Inferencing, third-person -s and a district observation

Lesson plan (40 min)

• 0–4 min, prediction. Show the title and first line only. Pairs predict: Who is speaking? What is the problem? Take three answers. (Student talk: 2 min.)
• 4–9 min, vocabulary pre-teach. Five words from the passage on the board. Students match two words to pictures and two to Hindi equivalents, then say one sentence with one word to a partner. (Student talk: 4 min.)
• 9–17 min, first read with a question. Teacher reads aloud; students follow in the textbook. Pairs answer two inferential questions: 'Why did the narrator refuse the money?' and 'How do you know?' The teacher writes one pair's answer on the board and asks the class to point to the line that supports it. (Student talk: 6 min.)
• 17–25 min, language focus. Six sentences from the passage are on the board, three with third-person -s and three with do/does. Pairs sort them into two columns and write the rule in one line. Teacher elicits the rule and contrasts 'He goes' with 'He is going'. (Student talk: 5 min.)
• 25–34 min, short writing. Students write four sentences about what they would do in the narrator's place. Checklist on the board: capital letter, full stop, one third-person -s, one 'because'. (Student talk: 2 min for peer check.)
• 34–40 min, share and exit ticket. Three students read one sentence; the class says one thing that worked. Exit ticket: one inference sentence.

Rationale. Meaning comes before form, so the passage is read for inference first and the grammar noticing uses sentences from the same passage. Student talk totals about 19 minutes, which satisfies the officer without turning the lesson into an activity show. The textbook is visibly used in the first read and the language-focus sentences. The one dictionary per four students is enough for the vocabulary block if the teacher assigns one word per group.

They are not the same, and identical red-pen correction will not help.

• 'He is go' is a developmental interlanguage form. The learner has a frame 'is + verb' from the present continuous ('He is going') and overgeneralizes it to the simple present, or transfers a Hindi present-tense pattern. The third-person -s is missing because the learner is using 'is' as the carrier of tense. The next step is to contrast 'He goes' (habit) with 'He is going' (now), using two pictures and two sentences.
• 'She don't' is a different rule problem. The learner uses the invariant negative 'don't' for all persons. This may be dialect influence, or it may be that the do/does contrast has never been noticed. The contrast is 'She doesn't' versus 'They don't', with the -s moving to 'does'.

Feedback. For 'He is go', recast and contrast: 'You wrote He is go. We say He goes every day. Here is He is going now. Which picture is every day?' For 'She don't', use a two-column noticing chart (he/she/it | they/we/I) and a substitution drill with pictures of one girl and two girls. Do not write 'wrong' on both. The first needs a tense contrast; the second needs a person contrast. Correcting both as 'grammar mistake' hides the different underlying rules and produces the same error again.

Classroom implication. The diagnostic shows 22 students with the first pattern and 14 with the second, with overlap. A single 15-minute language-focus block can address both if the board is split into two contrasts and students sort sentences into the correct column. The exit ticket should have one item from each pattern, so the teacher can see which child needs which reteach.

Task. Write a 60–80 word paragraph: 'A time when you helped someone, or someone helped you.' Use at least one sentence with he/she/it + verb-s, one negative with don't/doesn't, and one 'because' sentence. The task is familiar, needs no special vocabulary, and matches the unit's narrative focus.

Marking (20 marks).

• Content and message (6): a clear event, who was involved, what happened, how it ended. 6 = all four; 4 = three; 2 = two; 0 = not decipherable.
• Grammar accuracy (6): two marks for the third-person -s sentence, two for the negative, two for overall sentence completeness. Each mark is for correct use in context, not for the presence of a keyword.
• Vocabulary and linking (4): at least four topic words used correctly; one 'because' or 'so' linking two ideas.
• Mechanics and coherence (4): capitals, full stops, paragraphing, readable handwriting; two marks for capitals and full stops, two for logical order.

Modification for the 11 weakest writers. Same criteria, same 20 marks, but a scaffolded version: a word bank of eight words, sentence starters for the first two sentences, and a requirement of 40–50 words instead of 60–80. The grammar and content criteria are unchanged. Length is not a criterion, so shortening does not lower the ceiling; the scaffold supports the message without giving marks away.

Why not a separate easier paper. A different paper would make the scores incomparable and would tell the 11 children they are doing a different subject. The scaffold keeps the same construct: can they communicate an event in English with the target forms? Mark the first draft formatively, return it with two specific corrections, and let all students redraft once before the final mark. That redraft is where the 22 and 14 error patterns can be addressed individually.