Evaluative decisions

Evaluative decisionsare those that a teacher makes after a lesson has been taught. They arise from asking the following kinds of questions about the lesson:

· Was this lesson successful? Why or why not?

· What were the main strengths and weaknesses of the lesson?

· Did the students learn what they were intended to learn?

· What did the students get out of the lesson?

· Did the lesson address the students’ needs?

· Was the lesson at an appropriate level of difficulty?

· Were all students involved in the lesson?

· Did the lesson arouse students’ interest in the subject matter?

· Did I do sufficient preparation for the lesson?

· Do I need to re-teach any aspect of the lesson?

· What would be a suitable follow-up to the lesson?

· Should I have employed alternative teaching strategies?

· Will I teach the material in the same way next time?

As teachers gain experience in teaching and develop a deeper conceptualisation of teaching, the criteria they use for evaluating teaching change to reflect their new assumptions, beliefs and levels of awareness. Richardset al. (1992) also found that the evaluative decisions the teachers made provided input to planning decisions that they make on subsequent occasions. Hence, planning, interactive and evaluative decisions are interconnected.

Main steps

Everything mentioned above can be brought to the following conclusions about the way the teachers plan their lessons. This way may indicate a certain number of procedural steps the teacher should undertake.

1. Gettingacquainted with the content and language material in the unit.

Teacher preparation for a lesson starts with a thorough study of the content of the texts and exercises included in the unit. The teacher has to size up language input mainly from the angle of acquiring a definite skill.

2. Analysing the language material in the unit.

Skill acquisition is analysed from the point of view of difficulties. The main focus is the difficulties in acknowledgement and memorising new language items. With this purpose the teacher determines his techniques of introducing new language input (explanation, demonstration, immediate creativity, types of context, visuals).

3. Grouping the language material.

Here the main purpose is to put the language material in good orderaccording to the common character of the linguistic phenomena under study. The overall aim is to define the main pivot of language form and content in the lesson and a series of lessons.

3. Defining the additional information.

All necessary knowledge is to be included in the series of lessons. The information of educational character is provided by applied sciences (art, literature, lingua-cultural studies, politics etc.).

4. Defining the level of speech skill development.

Final, stage and grade requirements to the level of speech skill development are to be taken into consideration. For example, students should be able to use 10 phrases and expressions in conjunction with a suggested situation/ topic by the end of the 7^th form. Their speech should comprise the elements of description, narration and argumentation.

5. Defining the sequence of lessons within the system of lessons and structural types of lessons.

Regarding the overall result achieved at a final lesson in the series as the students’ terminal verbal behaviour, the teacher distributes the material under study among separate lessons. He puts forward overall goals and objectives for every lesson in the series, specifies the character of his students’ activity.

7. Planning a separate lesson.

The teacher defines the main aim of the lesson, distributes the teaching material into sequences, specifies the purpose of each sequence, and formulates students’ tasks for the corresponding exercises in the unit. He also selects typical communicative situations suitable to students’ communicative activity in the lesson.

6. Choosing visuals and technical aids.

For training lessons the teacher chooses speech patterns, schemes of phrases, patterns and models of word combinations, tables of paradigms, substitution tables (graphic and sound), visuals etc. It should allow the teacher to introduce and activate lexis according to the character of words.

For communicative lessons the teacher chooses the students’ utterance plan, key words and word combinations, pictures of objects and pictures of dynamic character (with a plot, reflecting the dynamism of events).

Lesson plan

Language teachers use many different kinds of approaches to teaching, depending on their assumptions about how students learn and on the kind of methodology that they believe best supports this learning process. For example, in lessons based on a Situational Language Teaching approach, the sequence of classroom activities moves from presentation to controlled practice to free practice. In a Process Writing approach (Proettand Gill, 1986), activities move from pre-writing to drafting to revising. In skills classes, teachers often choose activities that support specific sub-skills or micro-skills, as is seen in the following two lesson plans:

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13