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Professional Development Assignment Stage 4

Re assessing beliefs
During the last seven months I have become far more aware of my own
presence in the classroom and more sensitive to my students needs. I have thought
through my beliefs about the nature of input and reexamined the appropriacy of the
language I provide for my learners, especially my YL.
My reading about the process of intake (Hedge, 2000: 12) and the factors
involved in it, had an impact on my lessons organisation. I understood the importance of
activities that involve negotiation of meaning which aim to make the output more
comprehensible. Therefore I have introduced different techniques typical for Dogme and
the TBL approaches that encourage greater levels of involvement. After I have changed
the interaction patterns in class my students reported increased willingness to experiment
and take risks. I have finally managed to steer clear of the PPP approach thus
ensuring ???better flow of the lessons. What I feel has changed the most is my grown
confidence in the activities I choose and my renewed enthusiasm for creating warm and
welcoming classroom atmosphere. I have always held a belief that anxiety and stressfree classrooms precondition successful learning is now backed up with a firm rationale. I
was doubtful and felt guilty for using L1 in class, but my reading (Kerr, 2014 among
others) helped me see how I can take an advantage of it.
I came to realise that my tendency to over- explaining grammar rules to my
students could no longer be justified by taking for granted the students apparent
insistence on it. Having used guided discovery technique on many occasions in the
course of the past few months and witnessing the effects changed my view on grammar
teaching.

What has helped the most


I have done a lot of reading for this assignment, revisiting books on SLA Theory and
Contrastive Analysis as well as books on Methodology and PD in an attempt to establish
a firm base for my teaching and situating it in my particular context. I have chosen Dogme

teaching for my experimental practice and was since then encouraged to implement
Dogme techniques and un-plug my lessons (on a small scale).The techniques of
reformulation and recasting were the ones I found most valuable. Learning more about
the cognitive processes involved in L2 reading persuaded me to establish a reading club
for my YL so as to encourage extensive reading.
However,(BETTER LINKER NEEDED), the honest, constructive feedback my observers
and my LT have given was and eye-opener and therefore extremely helpful. My
questionnaires, provided a great deal of useful data but also served as a springboard to
fruitful conversations. Informal interviews with the students were also enlightening. I have
put a lot of effort to be persistent in writing my own observations of the instruction giving
and board work but those attempts were less successful in comparison to other data
collection methods. Nevertheless, I tried to combine subjective and objective methods to
better inform my practice.

Continuous Professional Development

I will continue using the approaches and techniques mentioned above by


means of further un-plugging my lessons and opening more classroom space. I
believe that students autonomy can be encouraged by including short
metacognitive stages and effective learning training strategies in my lessons

(Hedge 2000:83).
I will continue using observer questionnaires but this time will also involve my
adult students in the evaluation process more than I have

Action plan
-Further areas of development I intend to focus on in the post- DELTA year
1. Providing feedback
I feel I am too inclined (BETTER WORD NEEDED) towards whole- class teacher
centered form of providing feedback. I intend to become better informed (by
means of reading and lessons observation) about the alternatives and this will be

one of my future action points. I will use teacher logs and observer
questionnaires for collecting data.
2. Error correction
More focused reading and experimenting with different classes on what seems to
be effective method preferred by the learners depending on their age, level and
learning style. I intend to take notes and record critical incidents so as to gather
data.
Action plan for CPD

To attend conferences and give talks/ workshops based on my DELTA September 2017
research and findings

on

To organise workshops and seminars in my county (and/or the


neighboring countries- Kosovo, Bulgaria) on behalf of a teacher
association I am a comittee member of
April 2016
(conference) ,
2017
Conduct small scale research in teaching reading to YL
working with primary school teachers in my town

Next semester

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