Oct 14.

1. Lesson/task description before
Aims

• Subject matter: Provide context for introducing Present Perfect and Present Perfect Continuous. 
• Thinking: help learners discover new verb forms for speaking about the past and start building a model via ENV.

Materials/tasks I am going to use

• Text about travellers and explorers in New Headway (Upper-intermediate, Third edition, Students’ Book).

2. Lesson/task description – after
Procedures (how we worked: time, organisation, etc.)
In the beginning of the lesson we started working with shorts texts about travellers and explorers. After doing some general tasks I asked students to have a look at the text and tell me which verb forms they found. It was nice that students started telling me verb forms (not tense names). They mentioned Ved, and HAVE Ved and finally we arrived at HAVE BEEN Ving. So I asked them what are the rules they know about these forms (when we use which one). They said HAVE Ved is the result and the other one they didn’t know. So I gave two examples from the book – I’ve read the book it’s good. & I’ve been reading the book. I’ll lend it to you when I’ve finished. Someone told, the first one the action is finished, the second one – not finished. So I asked them how to write this rule via ENV so we came up with the parameter Action Completeness (which I actually suggested) and values Completed and Not-completed. Then I gave the third example I’ve been reading about Orwell recently. I’ve just finished his biography. Some students gave the same idea – I’ve been reading is Not-completed. That was the end of the lesson so I asked them to do exercises in their workbooks (these tasks have the keys) and try to finish the rule via ENV.

Learners’ response and outputs (how they responded to the task and what they actually did in the lesson)
Students were looking for verb forms and tried to formulate rule for new forms via ENV by analysing sentence examples. What I liked is that they named me verb forms instead of giving tense names.

Teacher’s role (what the teacher actually did and how)
The teacher provided examples of sentences for the analysis and summarised students’ replies helping them formulate the rule via ENV.

3. Overall reflection on the lesson / task

Aim aspect (to what extent did we reach the aims?)
If we speak about the subject-matter then the context for tenses was provided so seems the aim was reached. I think that I also managed to make them think about the rule via ENV (they tried to give different values for verb forms and I didn’t hear any complain on why do we need ENV).

Tasks & materials aspect (how did we work on the tasks to reach the aim? Please make specific references to the steps of the thinking task framework)
I would say the tasks did not follow the steps of the Thinking Task Framework. We did not check students’ knowledge before offering them new forms to work on. At the same time, it’s interesting to note that I planned to ask them to do one self-checking task after they found new verb forms. But I have noticed that I skip the tasks from time to time due to different circumstances. Am sure this is not good and I have to work on following the main steps.
If we speak about building the rule, students were asked to analyse examples and suggest their rules (a parody on Step 2). At the same time, two examples for building the rule are absolutely not enough.
Step on reflection was not supposed to be included on the first lesson.

Questions / conclusions for the future
I think that after working with the first system, which took me too much time I was scared to offer too many tasks before coming up to the rule that is why I focused on building the model at once. This process was simplified and speeded up. At the same time, I stick to making students formulate the rule via ENV, which is a small achievement.