As mentioned in my "Philosophy of Education" page, I design classroom activities around 3 main pillars of instruction:
" ... comprehensible learning aids, detailed exam instruction, and personalized performance feedback ..."
The 1 de Bachillerato students are 17 and 18 years old. Many of them have taken the Cambridge Exam, and they are quite fluent in English. My role as a language assistant is to build upon their fluency, to help them think creatively and improvise during a discussion. Although these students can fluently read, write, and speak in English, they do not get often get opportunities to practice English, outside of school. The other teachers and I utilize language strategies to challenge them to improvise and speak about topics, without having any a pre-determined understanding about a given topic. Activities such as 1) "Describing your Perfect Day" and 2)"Discuss this picture for 1 minute and a half", provide an appropriate level of difficulty for this age group.
Comprehensible Input / Detailed Exam Instruction
Before we completed the "Describe your Perfect Day" speaking assessment, I had students write about some of their hobbies and interests in class. Then, we had a group discussion about what young people enjoy doing in Spain, nowadays. Students had a spirited discussion for a few weeks about their hobbies and interests.
1) One week, I facilitated a class activity where they would write about their "ideal day". Students were required to write 7-10 sentences, detailed what specifically they would do. I designed it around the 5 W questions: who, what, where, when, and why. I stressed the importance of details. To give them a better understanding of the project, I provided them an example of my "ideal day", by detailing it in class to them.
2) After completing the "ideal day" speaking assessment, we moved on to an assignment in which they had to describe pictures. The assignment consisted of students describing a picture they had never seen before, and they were required to describe it.
As comprehensible input, students were given PowerPoint slides to guide them in how to develop thoughts, based on a visual image. This helped students strategize how they were going to describe the picture. A copy of the PowerPoint slides is provided here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-Rgx0dIzgMRjA45D16654vwf4sSZFlKHwbgvciNSII/edit#slide=id.p1
We went through the discussion of some helpful ways to think about describing pictures, and we then discussed it as a class. We practiced how to invent an idea based on an image, and how improvising means thinking about other aspects of the pictures. It seemed students became more mindful of the dynamic of photos, after looking at the different aspects of them.
Personalized (performance) Feedback
1) After they completed the project, the task was for them to articulate an ideal day (the next class session), without reading from their papers. Basically, they had to memorize their writing or improvise their speaking. The task was to speak for 1 minute and 30 seconds about their ideal day, with details, answering the "5W" questions.
2) During the picture description, I also assessed the students ability to describe a photo. For the first semester, it was a simple description of feedback, based on the teacher's request for this feedback form, so they can see some basic concepts about how they are performing. I have attached the website -- thoughtco.com -- with information I used to create a rubric, for both the "Ideal Day" and "Describing Pictures" assignment. I used the following categories: 1) Content 2) Presentation Skills 3) Fluency 4) Grammar/Structure
https://www.thoughtco.com/esl-presentation-rubric-1210285