domingo, 20 de septiembre de 2009

First week: Piloting the diagnostic test.

This week was really demanding for us given that there were a lot of information and we had to clasify the most important and relevant related to our Research Project. Besides, we had some concerns about the question and objectives and at the same time we had some doubts about the way to design the modules as well as the way to upload them on the platform.


Finally we decided to star our Action Research project.


                       

On September 10, 2009, we asked for permission to apply the research project at the school. The principal told us that it was an interesting topic and if we needed help we can ask for it to our preschool English headmaster.  


Given that school have five groups of Pre kinder we decided to pilot the test in Pre kinder A on September 16th, 2009. We concluded that there were many topics to work on as well as a lot of information for kids and few pictures that illustrate the vocabulary. So, we added more pictures and focused them just in two topics: Actions and body parts following the curriculum of the school.


On September 18th, 2009, we applied the new version of the test with the target group (Pre kinder B) to analyze the amount of vocabulary students have. We realized that some pictures made them get confused, for instance they said sports instead of saying the actions. And related to body parts, when they saw the head they said hair and when they saw the hair they said wig.

Regarding to the amount of vocabulary they had, we noticed that only one girl knew one part of the body and one boy knew another one. The rest of the children answered in Spanish because they expressed that they didn’t know the words in English. It was good evidence that these children did not know vocabulary related to the selected topics and they needed to enrich their vocabulary.

At the beginning of the video recording they were excited because of the activity; however, some of them felt shy to speak in front of the camera.