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Activating intuitive heuristics 201
“conversationally acceptable” in English? Would it be necessary to bring up the issue of style and language variety here? Would it be nec- essary to discuss how people are supposed to speak and write and how they actually speak and write?
8.1.7 Think about what kind of out-of-class assignment you can give your students to strengthen their understanding of the use of the pres- ent progressive. For instance, would the running commentary of a sports event broadcast over the radio be a good source of data containing sev- eral instances of the present progressive in a communicative context? If yes, how would you design an assignment based on that?
8.1.8 Go back to what you have done so far and see to what extent your classroom plans and procedures can actually raise your learners’ language awareness, promote meaningful interaction, and, ultimately, activate their intuitive heuristics.
8.1.9 At the earliest opportunity, try to implement your plan (or parts of it) in the classroom and see how it actually works. When the students are working in pairs or in small groups, use the time to jot down your impression of how the activity develops in class. Based on your classroom experience, reflect on what part to keep and what part to change in order to achieve your goals.
8.1.10 Finally, critically reflect on the process of doing this project. Specifically reflect on the usefulness of exploratory projects like this for designing appropriate microstrategies.
Project 8.2: Focus on Form
8.2.0 Recall the earlier discussion on pedagogic tasks, which focus on form attempting to draw the learners’ attention to grammar only if it is needed to carry out the tasks. Their main focus then is on com- municating to solve a problem or to perform an activity. One of the ob- jectives of pedagogic tasks, however, remains grammar construction on the part of the learner. This project is aimed at helping you experi- ment with a pedagogic task. Here’s one way of doing it.
8.2.1 Select a communicative activity appropriate to the level and in- terest of your learners. It may deal with social and/or academic com- munication such as getting acquainted with classmates on the first day of class, responding to a newspaper ad, deciding on a birthday gift, tak- ing a stand on a current social or political event, etc. At higher levels of challenge, the activity may require the learners to collect information from different sources (through, for instance, library or the Internet)