Meeting 5 and Assessment 3

Meeting 5 on Thursday, 10th April was almost entirely dedicated to Assessment 3, the group presentation. The assigned task was for the group to make three, linked presentations which all had some connection to a common theme. The students would be marked both accordingly to how well they performed individually, and according to how well they managed to link their presentation to the other two. In addition to this they had an allocation of 10 marks each (i.e. 10% of the entire course mark) to award to themselves as a group to represent the work they'd put in collectively to enabling this presentation to happen.

On the day we began with the 'Photo Album' exercise, for which I'm grateful to my former colleague, Janet Harling. You draw a number of blank 'frames' which come to represent pictures in your photo album. The pairwork task then is for one student to describe the content of the photo and the other to show interest, by interventions and questions which keep the first student talking! The pedagogical aim of this exercise is to break the ice and to get students speaking English again, whilst the practical aim is to give me, the teacher, a chance to ensure that everything is working technically (and to fix things if they aren't).

It worked out exactly like this, with one student needing to leave and come back, another needing to adjust his mike and a third turning up quite late … The pairwork exercises worked quite well too!

There were two Assessment 3 presentations this evening (i.e. 6 students performed in all): one about various aspects of the making of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy; and the other about different types of sports people played. Both group presentations were performed really well - and I could see real progression in the students' oral English skills between Assessment 1 and Assessment 3.

When we'd finished, I went through the course evaluation procedure again and we moved down to the camp fire after the students had had time to discuss what they wanted to say, to hear what they thought of the course. More about this in the next posting …