4/9/1997 Individual session. Kikey and Angeles (translated from Spanish. Language in
italics was originally in English
Kikey is an advanced student of English. She was also very enthusiastic about the
project, hardly missed a session and worked at SAC everyday. She also works twice a
week as an English teacher for children and adults. She is about to begin the third year of
a BA in TESOL in Oaxaca. Her English is very fluent and she regularly goes to the SAC
to study and practice.
This is the transcript of an individual session two weeks before we ended the project. Up
to this moment I had worked with Kikey in seven individual sessions. She had also taken
part in six (out of seven) input sessions and six group discussions and about nine group
sessions. There were several individual sessions aimed at the analysis of the participants’
processes of learning with two specific goals (to Ieam the third conditional and to Ieam
twenty verbs). In theory, this is at least the third time that she had studied the third
conditional. In the previous individual session, she showed me her study plan. She knew
that the grammatical structure was not something new for her but she had some doubts.
She looked for grammar explanations in different sources. She also said that she wanted
to practise it but she didn't know how. The aim of this session was to talk about the way
she solved her doubts. The homework for this session was to think about the way to
practise these specific items.
1 A. So, What did you do?
2K. Excuse me?
ЗА. How did you start to work?
4K. Ah, Ok. To begin with, yesterday, I solved my doubt.
5A. Ahah (laughter)
6K. Definitively
7A. And now you have a good hypothesis about/
8K. Yes
9A.... how to form the third conditional
10K. Yes, now
11A. Mhm
12K. With the present perfect, isn't it?
13A. Mhm
14K.And the past, and the modal would, to form this grammatical Stracture.
15A. Why were you wrong? Or what? in a way... I mean, you said that "you solved your
doubt". You didn't know? or were you wrong? or did you have a doubt?
16K. I had a doubt....because I had, I mean, at the very moment that you mentioned
"conditional" I thought about if clauses, so I said, It's got to be the if clauses. But the
structure, I had doubts about that.
17A. And you were mixing the past with have
18K. Yes
19A. With the modal
20K. Yes
21A. Aha
22K. Yes, I mean...
23 A. And what happens is that they belong to two diferent parts.
24K. Exactly. That was the doubt. And then, I didn't know how and then I clarify my
doubts.
25A. Mhm
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