While working through each category, it was interesting to discover how important it is to be conscious of these perceptions. Being aware of our weaknesses (internal negative factors) helps us work on them, while realizing our strengths (internal positive factors) makes us more confident. And though opportunities and threats are related to external factors, thinking about them helps us identify our expectations as students and may, at the same time, become a course goal for the teacher.
All in all, it was a very interesting excercise and I highly recomend it to develop self-awareness and goal orientation.

The problem is that prior knowledge is not equal across the classroom. This is why it is essential to assess students background knowledge so as to find out what they do or don’t know. The author suggests different ways to do this, such as prediction guides, carousel walk and  free discussion.

This pre-reading activity is evidently not about activating students background knowledge, because probably there will be very little existing knowledge about India. My intention is to engage and motivate students through showing them something unknown and giving them a sense of discovery. It is about introducing them to different realities and the awareness of cultural diversity, thus building up new knowledge and arousing curiosity.

Group activity:
Students will work in groups of six, and come up with typical questions and expressions used in interviews, in the different stages. These will be shared with the class and the entonation and pronunciation will be performed by the teacher and repeated by students. As a class they will decide on the interview setting and organize themselves to bring the elements requiered to stage it.
Pair activity:
Students will pair up and decide on a famous actor, singer or football player they would like to interview. For homework they will do research on their celebrity so as to be able to answer the interviewers questions. During the following lesson they will write and practice their script. And the following lesson present their interview.

·         Listening, the teacher reads the story out loud, two times. 

Note: this stage, depending on the text being read, could be very useful for the teacher to become an input resource for prosodic features of speech, such as intentional pausing, stress, pitch and intonation,  thus making the text rich and alive, musical. 

·         Writing, first by note-taking and then by writing the text as close as possible to the original one.

·         Speaking, through comparing and discussing with group-mates.

·         Reading, when reading the reconstructed text out loud.

I believe this activity  is a great opportunity  for the teacher to use  for formative assessment, it serves as input for the teacher to see and analyze students outcome (error analysis), and helps to provide feedback  and practice the aspects that may still be weak. 

1. Students pair up. Teacher hands out 10 cards to each pair of students. They will play to be fortune tellers. Student A isthe fortune teller and asks student B to pick three cards. Student B picks the cards. Student A turns them over and according on what appears on them predicts students B's future. Ex. You will be obscenly rich and live in a castle. You will  marry an old woman or live with your mum. You will be encountered by a shark on a surfing holiday.  You will be sent to a nunery. When they have finished reading  the first three fortune cards students swop roles  and it's student B's turn to be the fortune teller while student A picks three cards.  
2. Teacher asks students: "Who was born between 21st of Feb and 21st of  March?" All the  students born between those dates form the group piscis. Then teacher moves on to April. Once all the horoscope groups are formed ( it doesn't matter that in some groups there are more students then in others, actually it would be interesting to observe which ones work better) they are given a different zodiac sign to work on. Groups have to write a short horoscope using will and won't to predict that signs future. Once ready teacher randomely names a student, the student tells her his/her  zodiac sign and the group that was in charge of that signshoroscope reads it out loud.  

In my case, the perceptions I had, concerning my weaknesses and strengths, turned out to be quite accurate. Though maybe my concept of creativity was quite unrelated to classroom activity creativity, It is astonishing the amount of variables one has to consider to be creative. The choice of materials on the one hand, how to change the fossilized concept of teaching and learning on the other, how to make the best of resources at hand, how to engage and motivate students, how to make language alive and not concentrate only on structures, words, and forms,  how to take advantage of students background knowledge, how to integrate different skills ... it is a never ending challlenging task. My weaknesses, were constantly present, but having expressed them at the begining of the semester helped me  try and tackle them somehow or at least be aware that there they were. 
The opportunities were much more than I expected. This is the first and only subject of my career in which I have been explicitly presented with a variety of  activities and materials, all of them engaging and different to what I was used to. It makes one realize the diversity that exists and the amount of opportunities there are to change ceratin concepts on how to teach. I especially enjoyed, and will deffinitely use them over and over again, the tea-party activity, the group work, the cooperative dictogloss, suggestopedia, storytelling and the chance of differnt classroom settings. All these opportunities of learning new ways to teach were given to us, externally, their foundations on the teacher. So once again, somethig I learnt during the semester becomes visible, the importance of the teacher as a resource. 
The threats were also constantly present, not having enough time,and not being a profficient technology user. But all in all, I learnt, maybe slower than others, but still, with the chance to discover, use apply and reflect on different and new methods. 
I would like to end my last entry by saying that, in my opinion, there should be more of this type of lessons, guided, hands on, concrete, real, experienced, analyzed, applied and with the opportunity to reflect on.