Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

Fourth step: practice of second conditional (15 min)

They played a game for the second time to practice the second conditional. As the students wasted much time with the previous game, the teacher changed the rule. He gave the if clause of every sentence and the students continue it by giving its main clause. It was a whole class game and the courageous ones who found the right continuations of the given if clauses were given marks as bonus.

Comments on the lesson:
We are going to begin our comments with the strength of this lesson. As we can see in this report, the presentation stage is concise in both first and second conditional. Everything which should be explained is included in it. Furthermore, the games to practice the two types of conditional motivated the students because everyone was eager to participate. The class was lively since there was communication during the turn taking. The students understand the condition-result relationship, so most of them can build first and second conditional sentences.
Despite its strength, this lesson also presents some weaknesses. Firstly, we have the same comment as in the previous lesson concerning its title. “THE CONDITIONAL TENSES” cannot be the title of this lesson because it is not a specific lesson on present conditional and past conditional or perfect conditional. Instead, it should be “THE CONDITIONAL SENTENCES” or “THE CONDITIONALS”. Secondly, concerning the way this lesson was copied on the blackboard, we can say that it is presented in a traditional way. There was no interaction and elicitation during the explanation, but the teacher spoon-fed the students with pre-fabricated rules that they are supposed to practice later. Moreover, the first game was time-consuming since the class was divided only into two large groups. Therefore, it took a long time for all the twenty four students in a group to take turn as they had to think a lot before building their sentences. It could have been better if the teacher had divided the class into four groups of twelve students, and asked four intelligent students to lead each group. As such, the students can correct their friends’ answers and help one another. In that case, there is no bonus, but the aim is just to practice the language in a fun way. The teacher can act as a supervisor of the groups by moving around and listening to the students’ answers.

As a conclusion to these comments, we would say that the lesson was successful and attained a part of the objectives of communicative grammar, but there was a problem of time management.