The overall sequence of my lesson is: first, an introduction to the objectives of the lesson (3 min); second, a warm-up activity to help students review simple present and present continuous verbs and learn how to take notes by using a song (7 min); then, have students review rules of simple present tense by using one lyric of the song (10 min); fourth, watch a video for three times, with the first two times letting students practice taking notes, asking and answering questions in simple present tense (by using sentences starters), and the third time asking them to pay attention to adverbs of frequency so that they will be able to discuss their daily routines (with the help of a worksheet) in breakout rooms (20 min); next, have students review the present continuous rules also by using the song’s lyric (5 min); after that, a dictogloss activity to let students take notes of a video about asking and answering questions in present continuous tense and discuss their notes in break out rooms (20 min); next, a text reconstruction activity to let students review two tenses by filling gaps in a text (15 min); finally, a recapping part to review course objectives and survey students’
feelings about the course and the two tenses learned in this course.
Overall, the sequence of my teaching meets a part of my content and language objectives, such as activating students’ prior knowledge (Echevarría et al., 2017), learning new grammar rules based on this knowledge, etc. Also, my lesson tries to use engaging and level-appropriate activities to stimulate students’ learning motivation and enhance their “four strands of skills” (Nation and Macalister, 2010, pp.38-39; English Language Proficiency Standards for Adult Education, 2016).
However, apparent defects also exist in my lesson as below:
a) Goals and objectives
First of all, one of my content objectives, “discuss the essential question ‘Why are families important to us?’ by using correct tenses” wasn’t successfully achieved in my lesson. This goal should be discussed in the “text reconstruction” activity by asking students if they think their families are similar with the family in the text and the reasons for their answers. But due to the time limit and my lack of experience in using techniques that can avoid eliciting “Yes/No” answers (Fisher & Frey, 2013; Saunders & Goldenberg, 2007; Toth, 2013), student couldn’t “actively engage in interaction” that will promote their higher-order thinking (Echevarría et al., 2017). What’s more, although I shared only language objectives at the beginning and the end of the class, and I didn’t keep in mind to “determine if students have mastered” these objectives (Echevarría et al., 2017).
b) Opportunities to leverage students’ rich conceptual, cultural, and linguistic resources According to Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, it is important for teachers to build upon students’ cultural, linguistic, and other skills or knowledge to create a reciprocal learner-teacher relationship (Li, 2014; Gay, 2010). But instead of incorporating students’ cultural and linguistic features into my teaching, I not only explained the grammar rules in English but also let students converse solely in English, which isn’t conductive to building a caring learning environment.
c) Content and language learning
In addition to completely missing one content objective in my teaching (as I’ve mentioned above), I also didn’t make it to have all the students “take notes” in the dictogloss activity. Although I used both oral and written instructions before the activity, most students still chose to remember the discourses of the video by using their memory, rather than writing down their notes. I assume there are two reasons that they didn’t follow my instruction. On the one hand, I introduced how to
take notes in the warm-up activity, which is the very beginning of my class. After the first introduction, I didn’t elaborate on how to do it in the following activities, but just asked them to
“take notes” and thus students might already forget how to take notes in the dictogloss activity. On the other hand, there aren’t any instructions in slides where I put the video, which might also cause them to forget what to do while watching the video.
About language learning, all the language objectives were presented in my activities. But I’m unable to say that I achieved these language objectives because in activities like the text
reconstruction, I noticed that most students couldn’t get all the answers correct except for one male student who has well-grounded English learning background, and I just ignored mistakes that students made and kept moving forward of the activity when I heard the male student’s correct answers. Such neglect of students’ linguistic errors will result in students losing chances to learn language and I, as a teacher, assessing their learning ineffectively. Also, although I listed key vocabulary in the lesson plan, almost half of them were just read by students in the example sentences I used when introducing the third-singular endings, which didn’t attract enough attention from students to learn these words.
d) Engage students with multilingual, multimodal texts and tools
As what I’ve mentioned above, I didn’t use students’ L1 to help them learn the grammar knowledge. Beyond that, I didn’t differentiate my instruction to make the lesson ‘challenging to all the students’ (WIDA Consortium, 2012). Although students are in a class of the same level (high- beginning), they have different educational backgrounds. To make my class more differentiating for EL learners, I should have set different language objectives according to students’ language
proficiency while maintaining the same content objectives (WIDA Consortium, 2012). For example,
in the activity when students asking and answering questions by using simple present tense, I can ask students who have higher English proficiency to do this activity without the help of sentence starters, which may work as over-scaffoldings for them (Daniel et al., 2016).
e) Simultaneous opportunities to assess students’ progress dynamically
In line with what Poehner and Lantolf (2003, p.4) argued about assessment, it’s important to identify learners’ zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978) “to fully understand a person’s potential to develop.” To achieve this development, teachers need to use dynamic assessment (DA), which belongs to one type of formative assessments. Based on Brown (2010, p.19)’s introduction to examples of DA, I examined my teaching and found that what I did well is offering “clear tasks and activities” to students. Yet, I didn’t raise questions that can “demonstrate understanding and knowledge” after each activity, nor did I offer ongoing feedback through the whole learning process. Moreover, although I used a survey to examine students’ understanding at the end of the class, many students didn’t participate, which might indicate that they are not ready for self-assessment.