SESSION 8

Start to worry if a student says something like:

“I like school. You don’t have to think. They tell you what to do.” (A child’s comment about school taken from ‘The Thinking Child – An Introduction’: Robert Fischer IATEFL Young learners SIG Newsletter No.17 March 1997).

Schools should be a place where students develop their capacities and learn by doing, and this implies thinking, finding solutions, and applying them in different contexts. Start to worry if one of your students says something like that.

I think that student’s autonomy has to be one of the key points in teaching. Students learn how self-reflect and how to make decisions, but they are not alone because their teachers (and even classmates) guide them and provide assistance when needed, and like this they can develop the learn to learn skill through the experience of learning. That is why goal-oriented learning strategies can be of great help for developing autonomy and learning. The most commonly (I used them in high school and college, and I still use them whenever I have to study something) are the following ones: asking questions, planning, monitoring, checking, revising, and self-testing. To sum up, from my point of view, as part of the guidance given to students, teachers could also provide them with different ways to access new content and learning it.

SESSION 7

Among the different styles of teaching and many methodology strategies, we can find a relatively new way to help students learn: the gamification. Huotari & Hamari (2012) describe it as “[…] the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts”. So we, teachers, can take advantage of this too and include games in the classroom.

And why can it be good for education? By letting students play and transforming something formal into something more informal, we are creating a better learning environment for them. The game-designed activities may entertain them more than a traditional class with traditional tasks. They will have fun, and I think this will lead to more engagement and a rise in their motivation. Other benefits of it might be the sense of achievement after being successful in a challenging game, the friendly competition, the possibility to interact with the other classmates, the practice of problem-solving real life situations in a safe environment, and the instant feedback of losing or winning. But above of that there is the fact that a game can capture someone’s attention more than anything. Students can even forget that they are in a classroom, how long they have been playing, and be totally focused into the game. The psychologist Csikszentmihalyi calls it the ‘flow’ and some athletes and gamers ‘being in the zone’.

The gamification in the (foreign) language class can have more advantages: all the four skills in language learning can be involved, meaning will be more important than form/formS but the teacher can also focus on specific language forms, and any game will have the good things that come with any cooperative activity.

SESSION 6

It is remarkable that input seems to be a key point for learning a language; either if it is written (stories, articles), spoken (dialogues, monologues), or multi-modal (videos, comic books). The teacher can encourage and motivate students with a good choice of texts to work in the English class. Essentially, the chosen texts should be engaging and relevant for them, that is to say that they have to be aligned with students' interests in order to be really exploitable. On top of that, we should not forget to choose challenging texts, but not so far from their level as it will be impossible for them to understand and all the motivation will fade immediately.

Among the proposed designs for text-based tasks from Willis (1996) we can find prediction activities, jumbles, restoration tasks, jigsaws or split information tasks, comparison tasks, and also memory challenge tasks. Images and even songs can be a good option too if we know their musical preferences (forget about the Lemon Tree!), and the teacher can give the chance to students to create their own activities and select their own material to boost the motivation factor.

SESSION 5

In 2005 Ellis wrote the following series of Principles of Instructed Language Learning:

1. Chunks over isolated words.
2. Focus on meaning and focus on form.
3. Implicit & explicit knowledge of L2.
4. Take into account the learner’s previous knowledge.
5. Input + output.
6. Language in context.
7. Different strategies and techniques for motivational purposes.
8. Free and controlled production.

With this and Willis' (1996) suggestions for varied activities which include listing, ordering and sorting, comparisons, problem-solving, sharing personal experiences, and other creative tasks such as pyramid discussions, debates and even dialogues (open dialogues, guided dialogues, disappearing dialogues, and half a dialogue), I think that nowadays teachers have it a bit easier to help students learn languages and distance the old-fashioned and ineffective grammar-translation activities.

EXAMPLE OF A GAP TASK:

The teacher would ask what kind of transports do they use, and then which do they think are the best and the worst. They can propose real transports and others that do not (still) exist. Some images are shown as examples to activate their ideas. After writing a list, in pairs, they will have to discuss why they have placed each transport in each list; afterwards they will share their ideas with the whole class and discuss which one is the best and which the worst. 

SESSION 4

The post-methods appeared because nowadays, the Grammar-translation, the direct method, and the audiolingual method are no longer appropriate for learners in our context. I wonder if they were they appropriate at the time when they were born and applied. Possibly not but there had to be more investigation in second language acquisition to understand that for a higher percentage of success, learners should receive more input in order to produce output, and then being able to notice what language processes take place in a given context; and moreover, taking into account that motivation plays an important role when someone learns a language (or any other subject).

INPUT + OUTPUT + NOTICING + MOTIVATION

And then that is when the TBL shows up:

“A task is a workplan that requires learners to process language pragmatically in order to achieve an outcome that can be evaluated in terms of whether the correct or appropriate propositional content has been conveyed. To this end, it requires them to give primary attention to meaning and to make use of their own linguistic resources, although the design of the task may predispose them to choose particular forms. A task is intended to result in language use that bears a resemblance, direct or indirect, to the way language is used in the real world. Like other language activities, a task can engage productive or receptive, and oral or written skills, and also various cognitive processes.” Ellis, 2003: 16

So basically any communicative task has to focus on meaning over the form/formS, it has to present a kind of gap for learners to fill —it can be either informational, or favourable for reasoning or giving their opinion—, the linguistic resources have to be chosen by the participants, and the outcome has to be non-linguistic. And finally I would also add that if the aim of a task could combine language, culture and personal growth, it would be more engaging and motivating for learners with a more enriching result. 

SESSION 3

“Teacher educators argued that no single method is appropriate for all situations and that, in any case, teachers never simply implement the blueprint specified by a particular method, but rather ‘construct’ teaching fluidly in accordance with their understanding of what works for the particular students they are teaching on particular occasions.” Ellis & Shintani (2013: 36-37)

As I said in the previous entry, in my opinion, one method is not enough and it is the teacher’s job to identify which ideas of X method he or she can apply in a given context. And that is when the post-method began with types of approaches like the focus on form/formS/meaning:

Focusing on meaning may be the most realistic environment that a teacher can create but I feel that it seems insufficient because students may get lost if they do not know the grammar rules of the language. On the contrary, focusing on formS requires splitting the language in strings and learning, for example, first the present simple and then the past simple separately does not follow any natural context. However, as all the methods before, we can take advantage of these approaches and turn disadvantages into strengths such as focusing more on meaning in groups that have a higher level of the language, and more on formS for lower levels. 

As for other procedures, PPP (presentation > practice > production) happens to slice up the language too and gives the illusion of mastery, but when the students find themselves in a real communicative situation they will struggle to understand and interact due to the fact that they have only studied pieces of the language. Last but not least, that is why if a real communicative situation is given as input, students will be able to create output and through their interactions and the ones of their schoolmates they will notice how language works without any need to splice it up like slices of bread.

SESSION 2

Teaching does not start between walls. Like any other field, it is not shocking that there is science and many people working and thinking how to improve education before the procedure inside the classroom:

The importance of studying old and new methods is an essential part of teacher training because it allows us to experiment and understand how students actually learn in order to find the optimum way to teach.

Without the labour of theorists, nowadays we would still think that we learn by repetition and all language lessons would be based in listening to the teacher and repeating his sentences. Innovation has lead us towards different approaches, from the Grammar Translation Method, going through the Direct Method, the Audio-Lingual Method, the Cognitive Approach, and leading us to the Communicative Approach, where finally students have more autonomy, the possibility to interact with the teacher and with themselves, and their mistakes are taken into account to progress. 

But in fact, maybe there is no perfect method and teachers have to apply one or another, or even fractions of them, depending on the subject, the issue or the students. After that, is the teacher who has to decide how to apply the approaches and, at the end, a blend of all of them might be the best way.

SESSION 1

Teaching is not easy, and neither is learning if the teacher does not know how to do his job. It does not matter if you are the best in your field; if you do not know how to teach it, your students will have it more difficult to learn anything because you will not be the guide they need. That is nothing new.

There are many factors to take into account in order to be the perfect teacher or at least to try to be something similar. In this entry we will see the surprisingly importance of spaces and personality, and the role they have in teaching and learning. 

“Environmental psychologists argue that the spaces we inhabit in our daily lives can positively or negatively affect our behaviour and the way we interact with people around us” Bechtel, R. & Churchman, A. (2002) Handbook of Environmental Psychology.

It is essential to feel safe and relaxed in a place where we will spend many hours of our lives, and even more if in that place we want to acquire new knowledge and skills. Every student is an individual person, but along with their classmates, they shape a community. Preparing activities that allow them to express their personality and to know their peers will help developing this sense of a team.

As for the physical place, the classroom is an empty space that needs to be filled up with the essence of each student. If you do not think that this is important, just look the amount of personal decoration that a teen’s bedroom has. So a key part is to personalize the classroom as much as possible with their work. 

Furthermore, the teacher is part of the group as well. Students need to feel that you care, and sharing personal information may be a good idea (also, it is linked to motivation too). However you are the person in charge, and it is important to think about which personal details are better to keep for ourselves. On the whole, I think that “friendly but not friends” sums it up and should replace the old “do not smile until Christmas”.