Week 6 Blog Entry - Implementation #1

After posting my final LL Challenge Proposal, it is now finally time for implementation. In this blog post I will begin by reflecting on the first week of implementation, highlighting things that worked, things that didn't, and what to change in order to make them work. I will also discuss slight changes made to my challenge plan, and post my results from this week. Finally, I will discuss any further changes to my LLC.
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Reflecting on the past two weeks:

Last week (in week 5), I had planned to do a revision of the present tense (le présent) and past tense (le passé composé). I found several resources online, including:

• The rules and endings for -er, -ir, -re verbs in the present tense. 
• Common irregular verbs in the present tense. 
• DR MRS VANDERTRAMP - a common way to remember the 16 irregular verbs which take être as the auxiliary instead of avoir in the passé composé.
• I wrote a list of present tense irregular verb, with: the verb; the translation; the conjugations for je, te, il/elle, nous, vous, ils; the past participle

After printing off and studying these rules, I used the online verb conjugator I found. My initial thoughts are positive and I noticed an improvement in my scores from about 40/50% - 70/80%. One problem with the website is that there are a lot of verbs I don't know, and am therefore finding more difficult to conjugate. I am getting better at these, but it is still providing some difficulty.

This week (week 6), I have veered from my initial plan as I have an exam in week 7 for which I need to be able to use the imperfect tense fluently. Therefore, I spent quite some time this week learning the imperfect and all its rules. For the writing exam, we also need to use the passé composé, therefore I decided to adjust my plan slightly and have written a paragraph this week concerning these two past tenses. I sent this paragraph to my dad for correction and will discuss the results further in this post.

During this week, I also bought the full version of the app 'Très Bien' for $4.49. I have been doing exercises on this app, with the aim of redoing a set of questions until I achieve 100%. This has been helpful and has made me really think about what I am doing. A negative of the app however, is that it doesn't include a lesson on the passé composé.
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Adjustment of LLC plan:

According to what I have done these past two weeks, I will have to change my schedule a bit. Firstly, I haven't been delegating time effectively enough to this challenge, and therefore have found myself falling behind and having to change around my schedule. Therefore I think in this post it is critical to redefine my order of learning the tenses, as well as create a weekly schedule of when I will complete which activity. When we did the peer review, I saw Sophie had a schedule of which activity she would do each day. This seems like a great idea to keep on top of the work so I have decided to implement something similar. Both the new order and weekly schedule are shown below:

New order:

Weekly schedule:

This schedule amounts to ~1.5 hours per week of work on the challenge. This seems reasonable. 

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Assessment results: 

My results for the passé composé and the imparfait and a short discussion about each are shown below:

Online verb conjugator result table:

Discussion: These results quite accurately reflect my knowledge, as I do feel I am not 100% fluent yet, but I have definitely improved significantly since the start of the week. It is also on/above my goal of 80%. The only issue I am finding with this assessment method is that there are some verbs (especially irregular) that I do not know and therefore get wrong.

Paragraph correction result:

 Discussion: Since there is not a high number of verbs used, only a few mistakes show a big percentage drop, and therefore these results seem quite low. However, this is relative and is likely to be a continued trend throughout the challenge, therefore not presenting an important issue.

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Further changes to LLC:
In order to more accurately document my actual improvement for each tense, I will do an online verb conjugation quiz at the start of each week - before I have learnt the tense. I will do this on Monday. This will be able to show me more effectively whether I have actually improved. It will quantitively describe this improvement, providing a much more reliable basis for analysis.

This is all for the first implementation of my learning challenge. C'était très utile! (It was very useful [in the imperfect tense]) Hopefully it helps me in my exam on Monday!

À bientôt :)