- Details
- Written by Renata Jonina
- Parent Category: English
- Category: English 16-19
- Created: 01 January 2013
Working with Modal Verbs: Degrees of certainty
Conclusions
To sum up, I believe I was pretty successful in the very beginning when starting working with building a model. Students were working and doing everything I asked. But since I had no clear vision of where to go and was inventiing steps on the way, I failed to build a clear pattern of how to work with the first draft of the model and make students introduce changes. As a result, students got a lot of exercises and got lost in their rules. I also lost their motivation. In any way, I made some conclusions which helped me to improve when working on the next ‘group’ of modal verbs.
You can see some of the models of my students here.
Since my students have e-portfolios, you can also check their e-portfolios here to find out more details about our lessons.
Comments
I am truly interested in this as perhaps things on the site have to be presented in a different way to make them clearer to the teachers.
I'd say that the System gives very generalised steps but the key point is to sub-divide this general huge step into something small, meaningful and measurable. For instance, Part 2 of the system says - sort the following utterances into groups. But it doesn't give any idea on why should we sort, how to 'sell' it to students, should we give all 24 sentences at once, should we organise (or think of) that students understand the meaning of every sentence, how to check sorting better, what is the result we expect, how we connect it to the next part, etc., etc. And this happens with every part of the System. The system shows the tip of the iceberg and without clear procedures understandable for an average teacher it is difficult to make it work. You really invent every step. Maybe I am just a young and too inexperienced teacher and this is not a problem for others. But then the question is why TA teachers do not find it easy just to use the ready system.
To give you another example, think of the PASS materials. Phase 1 looks great but to make it function with parents you have to subdivide it into Phase 0.5 and even maybe smaller chunks.
If we refer to these texts as the available description, can you let me know which parts there are more helpful and useful in your opinion and which ones are not useful at all?
I try to add to whatever exists by describing my experience here (especially with sub-dividing the system into the sub-steps). That's all I can contribute with at this point.