Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Xiaoyang Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Hanzhong Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
In order to evaluate the previously taught lesson, simple past tense, the students were exposed to a Flash Story in which the primary focus was on simple past tense. The name of the story was A Medal for Ranger Day. There was a ranger who was working in a forest called, Sunny Canyon. He was once going along the Sunny River with his horse, Carrot, when met a family who were camping. Their son was lost and they could find him in the river drowning. Ranger Day saved him. Then, he met a young lady called Miss Sweet who was a teacher at Sunnyville college. She slipped from a cliff and then was saved by Ranger Day. The third one whom Ranger Day saved was a Baby Eagle that was about to be eaten by a Bobcat. Ranger Day climbed up the mountain and scared away the Bobcat. He, then, received a medal for his bravery and his story was published in a newspaper. The learners were exposed to the flash story in one session. In the first exposure, the learners were asked to watch the story mute and without any subtitle. Then, the they were asked to predict the content of the story and then, they were asked to recite it to the whole class. They were then peer-corrected and since the primary focus of the task is on meaning, the learners were corrected regarding the content of the story and how meaningful their sentences were. However, as the students were not aware of the content of the story, their predictions were sometimes wrong and they were corrected by their peers according to what they understood from the story. They sometimes uttered some funny sentences, too. In this section, the role of the teacher was minimized to the least and all the corrections were done by the students. Then, for the second time, the same story was broadcasted to the learners but this time, the students could hear what is said to them and the story was not muted. In this section, the learners wrote down what they could hear and then, they changed their papers. In this section, there was also a peer correction. However, the difference between peer correction in this section and the previous one was that in this section, Grammar was also included in the correction phase. The story was then played to the students for third time and in this section, the students watched the story with subtitle and also with the sound on and they were asked to repeat the sentences chunk by chunk. They whole process lasted for 90 minutes and then, the students were evaluated both regarding their oral production (fluency) and their accuracy after the task was done. This task proved to be useful in learning the past tense and also in improving the students self-confidence as they were asked to predict and say the whole story to their classmates. This process also reduces the pressure of the teacher in the class and accelerates the process of learning and producing the language.
