Objetivos Estratégicos

Despite her tendency to control the teaching-learning process, her methodical personality, and the systematic nature of her classroom behaviour, Emma appears to plan her classes only partially. In the following extract Emma provides some of the reasons for not planning classes thoroughly:

E: […] when I go to class, sometimes I have a glimpse of what I’m going to do,

something like ‘OK, today’s the past’, and I go into the classroom or I start the class and, suddenly, I realise that I haven’t prepared the class so thoroughly […]

I: And why do you do so? I mean, why is it that you go into the classroom …

E: Erm … many reasons maybe. Erm … Because I trust that to be spontaneous is

less boring […]

E: Less boring for me. Not necessarily for the students. Erm … something like OK the

unexpected will come during the class and will be a challenge. I don’t know if I really analyse that in my brain. I know that I don’t want to go through many things before the class for reasons probably because … because I imagine that something happened before that when I planned everything to the very last minute and suddenly the class disappointed me because it didn’t turn up as I had planned. That could be something very personal by which I plan things and, when they don’t turn as I plan them, I get very disappointed. So nowadays, personally, I try not to plan many things. […] The other reason would be that one day I don’t want to plan classes and I’m lazy and that day I want to read a book at home or do something (I2, p. 1)

Emma gives three reasons for not preparing classes thoroughly: first, because going to classes relatively unprepared is less boring and allows her to be spontaneous and meet some challenges; second, because she got disappointed several times in the past when classes did not turn out as she had planned them; and, finally, because she sometimes feels lazy (ibid.). Considering her fear for

losing control and not being able to respond to students’ questions and comments, the first reason appears to be surprising.

Emma claims she used to plan classes more meticulously when she first started teaching but, nowadays, she prepares her lessons in detail only when she is getting acquainted with a new textbook. She does all the exercises in the unit she is going to teach when she first uses the class book, but does not go through all the exercises when using the book again (SR3, E2). In spite of this, she feels

she has the necessary experience and skills to teach a good class all the same

(I2, p. 2). For each class, she flips through the unit she is going to teach to decide

what content to focus on and what tasks to make the students work on (SR2, E2; SR3, E2), but she never plans how she is going to teach these language features (SR2, E2). This coincides with Hashweh’s findings about experienced teachers

planning far less than inexperienced ones because the former are able to draw on pedagogical constructions developed through experience (see Hashweh, 2005). However, in the classes observed, it could be seen that not reading the exercises carefully before the class had some impact on her teaching practices. First, on one occasion she supplied task instructions which were inaccurate and, therefore, misleading. She asked the students to complete a story with the ‘expressions of time’ provided by the textbook in the instructions to the exercise. She did not realise, though, that the words or phrases that the students had to

use were actually ‘linking words’ which, in addition to expressions of time, included other adverbials such as ‘luckily’ and ‘somehow’ (SR1, E9). As a result,

some learners did not use these two adverbs because they were not ‘expressions of time'. Second, she provided confusing feedback on task answers on two occasions. In class 6, the students had to match three tense uses to either PPS or PPC based on the examples they had completed in the previous exercise. When eliciting the answers from the learners, Emma accepted as correct a learner’s response in which he matched one of the uses to past simple and not to any of the two tenses which were the focus of the lesson. She then acknowledged in the SR session that this had happened because she had only given a quick look at what the instructions said and the examples the students had to refer to (SR6, E3). In class 7, the learners had to complete a gapped

exercise with either PPS or PPC. In one of the answers, Emma got confused, probably because she had not read the text carefully, and accepted the students’ suggestion that both tenses were correct, when only PPS was possible (SR7, E4). Finally, as was explained above, she once ended up providing unnecessary

actions which were not informed by the materials she was using (see previous section).