Wed Mar 3

I had organised a freewriting but in the end decided against it, and we began almost immediately with the oral presentations. This time I told the sts that their grade for this would only be worth 5 points, but that it would be graded out of 10 to make things a bit easier; and I negotiated with them what emphasis should go where. They decided on grading it in a way I wouldn't have done myself - putting more emphasis on Using language fluently and accurately & Expressing opinions with precision; and less on Communicating with good grammatical control & Summarizing an article. Having worked this out, some didn't give their opinion at all until prompted by me; hence there was some confusion for me as to why they had put more emphasis on this for their grade.

Still, this being the first day, the first students were visibly nervous and happy to get theirs out the way, but still did quite well. It seems to me that as time goes on and there are less and less sts to give their presentation, it is the final few that actually have more problems with oral production who wait till last, whether they're nervous or not. At least at this time, those who had major problems with pronunciation, mumbling, or ungrammatical sentences were the ones who hung back till the end.

Some of the presentations produced a lot of comments or questions, particularly from one st, who seemed to have an opinion on almost every topic. I think she was enjoying being able to say something on every topic, but after a while I could see that other sts were a little bit annoyed that she had a comment about everything. Still, others also participated as well.

We took a short break after about half an hour and read the hippopotamus poem, which was enjoyed by all.

At the end of another 40 minutes of presentations I then introduced the Larson activity, whereby the sts broke into 7 groups and had to create captions for the comics. I must be careful when doing activities like this, that there is not a group totally comprised of serious, quiet people who don't like to share, because they do have serious trouble being creative and suggesting ideas. It would be better to put them (subtly) in different groups. I'm not sure how to do this exactly without it looking too obvious.