Individual Response - Peggy

This lesson plan is mainly based on the Interactionist model. I feel that the teachers who did this lesson plan had planned to have collaborative learning which follows the interactionism model. According to Vygotsky, the interactionist model says that learning is acquired when students interact with their surroundings, which includes people around them such as their peers and students. This is evident in activities such as pair work which aims to foster collaborative learning and the e-portal platform where teachers can give feedback to the students.

However, there are some traces of the behavourism pedagogical approach found in this lesson plan as well. One of the tenets of the behaviourism model is that learning can be acquired through habit formation and this can be achieved through the drill and practice method which is evident in the activity where the students have to imitate how the people in the conversation speak.

Strengths
Generally I feel that this is a very detailed lesson plan. I like how the objectives are clearly stated and they used verbs like “read” which is an outcome that can be measured and observed at the end of the lesson.

Secondly, another strength is that they made use of a variety of ICT tools such as using video clips, the IRF feedback system which is controlled by a remote control, as well as using an e-portal platform where students can interact with not only amongst themselves but the teacher can also participate. This creates a less threatening platform for all students to express their views especially for the shyer students who are afraid to voice out in class. Usage of this portal would also lessen the teacher’s workload at the end of the day as she is able to assess everyone at one go during curriculum time and she can give immediate feedback to the students.

They have stuck quite closely to the interactionism model in the sense that they tried to incorporate pairwork during the activities. When students give feedback to each other, they themselves will also learn from their peers.


Weaknesses
One of the weaknesses of this lesson plan is that it is too teacher-centric and it allows very little space for the students to be able to explore on their own. Since ICT is a tool to facilitate language learning, teachers should make good use of the facilities instead of just altering the physical classroom but there is no change to the pedagogical approach of the lesson. According to Towndrow (2007), in order to fully utilize ICT as a tool, it is not enough for teachers to just change the classroom and make it more technologised but adopting a student-centric pedagogical approach when teaching is key. In this case I feel that there could be more activities where students can explore and learn about language pronunciation. So instead of giving them the checklist which is akin to spoonfeeding them, the teacher can divide the class into groups and give each group a different area to research online about good pronunciation. The class then comes together at the end to craft the checklist together. The teacher can play the role of the facilitator who guides the class discussion and to provide scaffolding as a form of learning support which is essential as one of the five characteristics when teacher delegate tasks (Towndrow, 2007).

Another weakness is the materials or resources used, as some are either not age-appropriate or does not serve to meet the objectives of the lesson plan. Since they are still primary students, I feel that the long conversation script is not suitable for them and the script can be altered to a shorter one. The video clip which was used for the pre-activity can be changed to one which actually shows the speakers engaging in expressive/non-expressive speech which is what the objective of the lesson is. The Joey clip would come in useful if the lesson plan was about teaching plosives.