Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

Second step: practice stage (60 min)

As we mentioned above, the teacher gave two exercises to the students. The first one consists in matching two clauses (if clause and main clause) whereas the second one consists in filling blanks with the correct tenses. Both of the exercises were controlled and objective. After a written correction on the blackboard, the class ended without an exercise of production stage.

Comments on the lesson:
We would start our comments by mentioning the positive side of this lesson. The first noticeable point we would like to mention is that it is the only one class when conditional type zero is taught. We asked the teacher why he taught conditional type zero since it is not in the syllabus though it really exists. He replied that some students asked him what type of conditional it is and what it means because they have already seen it somewhere and that is why he decided to teach it. That is not a bad idea because students may need to use

conditional type zero. In addition to that, when we observed this class, the students were good at giving the correct answers in the accuracy practice, probably because they were allowed to have a look at their lesson books and the other halves of the sentences in the second exercise were already given.
However, this lesson also presents some flaws. First of all, we would like to comment upon the title “THE CONDITIONAL TENSES”. We would say that this cannot be the title of the lesson because conditional tenses only include present conditional (would+V –to) and past conditional or perfect conditional (would have+ past participle). Instead, it is better to replace it by “THE CONDITIONAL SENTENCES” or simply “THE CONDITIONALS”.

Concerning the chart, it is complicated because of the existence of the column “Time” and the structures of the sentences in the column “Function”. A student asked us what the column “Time” means because he did not dare to ask his teacher. The students were also given pre- fabricated rules and examples in the chart. There was no elicitation, thus there was no communication. In addition to that, we can see that the explanations of the function of type 2 and type 3 are complex, and it is redundant to put the column “Time” in this chart as it should be clear if the teacher manages to explain the use (function) through the examples. There was no elicitation during the explanation. Therefore, there was no communication through interaction apart from answering the questions “Do you agree with me?” and “is that clear?” which are not actually checking questions of understanding. No language skill is developed because the presentation stage consists in simply reading what is written in the chart. Besides, the explanation is just a skimming, and we could see on some students’ ways of looking at their teacher that they did not understand what they were learning. Furthermore, the non- existence of production stage is the biggest flaw of this lesson. We expected to observe some communicative activities because communicative grammar was not applied neither in the presentation stage nor in the practice stage.
Clearly, it is difficult to say whether this lesson was successful because the teaching stages stopped at the students’ accuracy level. However, we would say that this lesson is not communicative because it does not give the students the opportunity to express themselves by using conditional sentences.