A BRIEF SUMMARY

Today is the 25th of october, and that means that we have been in the Mención de Lengua Extranjera a whole month by now. It seems like if we had been here a lot more due to all the new knoweldege that we are acquaring thanks to classroom lessons, their related activities and group work. Most of them were very interesting and provided us with a "new view" on how to deal with our pupils in a not very far away future. The main idea is that to learn a language you have to use it. Until now it seems that our system has promoted an old fashion system of teaching english focused on written language, as if it was a dead language. This methodology has proved its uselesness with primary school children, who should be learning how to interact in a real context. Therefore we will have to develop the 5 skills, but with special interest in Listening, Speaking and Interacting. Scaffolding is a concept that we have delt with at the beginning of this year and it has given us a wide path to follow. Even though teachers do scaffolding intuitively, we find very usefull to know all the ways to improve the variety of doing it at the english classroom (paraphrasing, recasting, providing redundancy...) To read the RD (and the CEFR) and to analise its contents and objectives comparing them with pupils activities has made us think about the real porpouses of these activities, and how we will have to carefully choose which activities promote the skills that we want to develope. Working with songs has been very enjoyable, and so has been the "drawing dictations", showing us usefull ways of teaching listening skills. To prepare a meaningfull context to do Pre, While and Post-listening activities is essential and we should always take into account the multiple intelligence theory to reach every children enthusiasm. This has been a very brief summary of what we have been learning these last weeks. Hopefully, we will continue with our learning process, not only for our own benefit but, overall, for the children's sake.