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Fourth step: production stage (50 min)
During the production stage, the teacher gave two different exercises. Firstly, she asked her students to write a piece of writing which answers the following question: “What will you do if someone gives you 100,000 Ariary and a 4x4 car?” Secondly, the students dealt
with a reading comprehension exercise. The text was full of first conditional sentences and the topic was still about protecting the environment.
They could not finish the correction before the bell rang, and that is the end of our first classroom observation.
Comments on the lesson:
We noted some positive points concerning this lesson. Firstly, it is a good idea to start the class with a game as a warm up to wake the students’ mind up and to draw their attention. The majority of the students managed to re-order the words to have meaningful sentences, without being aware of their meanings. Moreover, the accuracy exercises fit the students’ level and the instructions are clear. Concerning the production stage, it is a good idea on the part of the teacher to develop the students’ writing and reading skills to produce the language. The structures are contextualized in a reading passage about protecting the environment. Therefore, it is easier to understand the condition-result relationship in each conditional sentence.
However, we also noticed some imperfection despite these positive points. First of all, during the warm up stage, the teacher checked the students’ understanding of the sentences by asking their opinions. She tried to interact with her students and to have more than “yes” or “no” answers. Unfortunately, only one of her questions was answered by few students. The students did not answer but just stared at their teacher because they did not understand the meaning of every question. In other words, the notion of conditional was not presented to them yet, and some questions were not clear at all: “What do they have in common?”, “How do we call this kind of sentence?” The fact that the teacher did not give any answer to her question blocked the students’ way to answer the next questions, so the elicitation was a failure. Secondly, the fact of forgetting to explain the use of the newly-presented structure is a serious mistake on the part of the teacher. Furthermore, the teacher forgot to explain the meaning of the two clauses and the two possible clause orderings. Therefore, we can say that the presentation stage does not make any sense, and we could see during this class observation that almost no student understood what has been presented to them. The teacher really tried to make her teaching communicative, but she did not manage to make her students speak to have an interaction. She elicited from the students by asking them to give other examples of first conditional sentences. Unfortunately, the students could not find any sentence because they did not understand what has been taught. Thirdly, the practice stage
should not be the stage when the use of the new language is explained. Finally, there are some negative points concerning the production stage. There is a wrong choice of situation in the writing exercise. The lesson is about possible situations, yet this piece of writing is about an imaginary situation which requires second conditional sentences but not first conditional as far as we are concerned. Moreover, the text in the reading exercise is long and there are many difficult words for students in “classe de première D”. As such, the teacher had to spend a lot of time explaining the unfamiliar words, and the time management was not respected.
In a word, we would say that the lesson was not successful because first, the teacher did not explain the meaning of “if clause type one” in the presentation stage, and second, the first conditional was not taught communicatively as the students did not have the opportunity to communicate either orally or in a written form of communication. In addition to that, it could have been successful if the teacher had chosen the right situation and the appropriate text length in the production stage in order to save time. If it had been so, there would have been enough time for communicative grammar by developing the students’ speaking, writing and reading skills.
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