Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

Step 4: Follow-up activity (20 minutes)

Objective: To develop students’ listening skill by showing them an example of authentic situation with second conditional sentences.
Language skill: LISTENING

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  Teacher shares the lyrics of Beyoncé’s song “If I were a boy” and explains some unfamiliar words in the lyrics (verse 1 + chorus)
  
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  Teacher asks some comprehension questions about the song. Students give oral answers.
  

What is the title of the song? “If I were a boy”
Does it mean the singer is a boy? No, it doesn’t? The singer isn’t a boy.
Why does she say “if I were a boy”? She wishes she were a boy because she is a girl.

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  Finally, students listen to the song and sing with the music.
  

Comments on the performance:
We would say that the lesson was successful although it was difficult to make the students participate. At the beginning of the class, they were active, but when they were asked to compare the meaning of the two conditional sentences in each dialogue, they did not dare to answer. We contend two reasons of the students’ reluctance: the first one is that the teacher was very new for them, and the second one is that they are not used to participating during their English classes. Fortunately, they participated in the activities throughout the lesson after long encouragement. This lesson is communicative in the way that it encourages students to participate during the presentation of second conditional and the introduction of “I wish+ Past Simple”. Thanks to the contextualization of the two conditional sentences, the students understood that they do not express the same thing. Hence, it was not difficult to deal with the

continuation of the lesson. Concerning the presentation of “I wish + Past Simple”, the students enjoyed answering our questions upon the pictures and the bubbles (Appendix III). They found most of our expected answers. Therefore, it was not difficult to tackle the rest of the lesson. However, we had trouble dealing with speaking in the first production stage. Although we asked them to talk with their friends, most of them just wrote their sentences in their exercise books, but refused to speak. It is often a problem to ask students to speak, especially when they are supposed to produce something and make a report. Finally, the follow-up activity helped us to evaluate the students’ understanding of second conditional. It is crucial to explain the meaning of the lyrics so as to show the relevance of the song to the students. Listening to the song helped them to develop their listening skills and relaxed them even though they were actually fixing the second conditional in their memory.

In a word, we would say that this lesson was successful in spite of some problems about students’ participation because the students understood the use of second conditional in real life situation like in the song “If I were a boy”. They understood that second conditional expresses a wish and that there is another way to express a wish, which is “I wish + Past Simple”.