Aim:

thinking: raising awareness of the ENV model potential towards the efficiency of doing the pre-text tasks

subject-specific: specifying the central notions of the text to-be-read for its better understanding;   raising awareness of successful presentation features

Materials: the pre-text tasks to the text 'How We Judge People' by Richard Bach.

Task 1.4.
Being famous is either a dream which is realised or a curse one wants to escape. What are good and bad points of being famous?

Task 1.4.
Procedure: list pros and cons individually (5 min), then pair off – compare – add to your lists (5 min), then regrouping into groups of four; organise and prepare to present  the ideas  – 10 min.

All in all doing the task, presenting and evaluating it took us 40 minutes.

Learners' outputs: the learners have mentioned the following: advantages - people's admiration and love, opportunities for doing what they like, freedom of choices, power, influence, possibilities to help others (charity e.g.); however, the students also mentioned the disadvantages, even more than advantages. One group organised their presentation proceeding from parameters and then described the values, but they had only two parameters; the other group mentioned the numerous values of the positive side and then the values of the negative sides, part of them belonged to the same parameters as did the positive values.

During the de-briefing we discussed:

Task achievement

Content: how many parameters are considered, are they uniform for positive and negative sides, who they are relevant for)

How did you do it? Did ENV model help you?

Features of a good presentation: the listeners tried to evaluate the presentations according to the parameters agreed upon: content, organisation, language.

The presentations revealed the lack of skill of the logical organisation of the material.

When analysing how they did the task - most of the students did not mention the use of the ENV, although in one group they actually used it. One of the students said that they actually started from values but when they ran out of them, then proceeded with parameters.

Overall reflection:  the thinking aim was not achieved - as they mainly used brainstorming and not the ENV model. The reason - my lack of skills in monitoring them.

Question: my students keep doing comparison/contrast tasks by brainstorming. Should I introduce limitations straight away - to prevent from it? Does it mean there's not enough challenge?