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Section
6 –
Hypotheses
and action steps To
change the students’ negative perception concerning the problem of the
specific lexis to acquire and master, and the problem of speaking about
difficult topics in English, I will make these points the focus of two
lessons: I will devise appropriate activities on the keywords related to
the topic in a class, and I will give the students of the other class some
authentic texts from a British textbook of Information Technology to be
read autonomously before the lesson, so that they can isolate and check
the unknown words and recollect all their previous knowledge about the
topic to deal with before the class presentation. “Action strategies
are actions which are planned and put into practice by the teacher
researcher in order to improve the situation or its content…Action
strategies can be thought of as preliminary answers to the researcher’s
questions or ‘experimental’ solutions to the problem he or she is
investigating.” (Altrichter, Posch, and Somekh 1993, p. 158)
The
lessons to be observed and analysed are the two starting lessons of an
English-History module about the great monotheistic religions and an
English-Electronic Systems module about the storage devices of the
computer system. I have chosen these two classes because they belong to
the two different courses I teach in and their level is different with
respect to their school grade (second and fourth school years), but it is
not different as far as the English mastery is concerned, an elementary to
pre-intermediate level with some high and low peaks. I have been teaching
in both classes since last school year. The materials used and devised for
the lessons are in Appendix 5. English-History
lesson The
aim of this lesson is to make the students concentrate on the lexis
already known related to the topic and on a number of new words necessary
to develop it. I will also use the words as inputs to elicit from the
students all the information about religions that they have previously
acquired in their History and Religion lessons and to let them find
analogies and differences between them. The cultural aim is to find out
whether the religions they are discussing about have some elements in
common or not. This has both a historical and an educational value, since
the theme is strictly connected to the growth of prejudices and
intolerance with respect to religious beliefs other than one’s own. English-Electronic
Systems lesson The
aim of this lesson is to make the students put together as much
information as they can about some storage devices of a computer system.
They have read an English text at home, checked the new words on the
dictionary and can use all their previous knowledge to take part in
the class activities. They will have to present and explain the
topic to me, the only person in the class who is not an expert in
Information Technology. The aim of the lesson is to lead the students to
use both the information contained in the text in English and what they
have already studied in Italian.
The cross-curricular aim is to make the students compare different sources
and establish what is already known and what is new, independently of the
language of the sources. |