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At the beginning of the class, the teachers reviewed the grammar on the board to activate previous knowledge and remind the students how to use the simple past. After that, one of the teacher told the students a story about something that happened to her when she visited her gramma last winter holydays.

In order to model the activity, the teacher drew the story in the whiteboard while thinking her ideas aloud, every time she used a verb, she wrote it under the picture (for example, when she told students she watched tv with her grandma, bellow the draw she wrote “watched”). It was a short story of an experience, where the teacher used no more than 4 or 5 verbs.

The students showed through their face expressions that they were following and understanding what the teacher were telling, they also started translating some parts to Spanish (spontaneously and innately) excited because they were understanding all the story.

After that, the other teacher did the same. So, the students had two opportunities to observe the activity.

The teacher explained that they were supposed to do the same: they should think about some interesting event that happened in the past and draw it on their notebook, they should write only the verbs in the simple past. The teacher gave 20 minutes to accomplish this activity. Most of the students understood the instructions quickly, but some asked for help and the teacher explained it in person. During the activity, the students call the teacher to check if:

1.         the history they choose were good for the activity

2.         the draw was beautiful

3.         how to write some verb in the simple past

4.         how to said some words (vocabulary)

Through the activities the teachers monitored the students work by asking questions about the drawings, following their output, trying to look over what they were doing and answering questions when they asked.

After 20 minutes, the teachers gave the opportunity to the students to present their own stories to their classmates and 9 students presented it spontaneously.

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Look the most common verbs over 9 participants! 

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Look the most common verbs over 9 participants! 

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Characteristics of the learning and leaners situation

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Characteristics of the learning and leaners situation

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Learning situation: The exploration project took place in a public school, located in Vitacura. It is not a bilingual school, but students start their English classes in first grade, where the class schedule contains six pedagogical hours per week for learning English.

Even though it is a public school, parents have to buy the English text books, which are used from preschool grades to IV Medio, following the same editorial through all the years of school.

Learners situation: It is a fourth-grade class, with students between 9 and 10 years old.

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Most students seem to clearly understand the explanation about how to use the simple past and they answer correctly the questions during the exposition of the subject, but we are not sure if they would produce output properly by themselves. We want to find out if students can use the simple past tense to tell their own experiences.

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The area we explored was speaking because we wanted to see if the students were able to express their understanding about simple past based on their experience, knowledge and vocabulary.

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At the end of the class, teachers told students how appreciated they were with their effort. In order to evaluate the activity, teachers delivery a question as an exit ticket - were the students had to check the option that best defines how they felt when performing this activity.

Check the option that best defines how you felt when performing this activity:
| A | It was easy for me
| B | It was fairly difficult for me
| C | It was difficult for me

In this case, it was the first time they did an activity like this. The result indicate that for  12 students the activity was easy, for 18 students it was fairly difficult, and for 15 the activity was difficult.

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From here, we believe that it is very important to increase the amount of speaking, to make them think about language, syntax and grammar. We believe that they have the tools and the knowledge, it just about giving them more opportunities to create output, to do metacognition, to feel more confident and to try in an environment where they know they won´t be judge.

Doing this action research showed us the importance of observe the needs of a particular group, the importance of looking for a solution for their necessities and act based in the characteristics of this particular students. We know that this is just a little data that we collected, but it helped us so much for create a critical thinking in our role as teachers and motivate us to create something new making decisions based on the research and results.

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We observed that there is a big gap between students and their English knowledge. Some students felt very confident about their English, showed a high self-teem during the activity and had no problem showing and explaining their works to the class, even when they had mistakes on it.

By the other hand, we could see some students that worked incredibly and understood the activity, but they weren’t confident about themselves when it came to speak in front of their classmates, so even though we knew that they understood the activity and were able to do it (writing down the right verbs in the past) they didn’t want to participate aloud.

We observed that, in general, students manage the verbs in the past, they could draw a experience and write the verb bellow (for example, a student drew herself cooking and bellow that she wrote “cooked”), they had thought about an experience they have lived and they drew it (because we wanted them to order their ideas), after that they had to tell to their class what they drew, but in that moment we realized that students were very complicated creating the sentences aloud. They knew the verbs in past, but most of them had problems with connectors, putting these verbs in context, connecting the ideas with the proper grammar and showed difficulty with the vocabulary.

We could see that students are much more comfortable just receiving input or doing activities in the text book, in silence and participating aloud just to answer to questions that doesn’t require much output.  We saw that students manage a lot of vocabulary, but not in context, for example, they know the verbs, they know how to say them in the past form, they know words of vocabulary they have seen since first grade, but they do not know very well how to connect them, they have problems creating output aloud, the grammar became much difficult to them when they had to talk,  they are missing connectors words or confusing them, there is so little output in their English classes that it impacted us.