Here are the competence aims I will use as bases for my choice of activities and material that I hope will assist the pupils in achieving the competence required after year 10:

Language Learning:

• utilize various situations, methods and strategies for learning English.
• use various aids critically and independently
• describe and evaluate their own efforts to learn English

Communication:

• master a vocabulary that covers a variety of topics
• use of basic grammar and text structures orally and in writing
• understand spoken and written texts on a variety of topics
• express themselves in writing and orally with some precision, fluency and coherence

Culture, Society and Literature:

• communicate through digital media
• present and discuss current and interdisciplinary topics
• read and understand texts of varying lengths and genres
• choose different listening, speaking, reading and writing strategies appropriate to purpose and situation
• write texts that narrate, describe, argue or present information, with appropriate basic structure and appropriate use of paragraphs
• use content from various sources independently and critically

In order to assess the pupils’ progress, and decide whether or not they’ve achieved some of the aims, I make them «brainstorm» at the end of the lesson, and each pupil has to say a different word or phrase to sum up what they have learned. In addition I have chosen to give them an oral task that includes ICT. I give the pupils about ten days to work with a Power Point or a PhotoStory presentation, about either South Africa or Jamaica. They choose from a range of topics, and work individually with the presentation. While working with their presentation they will have a one-hour writing session at school where the task is to write an interview with either Nelson Mandela, Bob Marley or Mahatma Gandhi. These activities will help me assess their skills in oral, reading, writing, ICT, and listening. I give them a set of guidelines on how to make a good oral presentation, what I expect of them, how to use the internet, avoid plagiarism and what internet-sites that have images licensed for use in the public domain, e.g. Wikimedia Commons and FlickR.

Before initiating the work with the presentations I spend three hours on preparing the pupils for the task: I give a quick introduction to Jamaica and South Africa. The pupils listen to a song by Bob Marley and discuss the lyrics. I give them a small grammar-test where they describe images in a slide show, writing sentences with “it is” or “there is/there are”, and some tasks related to concord. Instead of vocabulary tests I make them play a game similar to “Alias” where they describe the words in English and guess the words instead of write them. I robbed the idea from Marianne, who told me that she played «Alias» with her pupils. Apart from the writing session, most of the activities are either oral or a combination of written and oral work.

I give the same tasks and activities to two different classes, both in year 10. Although the pupils are more polite and obedient than I ever imagined, one of my major challenges is that there is a huge gap between the very competent pupils and the emerging pupils. Another challenge is how to make them speak English instead of Norwegian. After two weeks I realize that the lay-out of the lesson and how I organize the activities influences very much the pupils’ productivity. If I start the lesson by putting them straight to work with a demanding task, they become demotivated. But if I start with a game, a clip from youtube or something «fun», they would be a lot more productive.