Page 96 - Beyond Methods

84 Minimizing perceptual mismatches Episode 4.4
T1 What do you think is the purpose of this lesson?
S3 So that we can make the right choice . . . how to buy through news- paper ads . . .
S4 Increase vocabulary . . . and learn English . . .
T1 Learn English? By what . . . by practicing? By what?
S4 By conversation . . . and writing.
T1 OK, do you think there is any one thing, one grammar thing we were working on?
S4 Yeah.
T1 What part of grammar do you think?
S4 What part?
T1 Yeah, what part of grammar do you think we were working on? S4 Capital...uh...comma.
T1 What do you mean?
S4 No, not too much grammar . . . vocabulary.
The lesson in question was primarily a meaning-focused activ- ity with some attention given to the grammatical features of too and enough. Clearly, the teacher was trying get the learners to identify those grammatical items. It is evident from this episode that the perception of the two learners’ in terms of the purpose of the lesson do not match each other’s; neither do they match that of the teacher. An intriguing part of the interaction is that S4 mentioned the use of capital letters and comma as the teaching and learning objectives of the lesson, something that was not at all mentioned by the teacher during this particular class. Inter- views conducted later with the teacher revealed that punctuation was indeed the focus of a lesson taught the week before.
5. Strategic mismatch: This source refers to learning strategies: operations, steps, plans, and routines used by the learner to fa- cilitate the obtaining, storage, retrieval, and use of information, that is, what learners do to learn and to regulate learning. In the following episode dealing with the task of finding an inexpensive wedding gown, the teacher gave the learners fifteen minutes to solve a problem. She expected that it would trigger the use of