Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

Third step: practice stage (30 min)

The students were given an exercise which consists in putting some verbs in brackets into the correct form. The exercise was mixed as the presentation stage was about the basic rule of third conditional as well as the perfect conditional forms of modal verbs. There was an oral correction and they moved on the production stage.

• Fourth step: production stage (5 min)

During the production stage, the teacher intended to make the students play an if chain game. Unfortunately, the bell rang and they could not play it. Our observation ended there because the two hours were over.
Comments on the lesson:
When we observed this lesson, we could notice some positive points. From the beginning of this class, the teacher tried to communicate with his students by developing their listening and speaking skills when telling them the anecdote. He put them in the context of what he is going to teach. Moreover, the idea of presenting the lesson by using a reading passage is excellent because the dialogue covers the topic “Regrets” and the third conditional altogether. The context is clear as the dialogue is short. The explanation of the basic rules of third conditional is also clear as it includes the form, the use and the rules on clause orderings and past participle. Another good point of this lesson is the teacher’s intention to make the students play a game to produce the language. We were really eager to see how good they will play the game. It could have been a very good activity to make the students communicate by creating, speaking, and using the newly-learnt language in an authentic context.
However, this lesson also has some weaknesses despite the positive points we have just mentioned above. First of all, the teacher did not manage to draw the students’ attention during the warm up stage. They were not listening to the anecdote, so the teacher did not reach his objective which is to develop the students’ listening skill and to make them speak. Concerning the presentation stage, the teacher should not have presented the perfect conditional forms of modal verbs before giving an exercise about third conditional sentences which contain ordinary verbs (non-modals). Actually, the rules on modals are not included in the lesson on third conditional because they confuse students’ mind. Therefore, the exercise in the practice stage is not really appropriate.

To conclude, the explanation of modals in the presentation stage before moving on the practice stage was the main problem with this lesson, but otherwise it was successful because the teacher covered most of the stages of the lesson. He managed to teach the third conditional communicatively as the context and situation are clear and there was interaction between the teacher and the students.