For each course we complete we put together a report for our bosses and other interested people to read. This is the report I wrote regarding the first English course.

Beginners English Course Report
Nic Garner          Centro de Aprendizagem          13 January 2004

Attendance
The first English course was run from 1 September 2003 to 21 November 2003, and there were a total of twelve students, spilt into two groups of six students each. There were also three students who signed up for the course but did not attend a single lesson.

One student did not attend the first three weeks of the course, for unexplained reasons, and another missed the first week due to being in hospital.

One student failed to attend for the final two weeks without explanation and so did not sit the final test and did not complete the course. Another student only attended the first three weeks of the course and so also did not complete the course.

Attendance from the majority of students was not problematic, and most achieved an attendance rate of more than 90%. There were a small number of students who caused slight concern in the number of lessons missed, however on the whole their results did not seem affected by this.

Results
The results of the final test were as follows:

All who sat the final test passed except for two. Jeremias Cuncava, John Usufu and João Pápio displayed notable performances, all scoring above 85%. Elias Raul also performed well, scoring 70%, which was a better then I had anticipated he would attain.

The lowest passes were displayed from Carlitos Mabote and Edson da Silva, however this did not come unexpected on either part. Mabote did not show much promise form the start of the course, although he was very enthusiastic, and da Silva missed the first three weeks of the course. I feel he could have done a lot better had he been in attendance.

Lúcas Silva and Amado failed to pass the test. Lúcas was in a position to pass, and a little more work on his part would probably have assured him a pass. Amado’s attendance fluctuated due to work commitments and so he attended both groups throughout the course, which was not beneficial to his learning.

Course evaluation
I have analysed the completed papers and identified the areas that students performed lowest on. These included making negative statements, identifying when to use the different tenses and answering comprehension type questions. These are areas that I will be sure to improve upon and focus more on in the current course.

One of the biggest problems I found was making the course relevant to the students. The New Headway course is aimed at European learners and as such contains references that are irrelevant to the students. As the course progressed however I found more and more ways of doing this.

Towards the beginning of the course I considered the idea of regrouping the twelve students according to ability. However, as the course progressed I came to the realisation that in mixed ability groups the more advanced were generally keen to assist the others. Not only did this help the less able to improve more quickly, it also served to reinforce the ideas to those doing the explaining.

The lessons last for two hours, which is a long time to concentrate for, both for teacher and students. To get around this I began to introduce small activities at different points in the lesson, such as anagrams, puzzles and crosswords. These broke up the lessons and made the teaching easier to digest, and is something I plan to continue with on the current course.

On frequent occasions returning were arriving at lessons having forgotten a lot of what was taught the previous day. This was especially problematic over weekends or public holidays. To combat this in the current course I intend to set more small homework activities that will help to reinforce the teaching.

During the course I had a number of small tests that were aimed at assessing how well knowledge was being retained. In most instances these went very well, however in one or two there seemed to be a big gap in knowledge in work covered some time before the test was sat. In the current course I hope to improve on this by setting smaller, more frequent tests in order to pick up problems sooner.

Recommendations
Due to the apparent lack of demand there has been for the new English course I would suggest lowering the price of the course to attract more students. In line with this, another way of attracting people would be to offer a discount price for students attending both the Computer course and the English course, as this would offer an incentive for Computer students to participate in the English course as well.

At the current time students in the English classroom are obliged to write with their paper balanced on their legs, knees or other chairs, which is a less than satisfactory arrangement. Learning conditions would definitely be improved if we could desks into the classroom. One desk per two students would be sufficient, and so at the moment only two or three small desks would be required.

Previous students have expressed a keen interest in learning more English. The current course only goes as far as putting the students on the right footing for learning more English, and so an advanced course is required for the beginners course to be of any real benefit. I would be more than willing to teach this course, however it would require further teaching materials. The New Headway Beginner course that I am currently teaching from offers more advanced courses, and the New Headway Elementary course is likely to provide a perfect supplement to the Beginner course.

Teaching of the beginner course could also be improved by obtaining the cassette tapes that complement the course, and a cassette player to play them on. At the moment I am required to read through all the conversations myself, and as such the students do not get the wider variety of different voice types and ranges that the tapes would provide.