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.