I believe the more students are aware of the aims of the lessons the more successful they are. We can do this by can-do statements.

  As my school is a state school our schedule is planned by the Board of Education. According to this yearly plan the first topic of the 9th graders, who are successful at prep class, is 'describing people, physical appearance and personality traits'. We have thought the best way to do this could be done by using short stories, because they are from life and people can see similarities from real life. As a result, We decided to use ' The Landlady' from www.teachingenglish.org.uk . At the end of the week we handed them out can-do statement. Our plan was to do a quiz after this statement as well. In the can do statement, we wanted them to read the sentences and tick the ones they agreed. Besides, we asked them to add some more sttatements if they wanted to. Here are some sentences from the statement:

1. I can understand descriptions of people.

2. I can understand the descriptions of the characters in the story called 'The Landlady'.

3. I can write a short story by using personality adjectives and verbs of seeing.

4. I can understand 'Agony Aunt' of a newspaper.

5. I can write the agony aunt of the newspaper.

     In the second part of the same statement, we asked them to guess which parts they can do/ what they can write in the quiz.

After the quiz, we handed them back the same can-do statement and tell them to look at their answers and then complete the third part which asked them to write what they can do after the quiz. This helped them a lot.

  I believe it is much better to hand out can-do statements every two weeks.