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.

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). 

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!!!

 

 

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.

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!.

 

 

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.

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!



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:

 

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.  

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.