“Try to describe the main point of your lesson.”: Student perception and identification of learning objectives in English lessons

The students in an effective EFL classroom will perceive and understand a lesson’s learning objectives in essentially the same way that their teacher intended to teach the objectives—indeed the objectives as taught and learnt will be very similar. However, in the many less successful classrooms, this will not be so. This paper will investigate whether there are gaps or ‘disconnects’ between a teacher’s learning objectives and what students identify as the learning objectives and why. Eighty-minute English lessons were studied in four classrooms at one Hong Kong secondary school. Then four stimulated-recall teacher interviews and four post-lesson student interviews (N = 4 to 6) were conducted in order to ascertain whether students were able to correctly identify their teacher’s intended objectives, along with effects from certain variables. Furthermore, implications for teaching practices were drawn to shed light on EFL classroom pedagogy and thus close the gap between perceptual mismatches—what is taught, and what is learnt—or sometimes, unfortunately, not learnt. Copyright © 2009 Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore.