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!!