel the satisfaction of having consolidated new knowledge which they know

will be important for their future. Such small achievements, which for the teacher may seem

insignificant at the beginning, eventually, are the key for the students to make the decision

of improving their performance in their English learning process. The development of these

students finally takes us to the goal of the project, which is to give them an ESO certificate

having adapted their education in a way that is not in the least less demanding than that

given to the rest of students, and in which they can acquire all the contents and skills set by

the official curriculum.

However, the alternative sessions proposed in this project have the limitation of just being a

hypothetical development of the students’ learning progress during seven sessions. In real

life, every session needs to be adapted depending on the progress and feedback of the

previous sessions. Therefore, the activities suggested in this project can always be improved

and be better adapted to the students depending on their real progress through the

sessions. Moreover, a teacher’s didactic strategies are perfected with practice and

experience, so it is expected that the ones suggested in this project are just a starting point

and that teachers keep researching and putting in practice new ones that can complement

the present ones.

42

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Barcelona: Graó.

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44

APPENDICES

Appendix I :

STRATEGIES IN THE PROJECT EXPECTED RESULTS

MO

TIV

AT

ION

To make the class topics seem new and

present them in an attractive way. (Escaño,

Gil de la Serna, 2008)

The students’ attention is attracted and they

get more interested in the learning of

English.

To make the students’ experience in the

English class intense and emotional.

(Gallego, Gallego, 2004)

The student’s new knowledge is better

consolidated.

To include significant communicative

situations in the sessions. (Besalú, Tort,

2009)

The student’s attention is attracted and they

are encouraged to participate and be active

in the English class.

To create moments in which the students

can feel their contributions are valuable.

(Thorne, 2008)

The level of the students’ self esteem

improves.

To encourage students to talk about

themselves and listen to others, and reflect

about the classes. (Fukada, Fukuda, Falout

& Murphey, 2011)

Students create new and more positive

expectations with their experience with the

study of English.

TE

AC

HIN

G-L

EA

RN

ING

To alternate different kinds of activities

during the sessions. (Besalú, Tort, 2009)

Students feel more stimulated and willing to

participate in class.

To organize the sessions in terms of time

and space. (Escaño, Gil de la Serna, 2008)

Sessions become more dynamic and

interesting.

To create class discussions and moments of

reflection. (Ferreiro, 2006)

Students feel they have a voice in the class,

and the teacher can improve the preparation

of future sessions.

To make the objectives of the sessions

clear to the students. (Bernaus, 1995)

Students get more motivated and can feel

creative and responsible about the tasks.

To give a realistic context to the tasks.

(Vilella, 2013)

The tasks are enriched in terms of

competences and skills to be developed, and

the students feel more challenged.

To create zones of proximal development

(Onrubia, 1993) and make the logical

connections between previous knowledge

and the new one explicit. (Mercer, 2001)

The new knowledge is better understood

and the students are able to build their own

learning process.

To encourage the students to discuss their

own assessment. (Onrubia, Fillat, Martínez

and Udina, 1998)

Students feel more motivated to prepare for

their evaluation.

To include cooperative work strategies to

deal with the class activities (Pujolàs, 2008/

Torrego, Negro, 2012)

Students get more focused on the tasks and

feel more confident when solving difficult

activities.

To teach learning strategies to the students

such as taking notes, repeating in a

productive way, or organizing new

knowledge (Ferreiros, 2006/Nogales,

Sancho, 2008/De Jong, Perfetti, 2011)

Students have tools to deal with the English

learning and feel more autonomous when

studying.

45

Appendix II:

http://bls.gov/k12/index.htm

46

Appendix III:

(From http://www.agendaweb.org/)

1. http://esl.fis.edu/vocab/q21/jobs_r.htm

2. http://clases-ingles.com/vocabulary/Professions.htm

3. http://www.web-esl.com/Reading2/readinglevel2a.htm

47

Appendix IV:

http://www.thewhocarestrust.org.uk/pages/what-job-would-suit-me.html

Appendix V:

http://www2.arnes.si/~oskplucija4/ces/workers.htm

48

Appendix VI:

49

Appendix VII:

50

Appendix VIII:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pyfkcUbhbJs#at=38

Appendix IX:

http://www.tolearnenglish.com/exercises/exercise-english-2/exercise-english-7425.php

51

Appendix X:

TOM DOES NOT FEEL WELL

1. Today, Tom has a very hot face and feels cold. He______________________________

2. To know how hot Tom is he needs __________________________________________

3. There’s a lot of pollen in the park. Tom_______________________________________

4. Tom hit the door of the cupboard with his head. He_____________________________

5. Tom ate too many sweets. Now he__________________________________________

6. Tom fell from his bike. He__________________________________________________

7. Tom needs______________________________________________________________

52

Appendix XI:

54

Appendix XII:

Appendix XIII:

58

Appendix XIV:

61

Appendix XV:

Appendix XVI:

Appendix XVII:

62

Appendix XVIII:

63

Appendix XIX:

64

Appendix XX:

http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com.es/2009/04/i-robot-future-will.html

65

Appendix XXI:

66

Appendix XXII:

67

Appendix XXIII:

68

Appendix XXIV:

http://www.english-grammar-lessons.com/type0/exercise3.swf

http://www.englishgrammarsecrets.com/type0/exercise2.swf

69

Appendix XXV:

1. “My future plans and expectations”

Dear______________,

How are you? Are you very busy with your exams?I am recently thinking a lot about my future

because I am finishing my Secondary School. The number one question in my head is what profession

should I choose? I want a profession that will satisfy me, challenge me, and make me happy. I think

that a job should be like a hobby. I want to love my work.

First of all, when I finish Secondary School, I will take the first important exam of my life - the final

graduation exam. I will be tested in four different subjects: the English and Catalan languages,

biology, and maths. When I finish, I will study at the Medical University to become a doctor.

But now, I am focusing my attention on finishing my studies. Also, before I have a family, I am

going to travel overseas. I want to see countries like Japan, Finland and travel through the African

continent. After I finish my education and travels, I will get married and have a family. I will live with

my future family in a quiet, natural countryside setting.

What about you? Do you often think about your future? Do you have any plans yet?

Yours,

Sarah

2. British Superstitions

Dear______________,

How are you? And what about your cat Fluffy? You know that I visit my grandmother every Sunday

and we talk about interesting things. The other day we talked about superstitions and we had a good

time. I made a list of the more interesting British superstitions and you can read them. But remember

that people only believe these if they are superstitious:

• If a black cat walks in front of you, you’ll have bad luck

• If you break a mirror, you’ll have seven years of bad luck.

• If you carry a four-leaf clover it’ll bring you good luck

• If you want a good thing to continue, you should touch wood

• If you rub a rabbit’s foot, it will bring you good luck!

• If you walk under a ladder, you will have bad luck!

• You will have bad luck if you open an umbrella indoors.

What do you think about these superstitions? Do you think they are true? I don’t think you believe the

first one, because Fluffy is Black and you don’ have bad luck!

Best Wishes,

John

70

3. Health and body care

Dear _______________,

Keeping fit and leading a healthy life is very important these days. For that reason we want to invite

you to P-sport, the gym with the best facilities you will find! Join us and, if you follow these simple tips

and stay active you will be healthy:

1. If you drink between six to eight glasses of water every day, you will have more energy and

you will remove waste from the body.

2. Hygiene is very important for a healthy life. You will prevent illnesses if you wash your hands

before and after eating, after blowing your nose or coughing or sneezing.

3. If you start your day with a good breakfast, you will feel more alert, more creative and more

energetic, and your whole day will go better.

4. You will have a healthy life if you eat a balanced diet including proteins, vitamins,

carbohydrates, minerals, sugar and fat. A healthy diet is very important because it reduces

your risk of having high blood pressure, heart disease, and some cancers and diabetes.

5. Exercise has your muscles strong and reduces the risk of developing heart disease, depression

and anxiety. Join us and do sport with us!

Yours sincerely,

P-Sport’s staff

didactic proposals to deal with lack of motivation in the english classroom

Education

o description

o methodological

o observations

alternative session

didactic suggestions

appendices appendix

appendix iv

appendix v