GENERAL CLASSES

       Hi, again!!

       I am trying and collecting all the activities we did during week number two, starting with false friends. We also worked with translation, and the importance to translate the overall meaning or sentences in context, that is mediation. In the afternoon, we were listening to a BBCSound about polyglots which gave us some tips to learn a new language, such as:

-you are never too old to learn a language (Thank goodness!!)

-don´t play too much importance to the grammar

-don´t worry about making mistakes.

       If we want to learn English, we should create an English environmental context that helps us to  get immersed in the language. This video and the listening below can give a good idea of what being a polygloth involves.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07fs81t

       A list of life´s little pleasures was the subject for Tuesday morning classes. We learnt about Bertol Brech, the exiled German composer and poet who wrote a poem with this title.

      We listened to a BBC radio program about his life and  poetry; by reading out his poem, we did some drilling to improve our intonation and finally, we ended up writing our own list of little pleasures, reading it out slowly, giving prominence to the stressed syllables so as to give intonation to the poem. Here I  am attaching the link for further study.

htpps://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07gc78p

       With our second teacher, we did a mind map about everyday life and in pairs we had to compare everyday life in our own countries to life in Britain (food, people´s behaviour, daily routine, physical surroundings, travel and transport, etc). While doing the discussion, the teacher was taking notes, identifying  the errors or/and grammatical problems we might encounter for later assessment.

       On Wednesday Jeremy´s session started by looking up some definitions in different sources such as wordreference, google, cambridge, wikipedia and the urban dictionary. The words to be defined were: Propaganda/ Public Relations/ Advertising/ Lobbying

This was the introduction activity to start talking about WWI through a funny Mr Bean´s video where it is explained in plain words why The Great War broke out.

 By the way, you can slow down the speed of the dialogue (quite useful, indeed).

        This Video led us to talk about the involvement of the US in the Great War thanks in no small part to Edward Bernays, the inventor or the Propaganda; In short, the lobbyings in US wanted to join the WWI to sell their armies and, for that reason, Edward Bernays , who happpened to be Freud´s nephew, manipulated the masses by creating an advertising campaign based on the fear that German armies could attack them.

       He is also well-known for his campaign about women smoking as a symbol of liberty;  torches of freedom" was called

 

      The final activity was to devise a campaign to persuade people about an issue and  to present it to the whole class.

         After the break, James wrote 6 words on the blackboard and we had to guess the relationship among them: wig/Barcelona/airport/nervous/arrested/glued/immigration

     Can you guess the story?? Some students in class had heard about it before, so James gave us the Guardian´s article entitled "Man held in Spain over attempt to smuggle cocaine under his wig"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/16/man-held-in-spain-over-attempt-to-smuggle-cocaine-under-his-wig

       Working with the text, we had to find out all the words with 3 or more syllables and look for the stressed pattern; then, we read all of them out.

  Thursday was the project day: in groups we had to devise a project on science; I did one with my colleague Frank on genetic diseases and it turned out to be quite a rewarding experience.

With James, we were learning some colloquial expressions which served us to
 revise the Future Tenses

   and unfortunately, the last day of my mobility arrived; we revised everything we had done in class and in pairs, we had to write down a press release of the project we had presented on Wednesday; ours was about building a nuclear plan in the area. After the presentation of the press release, we created a self-deprecating Advertising campaign, so hilarious!!!!
After the break, we worked with lexis by means of a game; then, we tried to be polite rephrasing some sentences to avoid offending a Brit.  Do you want a try?

       As a final thought I would like to say that it has been a great experience, not only because I have been able to boost my English in the classes which, by the way,  I have considered top quality sessions, but also because I have had the opportunity to get immersed in the English culture I adore!! Looking forward to repeating the experience again!!!!

METHODOLOGY CLASSES

In this post I just want to briefly explain what I was taught about the use of new methodologies in classroom. The debate was arisen with these questions:

-“What´s the biggest challenge you face as a teacher?”

-“Do you follow a particular methodology or do you draw inspiration form a range of different approaches?”

-“How do you encourage learners autonomy among your students?

Basically, what we learnt in this session was that we, as teachers, shouldn´t restrict ourselves to just one approach, but we should familiarize to different approaches and add them to our repertoire. The challenge for us is to remove our teaching engrained habits and try to teach our learners chunks of language rather than words in isolation.

A range of activities  have been worked in these afternoon sessions; some of them are the following ones:

-       THE CIRCLE OF DEATH- a useful activity to control noise and bad behaviour in class; it is also a good idea to  avoid the use of the mother tongue during English lessons

-       A CONTRACT- where the overall objectives for the class should be set in advance related to some areas of improvemet, such as speaking skills, vocabulary, writing or behaviour. Students have to choose which ones are more suitable for them and stick to them

-       THE WORD BOX-personally I find this activity very rewarding; the idea is that every time a word or chunks of language, such as set phrases or collocations, appear in class, they should be written on slips pieces of paper that are placed in a box. The last 5 minutes of the class are devoted to revise these words: students can be asked the definition of them, the opposite or the synonym of a particular word, they can also be asked to produce a sentence where a particular word from the word box ought to be included, another activity I quite like is to make up a story with 8 words randomly chosen from the box….  The array of activities is endless provided you boost students vocabulary.

-       A CHOICE GRID is also a great idea as extension activities to get higher grades; they are given a choice of activities to be done during a term; for instance they can record themselves making an interview in English to his/her parents,   they can record a Madlipz, or read an unabridged English book, watch his/her favourite series in English…..

    Grouping classrooms was also another topic to be worked during these sessions; In the pictures below, you can find different classrooms layouts depending on the intended activity.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE AND NOT DIE TRYING IT!!

Hi, everyone!!

This is the first time I am going to upload a post on a blog, so first of all, please forgive my mistakes.

The goal of this post is to disseminate what  I have been learning while doing this workshop embedded in the ERASMUS KA101 to improve the teacher training both in active methodologies and in linguistic competences. Working in this way, teachers doing this training could learn and help in the successful development of the ERASMUS KA229, entittled "Euronenvironments" as well as the headway of the KA3 called "Leadership for Change".

As far as my course is concerned, The  Overseas Teachers´ Course", includes three hours  of general English classes in the morning with a pool of different issues,  whereas three days a week I have specific classes about methodology and teaching-related topics. Apart from that, in the afternoons and evenings, we have a programme of social activities so as to practise English outside the classroom.

As previously explained in the tweets I have posted, this week has been very fruitful in terms of novice approaches to deal with common issues that come  up in a classroom.

We have been dealing with soft powers and how to use News Media in classroom; one activitity that can be quite useful to do in class, specially with A-level groups or 4th grade of Compulsory Secondary Education is to look for a piece of news in the BBC, or in EL Pais in its English section and  compare it with the same piece of news in other news media, such as France 24 or Aljazeera. The purpose of this activity is to raise awareness of the fact that news can be biased depending on the website you search; Students then can explain the differences they have found in the diverse news media they have used.

On Wednesday, we were working with different songs to learn some bits and pieces of history through them.  Among them, it is of note the song "Strange Fruit", sang by Billie Holiday about people being lynched and hung on the trees in the 1930s in the US. We were also exposed to songs that apparently the original and cover version can be misled.

The teacher also emphasized the need to look for songs that can help students to learn rhythm in English as well as intonation; let´s take the example of "With a little help of my friends" by the Beatles.

It seemed funny to find out that "I am the Walrus", a Beatles´song, was written as a revenge by Lenon when he discovered that his "beloved" teacher taught English through his songs in classroom; he then came up with a song whose lyrics meant nothing and the music was also random.

The subject for Thursday classes was art; the first thing we did was a little project:  working in pairs we had to choose a piece of art, did some research and outlined a draft to teach our peers about it.  As a student-centred approach was used, the teacher, Jeremy, guided and facilitated all the process by means of guided-questions to lead the presentations. 

Afterwards, during James´ session, we were given 20 pairs of words that were connected: this was the starting point to think about some news about clothes or the clothing industry; A few good ideas came up:

-Vegetarian people want to use non-leather shoes

-Second-hand clothes to prevent pollution

-Barefoot groups in Cze-Republic to stop pollution

We had two articles about sustainable clothes to read at home.

Friday was a revision day:

First, we searched for a piece of news in three different news websites and made a two-sentence summary.

Then, we wrote a 20 minute-essay about our favourite piece of art (Undoubtedly, I chose León Cathedral!!)

and finally, we had to say the first two adjectives that came to our minds while enjoying "The Sunflowers" by Van Gogh. With all the adjectives we composed a kind of  collaborative poem.

This is briefly speaking what we have learned  in our morning sessions. I will be explaining the afternoon sessions in another post. Bye for now!!