Delta 5b

Module Two

Report for the internally-assessed Professional Development Assignment

Candidate name Katya Kirichenko

Centre name The Distance DELTA
Centre number 10239
Candidate number    
Assignment title
Task Based Language Teaching
(Experimental Practice)

Grade
Please select
th
Date: 5 April 2013
Neil Anderson (RA Stage 1) May 2013, June 2013
Tutor name David Palfreyman (Stage 2, EP)
Damian Williams (Stage 3) 30/7/13

Delta5bOctober2010 1
Assessment Criteria – Professional Development Assignment: Reflection and Action

Successful candidates must:

1 present an assignment which:
a) is written in language which is clear, accurate, easy to follow and does not impose a strain on the
reader
b) is cohesive and clearly ordered and in which component parts of the assignment are relevant to the
topic
c) uses appropriate terminology accurately
d) refers to and references key sources
e) contains a bibliography of key sources consulted
f) follows widely accepted referencing conventions
g) respects the word limits of individual stages of the assignment and the overall word limit (2,000–2,500
words) and states the number of words used.

Tutor comment and feedback

Stage 2: Be careful with word limits: if future assignments are even slightly over the maximum limit, they can be
returned to you unmarked. (1g)

At stage 3:

1a) Your language is generally accurate and error-free, and written in a largely academic style.
1b) The assignment is clearly ordered, with the use of subheadings and bullet points which make it easy to
follow. You have appended lots of useful data, so keep this up for stage 4.
1c) Terminology is generally used accurately throughout, and this is referenced with links to sources of reading.
1d – 1f) References are made appropriately. You have consulted appropriate sources and included a
bibliography.
1g) Well done for keeping to the word limit at this stage. Don’t forget to provide the overall word count at stage
4.

2 focus on the topic of the assignment by:

a) selecting some key strengths and weaknesses in their teaching practices and providing a rationale for
their selection
b) selecting approaches/procedures/techniques/materials to use to address the issues identified in 2a
c) critically evaluating the effectiveness of the selected approaches/procedures/techniques/materials
d) critically evaluating the effectiveness of methods and/or documents they have selected to gather data
to allow them to focus on their teaching practices
e) providing an appropriate action plan to promote their professional development
f) critically reflecting on their teaching practices and beliefs during the course of this assignment

Tutor comment and feedback

Stage 1
Overall, you set yourself a big challenge here, Katya, which is to be commended. I think you pulled it off well for
the most part, though there are important areas to consider for your future teaching of grammar.

The key strengths were:

 Use of contextualised dialogues to provide examples of when the backshift was used and not used; you
had clear model sentences here. (7c)
 Your ability to and willingness to “remedy” a situation in which learners were unsure of the rules.
Though this should have been better clarified at the teach stage, you micro-taught the controlled
practice and decided to use the feedback slot to do further clarification using new examples. This was
good reactive teaching. (6c, 8d, 9a)
 Variety in production – from written sentence level, to pressured oral production, to contextualised
written practice. Learners remained well engaged in an area that is traditionally a source of frustration
for them. (8c)
 The lesson was well-planned from the ground up, and there are lots of encouraging elements to your
planning, including your outline of the learners in the profile and commentary, your staging and the
scope of your focus (though see my comments on wording the aim). (5a, 5h, 5k)

Consider the following:

Delta5bOctober2010 2
  Clarification: you need to ensure all students are involved here and you fully cover what the learners
need to know in order to implement rules in practice. A lot of this comes down to improving your use of
precise elicitation / checking questions and drawing not just on one learner to give you a rule (this
doesn’t tell you much about the others). (8a, 7d)
 It is very important that learners have a clear sense of what they are supposed to do in the production
stage, beyond completing a dialogue i.e. how many instances of the TL do you want? Backshift or not?
Remind them clearly. (9c)
 In general, task set-ups are sometimes a little loose; consider making these clear by ensuring all
students are paying attention, checking the students know what to do and monitoring immediately to
ensure all students are doing it. Give time limits where it will further help the aim (e.g. skim reading) an
in order to better synchronize students. (9c)
 Spending time at the end of the lesson focusing on the progress made with reported speech rather than
an elaborate voting system for content feedback. This felt like a missed opportunity and looking at their
writing reveals they are partway there but not fully so some attention to examples to recap on rules
would have been beneficial. (7e)
 Some elements of planning could be improved, notably more explicit reference to background reading
in the lesson plan commentary. (5k)

Stage 2

You’ve summarized clearly your beliefs about four different areas of teaching, making reference to your
experience and specific teaching strategies. A couple of your points could be clearer:
(i) Task based learning could certainly provide “a natural context and a real purpose for communication”, but it’s
not clear how guided discovery does this: it’s cognitively engaging, but it doesn’t aim to use the target language
in a real context.
(ii) In your final point particularly, it will help in future to say explicitly what you are comparing with, e.g. “Group
and pairwork increases the amount of student talking time compared with oral interaction between the teacher
and individual students” (to take a contrasting example, in the case of writing, group writing can allow less
actual writing practice than individual writing).
(2f)

You’ve identified some relevant strengths and weaknesses in your teaching. It’s interesting to compare your
strength 3 (monitoring, dealing with emergent language) and weakness 3 (lack of “feedback sessions”). These
are linked, and you can think about how your strength in responding and giving feedback to individuals while
they are doing activities can feed into feedback sessions after the activity/ for the whole class.
(2a)

You’ve made some suggestions for improving the weak areas mentioned above, but these are still a bit general.
For the next stage of your RA, identify some sources for ideas in relation to each point, e.g. online articles about
giving classroom instructions or feedback, which will suggest specific strategies to try.
(2b,e)

You’ve mentioned a variety of ways of gathering data about teaching, relevant to specific weaknesses
mentioned above. The choice of instruments is appropriate and you’ve chosen simple, practical formats which
should help you get useful information (you would need to make sure students understand what “feedback”
refers to). You also show awareness of the advantages of each type.
Although you mention audio recording instructions, none of the materials in your appendices seem to focus on
this (e.g. an observation sheet could focus on instructions and the effect of these on the success of an activity).
(2c,d)

Stage 3

(2c, 2d) You have reported back clearly on most of the key areas at stage 2, though I’m not sure how class
dynamics relates to setting up activities (or even if it’s supposed to). You’ve also discussed which tools and
methods you’ve found useful. What would improve this further is if you also discuss this in terms of how you felt
after using the techniques, not just learners’ reactions. This is something to focus on for stage 4.

(2a) You have identified three areas which you feel a need to develop. These are new for this stage, and so it
would perhaps have been useful to discuss the background to them a little further, especially the latter two.

(2b, 2e) Your action plan appears achievable, and you appear to have a clear idea of what exactly you want to
get out of the next stage of the assignment, which is good to see. In your description of data collection methods
you have described some useful tools to monitor your progress, and these will provide you with a lot of useful
data from which to draw conclusions. Make sure you append all this at stage 4. Do read my suggestions for
Delta5bOctober2010 3
other possible tools you can use here carefully, and feel free to integrate them into stage 4 if you want.

You have only briefly mentioned how your beliefs haven’t changed much since stage 2. That’s quite acceptable
at this intermediate stage in the project: no doubt you will have something to say about this in Stage 4 (2f).

This is a good continuation of this part of the PDA, Kateryna. You have set out some clear areas for
development for the final stretch of the course. Good luck with stage 4.

Stage 4

Delta5bOctober2010 4
 Assessment Criteria – Professional Development Assignment: Experimental Practice

1 present an assignment which:

a) is written in language which is clear, accurate, easy to follow and does not impose a strain on the
reader
b) is cohesive and clearly ordered and in which component parts of the assignment are relevant to the
topic
c) uses appropriate terminology accurately
d) refers to and references key sources
e) contains a bibliography of key sources consulted
f) follows widely accepted referencing conventions
g) respects the word limits of individual stages of the assignment and the overall word limit (2,000 – 2,500
words) and states the number of words used.

Tutor comment and feedback

Your assignment is clearly written, organized and coherent, although in some parts of your assignment you
could pay more attention to punctuation (1a,b). You make good use of terminology (1c) and refer to key
sources on your topic (e), which are clearly cited (1f) and listed in your bibliography (1e). The word length is OK
overall, but you could have reduced the rationale/commentary a bit and developed the post lesson evaluation
more (see comment below). (1g)

3 focus on the topic of the assignment by:

a) demonstrating understanding of selected approaches/procedures/techniques/materials
b) justifying the selection of the selected approaches/procedures/techniques/materials
c) making appropriate reference to theory, to the characteristics and needs of specific groups of learners,
and to their own professional development to inform their selection of
approaches/procedures/techniques and materials
d) critically evaluating the effectiveness of methods and/or documents they have selected to gather data
to allow them to focus on their teaching practices
e) evaluating their chosen area of experimental practice with reference to the specific group of learners
and their own professional development
f) showing awareness of the links between practice and underlying theory.

Tutor comment and feedback

You give a very clear analysis of features of TBLT, looking at theory, practice and relations between the two: you
show a clear understanding of these issues (3a, f).

You have given a clear and convincing rationale for choosing this approach (3b), with reference to the strengths
of your young learners as well as your own professional development, in relation to the theory and examples
which you have read about. The challenge could be to use TBLT to address your learners’ weaknesses (e.g. in
using grammar) (3c).

Your lesson plan demonstrates convincingly your understanding of how the ideas of TBLT can be applied in the
classroom. In planning the lesson you’ve made good reference to frameworks such as Skehan’s, as well as
thinking about your learners’ needs and preferences, as made explicit in the commentary. (3f)

You’ve chosen relevant objectives for your professional development, and used various means to monitor the
effectiveness of the lesson: two observers with different focuses, and self-observation notes as well. This would
help you to evaluate the lesson convincingly. A couple of the objectives could be a bit clearer, and especially
you could have given a clearer explanation about how you were going to evaluate objective 3 (how TBLT works
with YLs), which is clearly a key one in this experimental practice. (3d)

Your evaluation of the experiment is clear and balanced, and relevant to the objectives of the lesson. You show
awareness of what went well in the lesson and what could have been better (e.g. timing, management), as well
as the reasons for these. You could have developed this part a bit more, and linked your explanation more to
the specific objectives. (3e) You could also refer more to specific evidence (e.g. the interaction map, your own
notes) and comment more explicitly on how effective your means of gathering data were. While this doesn’t
matter too much at this stage, you will need to include it in future RA stages. (3d)

Delta5bOctober2010 5
Overall tutor comment and feedback on the Professional Development Assignment
(Please summarise strengths and weaknesses with reference to the criteria.)

Well done on a strong experimental practice assignment. It is evident that you have researched thoroughly,
have made practical use of your research in your own teaching, and have action points in place to help you
build on this experience in the future.

University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations

Teaching Awards
1 Hills Road
Cambridge
CB1 2EU
Tel: +44 1223 553997
E-mail: deltaadmin@cambridgeesol.org
www.cambridgeesol.org

Delta5bOctober2010 6