4th Journal Entry

Hans Humberto Oviedo Gómez

Reflective Teaching Course

M. A. Edgar Alirio Insuasty

Neiva, September 30^th, 2015

Reflecting upon my Intervention # 4

This fourth lesson reflection is part of the interventions I have done for my thesis. This class was developed in three hours. At the beginning of the class I greeted my students and explained that the class was going to be recorded. I reminded students that the purpose of the class was to implement customized EFL materials and pointed out that this situation has been already explained on previous classes and the last semester. The professor pointed the image in the first page and makes questions to the students.

T - There are two countries. What countries?

All S:  answered aloud.

-Colombia and The USA

T: Asked about the image

-What is this image?  (the professor moves his hands imitating a flag to help students to remind the word)

All S: Answer aloud

-Flags

Vocabulary Activity

In this sense, students were engaged and trying to guess what the workshop was about. Then students started to solve the first vocabulary activity by associating words, definition and images. This first activity was a little bit confused because there were some similar words and students got frustrated, Ex. colonies – settlers, pilgrims – separatists. In this specific case, I think what we could improve is to make emphasis in the main differences between those similar words, not only by telling those differences, but putting those words in context since the beginning. After this vocabulary activity, students had the chance to read and use the vocabulary given at the beginning to complete the passages. In this activity there were almost the same troubles, because students did not get the difference between some words clearly. After this reading activity, students were asked to develop and design a mind map by relating the previous concepts and their background knowledge. This poster (mind map) had to be presented to the whole class in terms of a 2 minutes presentation (description). This activity was meaningful because students were active at participating and tried to use the linguistic patterns in a proper way.

Ex.

Mind Map -Sample

Lina: -The colonies arrived (extra effort to pronounce the word correctly) to America and they started to look for… to look for… wealth. Then, they made trade ports and… and... loaded and unloaded trade goods. And later, (asks to clarify the pronunciation of appeared) then appeared the separatists who were a group of persons that wanted to create a new religion. 

Historical Facts

After those presentations there was an explanation about how to write historical facts. Students seemed to have problems with subjects on their facts. Students used pronouns instead of using the name of the person. I was giving some feedback and allowed students to be aware about what they were missing.

These teaching lesson was a really good experience. There were some troubles that have to be overcome. As Teacher Researcher I realized the importance on planning on students’ possible facilities or difficulties. One of the main problems with this intervention was the amount of activities proposed in the workshop. Time was not enough to develop the complete workshop and students could not develop the comic strip at the end as was expected. Next time, I am totally sure, these difficulties are going to be overcome, by trying to take the most important and meaningful activities to guarantee a success in the lesson.