Learner Progress

I think the main goals of the lesson were achieved to some degree. By the end of the lesson,
students were more capable of discriminating between the meaning and uses of the past
progressive and simple past in narratives. Students were able to answer questions about how the
meaning of sentences would change if their form changed, were able to complete the controlled
activity with very few errors, and were able to produce mostly correct sentences during the freer
practice writing exercise.


Strengths
-The materials used were appropriate for the learners.
-The use of visuals (pictures/timelines) were appropriate for the learning styles of the majority of
the class which added in understanding the differences between the TL
-The staging of the lesson plan was appropriate and moved smoothly from receptive skills to
language analysis to production.

Weaknesses:
-The fact that two similar but different pictures were given was not fully exploited. It would have
been more useful to bring more attention to the fact that students are going to write and read each
others papers in order to find differences. This would have given them a reason to write and read
their partners papers. It was done to some degree, but not nearly enough.
-Students could have benefited from more pronunciation practice of weak forms and stress in the
present progressive, and some more work on ed endings of regular past tense verbs.
-The controlled practice was possibly too easy and didnt give me a real chance to see whether
students had learned how to discriminate between the two forms.

Consolidate/Follow-up
Ive read through the writing samples. There were some errors in form (subject/verb agr. in the past
continuous), students were mostly able to use the correct form. Writing gives students more time to
think. To follow-up, I would develop their ability to use the two forms in spoken English where
students wouldnt have as much time to think. The same kind of activity could be used where
students told a story using pictures.