miércoles, 19 de diciembre de 2012

LEARNING STRATEGIES

Today's class, we started talking about the exam that we have to do in February if we want to pass the subject. In this one we will have to answer two kind of questions. Some of them will be theoretical and anothers will be practical. We hope to be so lucky as the guy that we can see on the right.

After that te teacher show us a powerpoint about learning strategies. Most of the contents were in spanish, althoung there were some in English too.

In the presentation we learnt about the different learning strategies by O'Malley:






Strategies which require planning for learning, thinking about the learning process as it is taking place, monitoring og one's production or comprehension, and evaluating learning after an activity is completed. Among the main metacognitive strategies, it is possible to include advance organizers, direceted attention, slective attention, self-management, functional plannin, self-monitoring, delayed production and self-evaluation.
 
 





 
Cognitive strategies are more limited to specific learning tasks and they involve more direct manipulation of the learning material itself. Repetition, resourcing, transaltion, grouping, note taking, deduction, recombination, imagery, auditory representation, key word, contextualization, elaboration, transfer, inferencing are among the most important cognitive strategies.







They are related with social-mediating activity and transacting with others.


When the teacher finished the presentation she gave us an activity in which we had to analyse to transcripts in terms of the information provided by the teacher to the pupils.



After that we played BINGO!!!! The day before the teacher sent us an e-mail explaining that we had to make some bingo cards to bring it today. Here you are some of the bingo cards that we made:

 
 
 
 
Finally in the practice lesson we had to do an activity in which we had to choose 3 activities from the Carol Read's 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom book and fill in a table for each activity. We had to upload the activity to the CV forum on "Learning strategies and learner independence". We want to share with all you the activity here too, we hope you like!.
 
 
 
 

miércoles, 12 de diciembre de 2012

READING RESOURCES; TEACHING AND LEARNING WRITING

Today, the teacher started the classroom showing us reading resources. She has taught activities like this:

-Number activity











- Class objects activity
- Extraterrestrial activity (you have to write the dialogue)
- Yo-yo activity (listening and reading)

There are cognitive activities that have the difficulty to know which group to put it.



Then, teacher has explained teaching and learning writing.

The teacher should give feedback to improve their writing. She/he has to scaffold  the writing task.
  • Starting point --> conected text for a purpose and a reader.

  • Differents ideas about writing:
      -Graubert (1997) --> Consolidates and reinforces laguange.
      - Raimes (1983) --> Writing reinforces the grammatical structures.
      - Porte (1996) --> As writing involves finding the right way of expressing something.

Teaching of writing must aim at building the student's communicative potential to produce whole text:

Writing: struggle to convert                           Writing: linguistic                               Writing has a language
thoughts and ideas into language.                  experience --> need to take               potential: discover of how
                                                                    risks and experimental with                language works.
                                                                    the language.



Writing process 3 important question must be considered:
  • The content: what you are writing.
  • The addressee or reader: who you are writing to or for.
  • The purpose: why you are writing.

lunes, 10 de diciembre de 2012

COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH



Today we have started with Communicative Approach. Communicative Approach is focused on communication, it also promotes interaction and language items are selected on the basis of what the learner need to know in order to get things done through language (in order to perform linguistic functions).


We have also learn the difference between functions and forms:
  • Functions of languages are the purposes for which language is used.
  • Forms are the linguistic means through which functions are accomplished.
So, as teachers, how should we proceed when selecting the language to teach? Firstly we identify general functions and notions and then, we select linguistic forms to express those functions and notions.

Communicative Approach also uphold that you have to appropriate your language to the context.

And the last characteristic about Communicative Approach is that it should be guided by these principles:
  • The information gap principle.
  • The information transfer principle (from one format to another).
  • The correction for content principle.

Big mistakes are communication content mistakes, not linguistic mistakes. We not only have to be good at using proper linguistic content, we have to be able to use linguistic content accroding to the situation (social markers, politeness conventions...).

miércoles, 5 de diciembre de 2012

READING STRATEGIES


Today, the teacher started the classroom showing us some of the bookmarks that we added in Diigo. The one that she chose was the next bookmark:

 http://www.rong-chang.com/nnse/snse/snse013.htm.

The name of this web is "SUPER EASY READING FOR ESL/EFL BEGGINERS". The activity chosen was horrible, because there were only a few sentences withouth cohesion. Another aspect was that there wasn't any graphic information about the sentences, and finally there wasn't a context, for example, the statments are talking about "he", but...who is he?. Here you are the activity:
 
 
 
13. His Imaginary Friend
He has an imaginary friend. He talks to his friend. His friend listens to him. His friend is smart. His friend is funny. His friend gives him advice. His friend goes everywhere with him. He and his imaginary friend are best friends. He is never alone. He is never lonely. His friend is always with him.
 
 



After that we saw some activities from the Sara Phillips' books: "Young Learners".
 
 



It was funny because we had to do the last activity and finally we corrected it in the digital board, and it was the first time that somebody had used it. In the activity we had to guess information about some people related to the floor of the flat where they live and the objects that they had lost. It was a funny challenge.

 
Then the teacher started to explain the different reading strategies that we have to teach our students.

After that we were talking about the text of "Diwali" and how children can get the meaning of words that they don't know yet.



 

After that we were watching some videos from the British Council web. Then we had to desing reading strategies acording  to a text that we had chosen.

Finally in the practice session we started a group activity. Firstly we have to choose a long text, and make six questions about it. Four of them have to develop higher order cognitive abilities and two of them lower-order cognitive skills. We also have to develop four activities to develope reading strategies.

That's all, have a nice long weekend!!!!!
 


lunes, 3 de diciembre de 2012

CONTINUING WITH "AICLE" // "CLIL"

Today's class started with teacher asking about the second voicethread activity because some of our partners haven't made yet. After that she told us that we have to start to speak to ourself in english because is a great way to improve our fluency.

 
Then we made a questionnaire on the Taxonomy in which all students could participate simultaneously. After that we continue seeing the powerpoint of "AICLE // CLIL". In the next box you can see it.
 
 
 


During the exposure of the topic, the teacher made a stop and started  a questionnaire about AICLE. It was funny because sometimes some of us didn't know the answer so few people answered the questions.

After that the teacher showed us a "PREZI PRESENTATION",  this one was about "Claves, pautas y pistas metodológicas para la confección de una secuencia AICLE" by Alicia Ruiz Godoy.


domingo, 2 de diciembre de 2012

READING SKILL

                                 
Until now, our experience as English students in primary school has not been very successful. That includes our experience improving reading skills. Generally speaking, our reading classes followed a similar structure, starting with an aloud text lecture (embedded in a weak context provided by the textbook) and a battery of questions, about content and/or questions with linguistic purposes (find verbs, synonyms…).

This approach is focused just on an intensive reading, and not on extensive reading, which fits more with the idea of reading a text with a communicative purpose, as we do it in real life, to get information from a text. To do so, we read guessing what’s next (jumping from word to word) and we do not concentrate in every single word on the text (we forget small words like in, and, so…), it is a lexical process.

The problem is that, for language learning we also need to focus on language, not only in text meaning. Therefore, we have to plan our lessons in a way that both kinds of reading are included, first with extensive reading, to get familiarized with the text (Top down questions), and then with an intensive reading focusing on language (Bottom-up questions).

Reading activities will have to be divided in three different stages:

-       Activities to do before reading the text, Pre-reading

-       Activities to do while reading the text, While-reading

-       Activities to do after reading the text, Post-reading

To begin with a question is always a good start, as it gives students a reason for reading. Questionnaires and debates are good options, in pre-reading and post-reading, always depending on how the teacher wants to lead the class.  Guessing games are a good example of while reading activities, like guessing the order of isolated sentences from text, or reading the first paragraph and guess what’s next…

It is essential that teachers become aware of the importance from the questions they prepare, as they should achieve higher cognitive levels to promote critical thinking (Bloom’s taxonomy).

 
 

sábado, 1 de diciembre de 2012

WHAT IS CLIL?

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a relatively new language learning approach that involves content learning (from different subjects such as history, geography or science). It doesn't do without the specific L2 teaching, it complements it. Its methodolgy is its main characteristic. It appears as a consequence from our actual globalized world and the increase of our technologic dependence. To face this constant change we should invest in innovation, investigation and education.
 
This approach can be easily misunderstood, CLIL is not a FL lesson, neither content in a FL (this would just be as any lesson in a foreign school).
 
Why CLIL?
Cognition Communication  Content  Culture (CCCC)
Among its multiple benefits we could mention the amount of input, the meaningful context or the motivation that students achieve. But this will be able only if it is properly implemented.
 
We, as students of Primary Education, have a huge responsability, because we will be in charge of its right aplication and its succes, which will be proved in future years.
 
We would like to share a couple of links. In the first one you'll find a lot of interesting and motivating ideas of activities that you could adapt for CLIL lessons:
 
 http://camillasenior.homestead.com/resources.html

In the second link you will find plenty of information about clil in general (materials, different experiences, interesting information for teachers...)

 http://clil.wordpress.com/category/clil-primaria/

We hope you'll find it usefull, ;)

 
 
"You cannot teach a language, only create the condition under which it might be learnded"
Von Humboldt 1898

viernes, 30 de noviembre de 2012


Today we discuss in class about mistakes and errors.

Firstly, we learnt the difference between them:

An error is related to knowledge, to the lack of knowledge. For instance: “I go to the cinema yesterday”. Instead of “I went to the cinema yesterday”. In this case the student didn’t know the correct form of a verb.

A mistake is related to forgetfulness, carelessness and lack of attention.

The big question was: Do we have to correct every single mistake or error that students make?

The answer is NO, because if we rectify everything, we are cutting the STT (student’s talking time), we are not letting them to finish a whole sentence. Moreover, if you correct everything, the children will lose attention. Remember that you are correcting a mistake, you are correcting a person.


Something we would like to highlight is the tip given for "How do we correct?"
The tip consists of using “hot cards” or “invoice books”, which we typically see that are used by the waiters to write down what it is ordered.


miércoles, 21 de noviembre de 2012

TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE & DRILLING

In today’s class, the teacher explained what is Total Physical Response. We had some ideas from last year. TPR is a method focus on oral competence which affirms that it is very effective to combine the spoken language with phisycal activity, therefore the students respond physically to verbal commands given by the teacher. The role of the teacher is to be like a film director.

The Benefits of TPR:
 - High-speed understanding of any target language
 - Long-term retention
 - Zero stress (Game like movements reduce stress)
 - With this method teachers emphasise meaning rather than form
 - Enjoyable for teachers as well as students
Later on, we watched a video of TPR, in which firstly the teacher gives instructions and makes gestures with the students, at the same time. Secondly, the teacher gives instructions but students have to make alone the gestures. And finally the teacher provides instructions out of order.  As we can see, each steps requires more attention due to the fact that they are becoming more complex. 

Then we watched a second video that showed the Drilling.  Drilling is a mechanical activity based on behaviourist psychology that consists of listening and repeating. The lesson showed in the video was a very highly control one (very mechanical). Children had to repeat lots of times “No, it isn’t”, and the teacher put a lot of emphasis in each word and moved her hands when saying a word:
T:  |No|  |it|  |isn’t|
So, as we can see, it wasn’t a real communicative situation.

The third video also related whit drill, showed us drill but in context; the teacher paints a drawing of a house in the blackboard in order to contextualize the story and provide new vocabulary. She make lots of gestures and sounds.
We want to share this video that demonstrate how to produce the drilling, which it is also related to "exposure" and "practice" (PEPP approach). 







martes, 20 de noviembre de 2012

PROVIDING SUPPORT

Hello everyone, today we are going to share with all of you the first group activity that we had to do for the subject "Dsarrollo del Currículo de Lengua Extranjera en Educación Primaria".
 
In this one we had to choose a kid's song. After that we had to write down the information of the song and finally we had to do a teaching sequence about it.

It was a good experience because it was the first time that we worked together, and It was amazing, every of us gave his/her own opinion so we could make a good job.

A few days after we had to change the activities between the different groups to give a feedback about the activity. It was good because we put in practice evaluation and assessment. So here you are the review version of our group activity number 1.
 
We hope you like it! See you!!!
 
 

lunes, 19 de noviembre de 2012

LESSON PLANING AND UNIT THEME

In Friday’s class, we learnt the assessing to learn and learning to asses.
 
Steps
1. Locate the lesson.
      What prior learning has there been? What are the overall objectives of the teaching unit?

2. Identify the essential intended learning out come.
      These many come from you schemes of work.
  
      3. Structure the lesson as a serie of episodes.
      Remembering that each episode should be introduced and reviewed.
  
      4. Decide how to teach each episode.
      Choose activities that relate directly to achieving the learning objectives.
 
5. Ensure coherence between episodes.

In the second part of the class, we did a unit theme related to animals in danger. We wrote the objectives, language lexis structures and analysis, crosscultural and pronunciation focus, key competences and finally, communicative function: listening, speaking, reading, writing.



domingo, 18 de noviembre de 2012

ASSESSMENT VIDEOS

Hello again, this is our second post today, this one is related to the videos that we had to watch about assessment. After that we had to make a visual template, this one had to be creative to draw the attention of people.
 
We hope you like!
 

 
 
 

DESIGNING A LISTENING ACTIVITY

Hello everyone, today we are going to share with you one of the group activity that we had to do for  the subject "DESARROLLO DE COMPETENCIAS DE COMUNICACIÓN EN LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA". In this one the teacher gave us a document with some listening activities and we had to choose one of them to create pre-listening, during-listening and post-listening activities.
 
We think this kind of activity is very important for us because it must us to think, imagine and create new activities, which is one of the most important thing for us as future teachers.
 
We hope you like!.
 
 

martes, 13 de noviembre de 2012

THE P.E.P.P. MODEL

In today’s class, we have learnt the PEPP model.


This model is divided into two parts:

Firs stage à presentation – exposure.

Second stage à practice – production.

Presentation (Introduce new language items).
The teacher has to create a context in which students perceive the need for the language before it is presented. The input must be comprehensible and the teacher directs the pupil’s attention. The teacher has to introduce the new language using language they already know. To be a good presentation, children have to listen to the word many times and learn vocabulary related to the topic.
 
 

Exposure (to new language items)
The teacher exposes the learners to the new language in different contexts and activities. Students have to use the oral form of the new language. Furthermore, activities like yes/no question and instructions are good to implement comprehension of the new language.
Example:

- Flashcard activities 
- Action songs
- Action stories
- Games
- Stories
  
Practice.
The aim is to shape the language produced by the pupil, so that it conforms to the model provided by the teacher (or other source of input). The common features are imitation, repetition, drilling and correction. This part ends when the students are able to produce the vocabulary without prompting.
 

  
Production.
The aim is to development of automatized and communicative language use. Common activities are pair and group activities (memorize and order flashcard, read lips and guessing words, finds someone who... ‘dialogues, etc). Teacher’s role is to monitor the learner’s performance and to check that communication is taking place.


 

Finally, we watched the next videos about PEPP:
 

We can say that the teacher has to give them the vocabulary they already know, she teaches new vocabulary and then she gives instructions in English with gestures. Also, is very important to attract the child's attention. Ultimately, checking for understand.

domingo, 11 de noviembre de 2012

SPEAKING RUBRIC

Hello everyone, today it is still raining, what a week!!!!! Well in this raining day we want to show you our rubric for the subject: "Gestión, Planificación y Evaluación en el Aula de Lengua Extranjera". But...What  is a rubric?

 


The teacher gave us a task in which we have to make a rubric for one of the skill that children have to learn in Foreign Language at Primary School. We choose speaking skill because the Royal Decree 1513/2006 of 7 December, says that speaking is the most important skill that children have to develope in this stage.

Here you are our rubric, we hope you like it!


If you want to know more about rubric you can visit this web:

http://www.tensigma.org/rubrics/about/rubrics_rb1.html

That's all, bye!



viernes, 9 de noviembre de 2012

LESSON PLAN!


Today, in “Gestión, Planificación y Evaluación en el Aula de Lengua Extranjera” class, we have learnt how to plan an ESL/EFL lesson:

Stay focus and recycle language:
  1. Select target structure.
  2. Select materials.
  3. Divide the lesson: warm up, introduction of materials, class work, summary.
  4. For the warm up: activate target area.
  5. To introduce material choose an exercise that will focus on the target area.
  6. Have students work on the material through using a variety of language recycle techniques.
  7. To summarise: language recycling.
  8. Short outline using bullets.
  9. Assign homework.
  10. Keep a copy of your lesson plan.

TIP: Keep your lesson focused. Do not try to do too much.


Then, we continued with “Top 8 Components of a Well-Written Lesson Plan”:



  1. Objectives and goals.
  2. Anticipatory set.
  3. Direct instruction.
  4. Guided practice.
  5. Closure.
  6. Independent practice.
  7. Required materials and equipment.
  8. Assessment and follow-up.

Finally, we discussed about the video that we watched at home about teachers methods for learning lessons:


 

jueves, 8 de noviembre de 2012

SPEAKING/ORAL INTERACTION

In today's class, we have seen the difference between speaking and oral interaction: while developing oral interaction, you must negotiate meaning, make gestures, listen to the speaker... So, as teachers, we should create more oral interaction activities, because this kind of activities are not common in current lessons. We have to train our learners in filling the gaps of their oral language by using gestures, fillers, more simple words, etc.


Then, we did an activity called “What is she wearing?” in which Elvira described us how to color Brenda's clothes, then, we had to dress Brenda. Elvira's intention was to show us how to do a proper speaking/oral interaction activity:

1.Firstly, the teacher has to contextualize the activity.
2.Then, he/she has to revise the language the learners need to produce in the activity.
3. Give proper instructions
4. Distribute hands out.
5. Organize groups.
6. Let the activity starts
7. Monitor the activity (while describing, the teacher cannot be in silent, they must do positive reinforcement, questions...).
8. Provide feedback.
9. Reflect on the activity.
 


Finally, we moved on the practice part: we continued with storytelling, but this time, we were in charge of telling the story to our partners in order to practice it. We had our own self-assessment sheet of paper and another one to assess our partners, so this way we could do a proper feedback.  


martes, 6 de noviembre de 2012

BLOOM'S TAXONOMY & STORY TELLING

Today, in class, we have continued working with Bloom's Taxonomy and storytelling:

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the different objectives that teachers set for students (learning objectives). There are six different domains: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. We can also divide it in two different cognition levels: lower cognitive questions (remember, understand and apply) or higher cognitive questions(analyze, evaluate and create). Current questions in regular schools are often lower order activities, so our main objective as teachers is to produce higher order activities.

For example, while learning new weather vocabulary: if they do a matching (match the word with the correct picture) they are just remembering; while if they answer questions like: “What's the weather today?”, they are applying. What is more, if you ask them to invent new categories to classify: “windy, warm, foggy, cold...”, they are creating.

In order to practice Bloom's Taxonomy, we did an activity related to it: we watched and listened the story: “The tiger who came to tea” and then, we had to invent two sentences for each category of Bloom's Taxonomy. Then, we had to do the same, but this time we had to based our questions on a fairy tale that we already know and invent five questions for each category. This way, we are learning to differentiate between all the categories and, what is more important, we are learning to create higher level cognitive questions.



Then, we continued with storytelling. Firstly we learnt the difference between read a story and tell a story: while you are telling a story, you use body language, interact with your audience, change your voice, you are redundant...

We also watched and listened the story “Fidgety Fish” and we learnt the parts of a story telling:
  1. Call the attention.
  2. Set the scene: It is always a good idea to exploit pictures to help the child understand and visualise the story.The stories have illustrations which can be used to introduce the story, elicit vocabulary they know, introduce difficult words in that story, and generally excite the interest of the child for the story. (Teaching Children © BBC | British Council 2007)
  3. Tell the story (predicting, interacting, using body language...).
  4. Discuss the story afterwards: It is always a good idea to do a quick comprehension check when you have finished the story.
For next lesson, we have to bring a story book and tell the story to our partners in order to practice storytelling. We think that it is a great idea to improve our skills on telling a story. 

miércoles, 31 de octubre de 2012

WHAT KIND OF INTELLIGENCES DO YOU HAVE???

Today's class was focused on multiple intelligences and cognitive processes.
 
In the first part of the class, the teacher showed us the following video:
 
 


After that we had to say what multiple intelligences we thought we were working on each part of the video.  The theory of multiple intelligences was proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983 as a model of intelligence that differentiates intelligence into various specific modalities, rather than seeing it as dominated by a single general ability. Gardner believes that there are eight intelligences as we can see in the next picture:



Later we performed an activity consisting of a sheet on which was a picture of a phone as we can see on the right.


Then we had to write in another sheet all the questions that occur to us relating to the phone.



To end today's class the teacher showed us a powerpoint on cognitive processes, referring to Bloom's Taxonomy. This onw is a classification of learning objectives within eucation proposed in 1956 by a committe of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom who also edited the first volume of the standard text, Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals.

It has been more than fifty years and Bloom's Taxonomy remains essential tool for educators to establish in the different subjects learning objectives. Recently, Dr. Andrew Churches updated the review in 2000 (Anderson) to bring it into line with the new realities of the digital age. In it, complemented each category with verbs and digital world tools that enable the development of skills to remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create.

In the next link you can show the Bloom's Taxonomy by Dr. Andrew Churches.

http://www.eduteka.org/imgbd/23/23-11/CuadroBloom2008.jpg

We hope you like it!
 

lunes, 29 de octubre de 2012

SWEDISH DAY!!!

 Today's class was completely different because of the visit of a teacher Glimäng Molin Swedish Malmo University to talk about storytelling.


Molin explained why it was good to perform storytellers in class. The reasons are:
- Motivation: developing creativity and imagination. Children usually appreciate narratives and are willing to listen to, read, or talk about stories.

- Meaning: Stories are filled with meaning and when children find meaning, they are rewarded through understanding.

- Communication: reading, listening to stories and responding generates communication language and opportunities for development.

Later Molin said a series of recommendations to consider when making a storyteller, these were:

- Firstly it is important that the content is known by the students.
- Secondly, we need to use different versions of the story.
- Thirdly, it is very important to make sounds when telling the story.
- Finally, if we see that the vocabulary is very difficult we can give them a key vocabulary.


Molin then gave us a story about which we should work in pairs, it was the story of Room on the Broom. The story is about a witch who flies around the countryside, she drops various objects, which are picked up one by one by animals. As thanks, she offers all the animals a lift.


The activities were:

- Read the story together   
- Character List
- Make a story map
- Find tat ae repeated phrases in the story

The teacher told us that due to the large number of characters who appeared in the story, we should introduce them before starting. As we have seen before this will serve as a piece that will help us to create the neccesary context before starting the activity

In the next link you can find a lot of woorksheets for teaching "Room in the Broom". There are differents printable worksheets for many levels: beginners, elementary, intermediate or advanced. We hope you like it!



Finally we saw a video of Pie Corbett storytelling by the "Red Hen". You can see in the next video:




The class was very interesting because Molin shown us another type of activity that we can put into practice when we are teaching, also having experiences with teachers from foreign countries is always enriching.