CHAPTER III: Self-observation study
3.2. Data presentation and analysis
3.2.8 Selection and sequencing of exercises
After conducting the presentation and explanations I moved on to the Practice and Production stages of the lesson, although the latter one was usually very basic in its form when dealing with beginning learners. Nevertheless, I had to choose and arrange exercises in a way that would help learners memorize and proceduralize the new knowledge.
Initially, I simply followed the order of exercises provided in the coursebook and then moved on to the workbook, with the only modifications being omitting some of the drills if I saw that learners had no problems with the use of the new structure. Generally, the exercises in coursebooks and workbooks were ordered starting from uncreative drills through contextualized drills and finally arriving at communicative activities with decreasing amount of control. Nevertheless, even though such sequence of exercises is the most logical one, it often has to be modified and adapted to the unpredictable situations that may arise during the lesson.
The situation that happened most often was that the learners did not achieve the proper amount of proceduralization of a particular structure and moved on to more meaningful tasks, where they had to concentrate on communication as well, and committed a very high amount of errors in the use of this structure. Interestingly enough, such situation happened very often during the introduction of interrogative and negative sentences in Present Simple tense. Learners from all the three groups that had those structures introduced to them during the observed lessons had great difficulty in remembering about adding the auxiliary verb “do” and ‘moving’ the “-s” ending in 3rd person singular interrogative sentences from the main verb to the auxiliary verb.
Actually, they even had problems with remembering about the “-s” ending in the 3rd person declarative sentences. The main problem was that both in the coursebook and workbook this commonly problematic issue was given as much practice opportunities as the conjugation of “to be” verb or Present Continuous, which turned out to be quite easy
for most of the learners. Obviously, the situation could be different for native speakers of language other than Polish. When this problem appeared for the first time, while I was teaching group #1, I was a bit confused and did not know what to do. Seeing that learners make constantly the same mistakes after finishing the drill exercises, I came back to drilling the structure by means of spontaneously creating an exercise on the blackboard and continuing to drill it until they finally managed to make mistakes rarely enough. When I experienced the same problem with group #4, I simply moved to the drilling exercises from the exercises book earlier (that is, before finishing the unit in the coursebook). This, however, caused another distortion in my original plan, since I usually use the drill exercise in the workbook as homework, in order to have learners memorize and proceduralize the rule of forming a particular structure better. I devised a short drill on the spot instead, but it was not satisfactory. Thus when I was introducing the same structures to the learner from group #2, I had some additional exercises prepared just in case and they turned out to be useful, as the same problem appeared again. This time, however, I noticed learner’s difficulties while doing the drills from the coursebook so I proceeded straight to the additional exercises and only later continued to do other exercises from the coursebook.
Conversely, there were also situations when the most sensible solution was to omit the drill exercise and continue to more meaningful ones. This happened especially often in group #6 and sometimes in group #3. The ones from the former group were handling new structures so well, that next to ceasing from giving them drills for homework, I limited their number during the lessons. Naturally, situations when the learners needed more practice happened as well, but quite rarely and they never needed more exercises than those provided in the coursebook. The instance of the learner from the latter group was similar, although in his case I only limited homework drills from the workbook, while still doing most of those provided in the coursebook.
Logically, if I increased or limited the amount of drills, the amount of the following more meaningful exercises also had to change. In case when the drills took more time, I either chose slightly more meaningful exercises earlier or left the most communicative ones for the next lesson or gave them as homework. The first strategy turned out to be less successful, since in many cases the increased pace of progression caused some difficulty for the learners. On the other hand, during the study I did not observe any possible negative effects of the second strategy, since I usually compensated for the lower amount of the more communicative exercises later, during
revision lessons. However, when the pace of progression was higher, due to the limited use of drills, the situation was much easier. I could devote the additional time for practice of more meaningful exercises or, in case of more advanced groups, devote some time to discussion or conversation.
3.3. Recapitulation
In this charter I presented the aims of the self-observation study, which were providing date for determining optimal ways of introducing selected syntactic structures to Polish learners of English and, secondarily, exercising reflective teaching abilities. I also provided the description of the study, including the method of data collection, the overall structure of the groups that I conducted the lessons with and during which the self-observation took place. I also listed the eight syntactic structures taught during those lessons, which were selected for the purpose of the study. The next section of this chapter was divided into eight subsections, according to the eight issues that were the focus of my observation during the study. In those eight subsections I presented the excerpts from the collected data and provided their analysis as well as some general conclusions.
Having presented and analyzed the data in this chapter of this thesis, I was able to establish several optimal ways of introducing selected syntactic structures to Polish learners of English language. The results of this endeavor are presented in the following chapter.