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.