I have chosen the following competence aims

Language learning:
use basic terminology to describe grammar and text structure
describe and assess his/her own work in learning English

To help the pupils reach the first aim I have focused on teaching them past, present and future of verbs. I have explained and shown examples of the different tenses on PowerPoint and given them exercises to solve. Sometimes they have handed in the exercises so I can give feedback and see if they get what I’m trying to teach. I have been focusing on this aim more or less the whole five weeks, so there has been a lot of repetition involved. When I explain it on the blackboard or with help from the PowerPoint I use a timeline to explain the different locations of the different tenses in time. I also try to drag the answers out of the pupils and make them explain it to each other. I think I have succeeded to a certain degree, but as I have tried to cover a lot of different things in my lessons, I haven’t given exercises I think are good enough in retrospect. The pupils now manage to see some patterns and they are familiar with the terminology, they are on their way, but most of them are not able to describe grammar and text structure. I have mostly focused on fill-in-the-blanks and underline-the-verbs exercises. If I could start over, I would have given more exercises based on the pupils creativity as I think it makes them more aware of the structures when they are creating them than when they are merely recognising them.

The second aim was to assess own learning. The pupils are working with a textbook and I give texts for reading as homework every week. I hear them read out loud every week. Sometimes I hear them one by one as they read a couple of sentences each, other times I let them read in pairs and walk around and try to listen to most of them. I have gradually introduced the «two stars and a wish» concept for them so they could learn how to assess themselves. First off they had to note down two stars and a wish for themselves when they read out loud, then for their reading mate and give feedback. I have had them assess me, and an assistant with a French accent that has been helping in class. When they were familiar with the concept we went through some important aspects of pronunciation that I am looking for when I am assessing them and had them consider these points when assessing themselves or their reading mates. I found this made it a lot easier for them as it was more concrete than just to say «you read well», and I could have introduced it a lot earlier in the process. The whole point behind two stars and a wish is to put more focus on what they manage than what they don’t manage. This gives the pupils a sense of success while at the same time they are aware of what they need to work on. I find that most of the pupils are aware of where they are in the learning process and from collecting their notebooks to check their homework every week I can see that their comments to each other have gotten more reflected over the weeks.

I have also worked with lots of other competence aims, and now I realise that I maybe should have focused on fewer so we could have gotten a bit further. But on the other hand, I value repetition, and I think to work with multiple areas over a long has positive effects that I wont see in the six weeks I am here. To have 60 minute lessons as we do here is both a blessing and a temptation to cover too much ground..