Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

Third step: practice stage (30 min)

The students were given an exercise which consists in putting verbs in brackets in the correct tenses. Actually the exercise was a free practice as the students had to understand the meaning of the sentences in order to know the type of conditional in each sentence and to

put the verbs in their correct tenses. When the students finished the exercise, they did the correction orally.

• Fourth step: production stage (5 min)

For the production stage, the teacher gave homework as time was over. The students were asked to build up three sentences with the conditional type 1, type 2, and type 3. Here is the end of our third classroom observation.
Comments on the lesson:
We are going to bring our comments on this lesson as we did with the others, that is, by looking at its positive and negative aspects. First, concerning the positive points of this lesson, the warm up is interesting because the teacher knows to relate the students’ Easter holiday to their wish of being home at the moment of speaking and the other way to express a present wish which is the second conditional. Besides, the presentation stage is lively as it is full of interaction and gives the students the opportunity to express themselves especially after they gave examples. This is a kind of revision course as the students are good at replying their teacher’s questions. We would like to mention that the example and the remark of the student who mentioned about hair dress are striking because his way of expressing himself shows how well he understands the use of second conditional, and that is why he wanted to rectify his example by using the first conditional. Though this lesson was summarized in a chart, communication took place as there was elicitation from the students.
However, as nothing is perfect, this lesson also presents some weaknesses. The kind of exercise in the practice stage can be confusing for students because there are cases when two types of conditional are possible, but the choice depends on the meaning one would like to convey. The details of this exercise will be found in Appendix II but here is the sentence in which conditional type one and type three are both acceptable:
You …………. in your exam if you …………. hard. (succeed/ study). There are two possible answers for this sentence:

1. 
   You will succeed in your exam if you study hard.
   

2. 
   You would have succeeded in your exam if you had studied hard.
   

In addition to that, we expected to observe communicative activities in the production stage. Unfortunately, the kind of exercise which is given to the students does not put them in a realistic context and does not allow them to express themselves like in real life situation as they are just supposed to produce three de-contextualized accurate sentences. It could have been better if the teacher had given a situation for each conditional type and chosen one or more language skills to be developed since that is the objective in the production stage.
Anyhow, we would say that this lesson was successful even though there was no communicative activity in the production stage.