Page 85 - Beyond Methods

Maximizing learning opportunities 73 dent Response Sheet in all your classes. The feedback you get from your
students will be useful to monitor the effectiveness of your teaching.)
3.1.4 As the students work on the response sheet, jot down any changes you may have made in your lesson plan as the lesson unfolded. Revise your list of targeted items (Go to your Specific Objectives col- umn in your lesson plan). You may find yourself deleting some words or concepts that you did not have time to deal with, or adding new ones that came up during the lesson.
3.1.5 Watch the video (or listen to the tape). Keeping in mind the ob- jective of this particular project, select a few episodes in which there are several occurrences of teacher questions. Transcribe only those seg- ments; you do not need to transcribe the whole tape.
3.1.6 Now, collect instances of questions that you can easily identify as display questions or referential questions. If there are doubtful cases, ignore them for the moment.
3.1.7 Review the interactive exchanges where display questions oc- curred. Keeping in mind that display questions do have a place in lan- guage teaching, reflect on the suitability of the display questions you asked in the specific contexts in which they occurred. Think about whether your questions, from your perspective, created the kind of learning opportunities that you wanted to create. You may want to jot down your notes using the table shown in Figure 3.2 (or a similar one).
Figure 3.2
Now, do the same for referential questions in Figure 3.3.
Figure 3.3
Episode #
Display question (turns x to y)
Learning opportunity it presumably created
Reasons to change to referential
or to keep
Episode #
Referential question (turns x to y)
Learning opportunity it presumably created
Reasons to change or to keep