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Communicative Skills for Secondary Teachers http://ced.cele.unam.mx/englishforteachers
Program developers Escuela Nacional Preparatoria No. 1 “Gabino Barreda. UNAM Ma. Elena Delgado Centro de Enseñanza de Lenguas Extranjeras. UNAM Leticia Martineck Karen Lusnia Eréndira Camarena Dulce Ma. Gilbón
Online tutor Adriana Aceves Martineck
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Introduction
A 120 hour online teacher development program was prepared for English language secondary school Mexican teachers. Free access sites were carefully chosen in order to facilitate their improvement of language skills and grammatical competence as well. Seven modules were designed to reach this objective.
Would that program be an appropriate response to that population’s needs? At the end of each module, teachers were asked to reflect on their own learning process in the different contents: learning to learn, the four linguistic skills, teaching strategies and the use of ICT.
As a final project of the above mentioned diploma, the participants are required to write a report. This volume includes the reflections of the first group participants who share their enthusiasm, surprise, stress and even frustration struggling with new technologies during their learning process, but their willingness to face the challenge as well.
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Hi colleagues, It has been a really exciting and different experience, to be your tutor in a course where we used only online tools. If you had any technical problems, you always found the way to solve them. I will miss your enthusiasm and professionalism in your work. You are the best class ever.
I hope all you learnt will help you to be a better teacher.
Best Regards Adriana
Contents ......................................................................................................3 Hi colleagues,.........................................................................................................................4 It has been a really exciting and different experience, to be your tutor in a course where we used only online tools. If you had any technical problems, you always found the way to solve them. I will miss your enthusiasm and professionalism in your work. You are the best class ever...................................................................................................................4 I hope all you learnt will help you to be a better teacher.....................................................4 ................................................................................................................................................4 Best Regards Adriana............................................................................................................4 Contents..................................................................................................................................5 Amalia Alvarez.......................................................................................................................6 Rony Alvarez Gonzalez .......................................................................................................19 Martha Arredondo Burquez ...............................................................................................24 Enrique Caparros Cadena ..................................................................................................37 Irene Cardenas León ..........................................................................................................46 José Antonio Carrillo Tejeda ..............................................................................................51 Gloria Chavarrin Millan .....................................................................................................63 Tomás Cordova Lara ..........................................................................................................70 Carlos Cornejo Carbajal .....................................................................................................80 Diana Eréndira Fernández Jaime.......................................................................................92 Jannet Flores de la Cruz....................................................................................................102 Karla García Ruiz .............................................................................................................108 Juan Antonio Lonngi Vélez ..............................................................................................116 Omar Lucio Bustos ...........................................................................................................128 Maria Elena Macfarland...................................................................................................135 Araceli Manriquez Peña ...................................................................................................138 A. Isabel Moreno de la Rosa .............................................................................................144
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Rosa Moreno Ascencio .....................................................................................................153 Belem Pedrin Goméz .........................................................................................................163 Xóchitl Pérez Pérez............................................................................................................170 Leonardo Ruiz Uriostegui..................................................................................................178 Page | 6 Alejandro Vazquez Morales ..............................................................................................189
Amalia Alvarez My Learning Experience
LEARNING TO LEARN ENGLISH THROUGH INTERNET TOOLS AND RESOURCES MODULE 2 As this module refers, here we had to familiarize with some resources and tools for learning to learn English through Internet, it requires different abilities such as: typing, using the mouse, searching etc. I liked Mouse Master where I had to use the mouse for ex: pointing, clicking with a single click, double click, drag and drop, scrolling, checking boxes and radio buttons, selecting menus, listing and typing in text fields and it was very easy and fun! (of course, it was the beginning) However it was not the only exercise to do, there were several like the icon for Canadian Master which is to read Canadian stories and to practice with exercises dealing with Canadian citizenship, there is also the Grammar central which is good for my students, because there are several exercise where he/she is able to select answers according to the topic. It has a very basic vocabulary, as well as the Crazy teacher and the Terrible Teacher which are for more advanced students. Flashed ESL which has exercises for students to learn grammar and a last one which is to read American stories with radio button exercises. The site is the following: http://www.tcet.com/eaonline/index.html I also enjoyed answering the Birmingham Grid for Learning MI because I found out the kind of learner I am. I realized that some people are better at understanding some things than others. And that we have all 8 intelligences, but we don´t have them all developed but just some of them and that we can develop the others by doing different things or exercises.
CULTURAL LEARNING AWARENESS This internet Diploma opened new doors for me as an EFL Teacher. After several weeks of study and practice I am able to use internet sites without fear or without doubt because it´s fun for them and exciting, since here they´re going to find information from other people around the world, they´ll also experience different ways of speaking, which is good for them to discriminate and sharpen their ears and even more to make them feel confident when they speak, tell them that they don´t have to sound perfectly American when they speak. Internet is the immersion to different cultures and different people (traditions) different ways of thinking, different ways of living, eating and communicating, but similar in flesh.
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MY TEACHING READING STRATEGIES EXPERIENCE
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I learnt that Reading is an interactive process between reader and text . The reader interacts with the text to recreate a meaningful discourse. In order to extract the required information from the text in L2 we apply certain skills and strategies. We have different purposes when reading which draw on a variety of strategies. For example, skimming the text if we just want to know what the text is about, scanning to locate specific information. A strategy I found really useful when applying this skill is to use the 8 questions Who? When? What? Where? How many? Why? How? How often? And this really good because they won´t read every word, they´re going to understand the text more precisely and also we can use a Semantic map to process information, which is better to ask them to write a composition of the text or reading. I loved the read along exercise, because here I could improve my pronunciation and context grammar too. I liked this site http://www.manythings.org/ I can work with my students in reading shopping, travel, driving and everyday signs so later they can make their own for school. Reading most of the times is the most difficult skill to develop (but not impossible) with students since it´s the most boring for them. Readings must be motivating, interesting, unknown (sometimes) to raise students interest. I liked the 100 short stories site. However there are tons of stories in the internet, we have to look for a good strategy to apply with students.
One interesting exercise is “Adult learning activities”, which is good to learn about daily foreign people activities . One of the readings is “Cell phone safety”. I think that before putting sts. In the computer to read these kind of exercises is necessary to consider first if they are ready to understand such vocabulary, so I think is great to start with prediction and brainstorming the topic and try to write words that are in the reading they will work. So they don´t feel dumb.
I learnt 2 strategies: Identify Facts and Opinions
A fact is something that can be verified and backed up with evidence. An opinion is based on a belief or view. It is not based on evidence that can be verified. And to evaluate or note the difference between both we had to answer some exercises in the following site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/reading/fact_and_opinion/index.shtmlThis module also remind me the different types of texts. 1. Non chronological report 2. Instructions 3. Explanations 4. Persuasive 5. Discursive arguments 6. Biography 7. Descriptive 8. Informative It´s a must that students know that here are different types of texts so when they´re reading they notice it. For this Teacher can explain the different types of reading by presenting different colorful text to call sts. Attention and then ask them to identify the different types of texts teacher presents. http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/ReadStrat3.html I consider this site truly important since we have to take into consideration what strategies students need to use before, during, and after reading to improve their reading comprehension. Because I found this 6 statements interesting and useful I pasted them ♥ A good strategy is to active Prior knowledge before reading because it helps them decide if they need additional information about the topic, format, or language of the text they will be reading. ♥ A good strategy is to ask questions before, during and after reading because it activates prior knowledge,it will help them understand the text or to have an idea about the text or to get familiarized with the text. ♥ It is possible to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words if they connect unknown ideas with known concepts. ♥ To visualize when reading to create a picture in our mind is helpful because it helps them support their comprehension of the text.
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♥ I have taught the following reading comprehension strategies in my classes: Prediction, making inferences,visualize images from text,classify or categorize information, making comparisons, sequence events, ♥ I am aware that I use some of the reading comprehension strategies as a reader in my own language when I find a difficult reading with a heavy vocabulary or with political ideas.
MY TEACHING LISTENING STRATEGIES EXPERIENCE
I enjoyed a lot these strategies that have to do with listening • Top down listening: I loved these 2 because I had to pay much attention to get the answers right. • Bottom up listening • Minimal pairs: Minimal pairs are words which have exactly the same pronunciation except for one sound. Do the exercises found at these sites, and check your ear. For ex: safe – save . This is a great exercise for my students and myself, it helps me sharpen my ears and differentiate between two different words that sound the same. • Word stress, intonation, pause, rhythm: • Tag questions
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This is a top down listening strategy where I had different options to work with a. See the video with Streaming video: Real Player or Windows Media b. The transcript c. A multiple choice quiz d. Story spotlight e. Story Notes (vocabulary) f. Downloading or subscribing to the vodcast. This module also remind me the importance of Word stress and I want to write 3 reasons: *To identify the many levels of meaning based on the word you stress. *To see the different ways a sentence can be understood *To remember that the true meaning of a sentence is also expressed through the stressed word or words. I also remembered intonation and rhythm but I hadn´t put the same attention as today with this diploma and I conclude saying that Intonation is the melody of speech! Something I knew and know now, but maybe I didn´t realize it until I heard it! And what I see is that depending the way you say things it´s the way people will get them (meaning of words or sentences) or get the message, so I could teach English or anything else by singing or with a different intonation (and my students can understan better)as if you do it seriuosly or in a rigid manner. MY TEACHING SPEAKING STRATEGIES EXPERIENCE
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It is a common problem for every student of English. You know lot of words but you are unable to speak. Isn't it strange? The reasons are many. English is not your mother tongue or you are hesitant because of your nature (and personality), as you may not be too confident and think a lot before you speak. This makes it doubly difficult. So the key is to start speaking is to initiate and condition your mind to speak English. For that, you need to begin with words, small phrases and sentences. You may have noticed how people try to intersperse their speech with English words. It may not sound too good but it's definitely a good way to build a rhythm. *Taken from: http://engspeak.blogspot.com/2008/08/lesson-91-how-to-deal-withhesitation.html I completely agree with this, when we prepare our students to condition their mind to speak at least short words or sentences or sing songs, they will not fear to speak in English. As for this module I enjoyed recording myself!! In the audacity program. Let me tell you that it helped a lot to improve my speaking. Its great advantage, is that I could delete it as many times as I wanted to, so it was finally ready. However, I sometimes got desperate because I had so many interruptions.
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I also enjoyed the voicethread which is fun and cultural, I get to know important people and some others I didn´t know. It´s fun and exciting to have your voice on the internet. Besides everything, this is the first time I´ve heard of it.
Practice speaking with other partner was a great experience because we could express our own opinion coherently and understand each other perfectly. I also like the idea of reading our course mates works and make comments on them. Voicethread a new and excellent tool to talk about and share images, documents, and videos with other people.
MY TEACHING WRITING STRATEGIES EXPERIENCE
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Many of us are not used to write and less to be the example of our kids at home. Writing can start with a diary or simply with words that you like and make sentences. Writing in English can be very difficult for students since they get confused with the order of some words, but it ´s not impossible as I´ve said before in other modules. A start with words it´s an end of paragraphs and long sentences. Publishing my own book! I made about 10! Imagine my students! This is a great start in writing in English since it´s motivating. http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/index.php?id=9695 Creating your book with internet images! I also learned much about photopeach site. Where I could tell stories over pictures.
ICT TOOLS We must take advantage of the ICT to become better teachers and to be a 21st century teachers, and to offer our students a greater life so they are great citizens and can immerse and compete in this globalized world not just to be great students but to face real life. So let Page | 15 ´s use them because our students are reaching us quickly! Module 5 is the one that uses most of the times the internet tools, than the others, which I think is great and fun for students. ABOUT PLANNING Bloom's Taxonomy and Critical Thinking • •
Knowledge - recall ------- Concrete experience Comprehension - understand ------- Observation and reflection
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Application - use, practice ----------- Testing in new situations
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Analysis - dissect, generalize -------- Forming abstract concepts
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Synthesis - create, combine --------- Testing in new situations
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Evaluation - appraise, value --------- Apply what he has learnt and
I chose this one because it has the elements that are needed for a good lesson planning, having and considering all these elements, we can have an effective learning and we can a achieve our goal which is to accomplish the graduation profile of Secondary level. David A. Kolb (with Roger Fry) created his famous model out of four elements: concrete experience, observation and reflection, the formation of abstract concepts and testing in new situations. He represented these in the famous experiential learning circle (after Kurt Lewin):
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In other words this means that Experiential learning is based on the assumption that knowledge is created through the transformation brought by the experience. Specific experience is transferred to an abstract conceptualization which is actively tested through new experiences. It is constructed by the individual. The main objective in this scheme is the construction of meaning by the student through two types of experience: the discovery, understanding and application of knowledge to situations or problems and interaction with other members of the process, where through spoken and written language, students share the acquired knowledge and through this process, all this it deepens, perfects and dominates the knowledge. MY LEARNING EXPERIENCE The 6-week Communicative skills for Secondary Teachers Diploma online from the Autonoma de Mexico University by the Foreign Language Teaching Centre, was a a truly remarkable experience of upgrading knowledge, and sharpening professional, cultural and social edges for me. The active teaching techniques offered by many sites in the internet came as cool drops on my thirsty lips. Great explosions of thoughts and reflections have been triggered inside me. I powered the idea that we as Teachers must seek ways to make the classroom learning interactive and entertaining; doing it this way, the students would be engaged unconsciously into the learning process. Then learning happens. There´s a Teachers belief that skills learned hands-on, or in other words, in a kinesthetic way, can achieve better retention in the learners’ mind. Creativity is a door to a fun learning and this reminds me of a famous line ----
“Tell me and I will forget; teach me and I will remember; involve me and I will learn.” Words of wisdom, indeed. But in my EFL classrooms, with limited teaching resources, and super-large class, interactive activities can be a very luxurious investment of time and money. As my 4 skills are concerned, I´ve improved a lot, as well as in my English Language Page | 17 Teaching. My writing skill is better since I found several interesting and useful sites like this one, that helps me look for answers I don´t know. Also is a good site for my students since they have many questions and it´s good for them because they´ll learn new vocabulary.
I also liked this site, because it helps me to have more ideas on what to add to my lesson plans and to make it fun!
I conclude saying that I enjoyed this diplomado online because it taught me to look for more, to go beyond, if we do more than we do, we´ll find things we never thought. This world is changing greatly! And continuing education stresses the need to improve learning efficiency, flexibility and personal responsibility for one’s own learning. So we don ´t need to spend money for improving our language proficiency or to improve as teachers, we just need and must navigate or search for things we can use in the classroom with our students or things for us as teachers!! If you don´t have the tools for this kind of activities, use your imagination!! And do it!
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Good luck to all of you! I don´t think computers can substitute men mind, but is a helpful tool so we can work together! "This course, without a doubt is far superior to any other courses I have experienced. It was positive and very encouraging". It was fun and motivating! As for the Tutor Adriana is highly schooled in Language Arts (I believe)in general which aids in helping us understand any doubts we had during this course. It was a very colorful and enjoyable learning.
Rony Alvarez Gonzalez My Learning Experience Page | 19 Unit 10. Reviewing the report of my learning experience.
Cultural learning awareness. It was really interesting the way we could reach other situations, other realities, other cultures by listening stories, news, etc., through ICT tools. For instance, we watched movies and short videos from other places and countries, listening different accents like the Australians and British ones, and we used lot of others resources, particularly I tried out with those little comics in classroom, the students liked because it was fun, they did the same by using the school’s computers, since we don’t have connectivity they did it on Paint making draws and balloon talks, etc. Writing and speaking for my students was fun too, I started the activities using real photographs of another students, boys, and teachers meeting, that was a start point of the learning activities where they had to write or say something about the picture through they know by their own experience, It was funny and motivating, and also they could correct each other’s writing specifically grammar and spelling, however they were afraid to correct themselves about the speaking, they said they don´t know, so that make them feel unsure. I did some exercises using Audacity too, It really help me a lot because they listened to the themselves how they pronounce the words, I use a little software that says a word you type on it, you can find it for free at http://talk-it.softonic.com/ they often goes to the computer in order to know how a word they found should be pronounced. I have tried little videos and part of movies to show them how native people from other countries sound when they speak English, I download short videos from some of the next links www.vimoeo.com, www.youtube.com, http://www.real-english.com/ to see and watch as many times you need over a subject, for instance the verb do in past tense in this video http://www.realenglish.com/reo/46/unit46.html gives a lot of examples and lot of answers to the same question, then I did the same with the students. I would like to use voiced thread with my students but we don´t have internet at school, that would be so interesting and motivating. New teaching strategies discovered
The strategies that we used to learn in this Diploma have been really attached to those habits mentioned for effective teachers of the 21st Century, by the way, the reasons they gave in the text are so strong, and it’s true the world is changing all the time, it doesn’t stop, the kids and teenagers are called the Net Generation because they use and incorporate technology to their lives so naturally, in this context the teacher’s roll have to change, in Page | 20 order to teach better we have to use current and different techniques and strategies that uses new resources, ICT resources. The school cannot be out the world changes. Since this Diploma is online, the resources were most ICT tools for learning, that make sense but, in our schools we don’t have internet for example, but we do have computers, so I download some videos, pictures, text, exercises and they have to work on the computer, they really like having the class using these tools, for instance, we use audacity and we play what we recorded and everybody listen and have the opportunity to fix it and say it correctly. Reading teaching strategies If I had to choose two good activities I would select two kinds of activities that I liked most, those are contained in the follow links http://www.awesomestories.com/, and http://www.rong-chang.com I think they are complete as a didactical resource, I mean, they are not only for a simple reading, and that’s what I liked, they also have exercises and activities around the information on the text you read, they make you think about what you read, there is not the usual resource for reading, they work on the reading skill; if we practice enough we can read a text and by using some of this advices we can have more information than just by simply reading. Skimming and scanning in www.skillsworkshop.org is important to keep them as an everyday resource for permanent learning. The next links http://www.bbc.co.uk/, http://www.cdlponline.org/, are very interesting tools for reading too. Talking about reading strategies the next link http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/ReadStrats_20Best.html was so interesting to me because that gives you useful reading strategies, which can be used as a resource for learning in any other language. I would say that the teaching strategies used were so important, because some of them used the exercises on the web and some of them the tutor asked a specific reflective question that made you think about the text we read. The effect they had on me was good because by reading I knew about other cultures, facts, thoughts, etc, and they came up as a knew reading strategies for me. You can go over them as many times you want or you need, you can download them print them and take them to your students. Listening teaching strategies.
In my opinion this learning experience didn’t has a difficult activity, the activities weren’t so easy either, but I think they were just normal, new surely but not difficult. If I must choose a difficult one, it would be the dictation, why, because the others you can learn them, and the dictation is kind of evaluation of what you know, It’s a little test of your Page | 21 listening skill at any moment you take the dictation. The others activities if you don’t know them you can learn and practice them permanently, for instance: word stress, the eight common word stress patterns in English, ESL Intonation Guide: tonic stress, emphatic stress, contrastive stress, new information stress, and of course phrasal verbs. However I would like to say something that could make the module of listening better (but no easier), is by giving more time to these module, I mean, more practical activities, I know that there is one of the modules that has more activities but I think still needs more. We know that the people who took this Diploma have certain knowledge about English, but if you don’t know phrasal verbs for example, you are not going to learn them by one or two exercises, even when we know that everybody has to practice more. However in the other hand, we also know that the intention of the course is got the awareness of the needs to learn by our own decision, and that’s the goal of these exercises and the ones and the end of each of the modules. Speaking teaching strategies Definitely was the voice thread and the recording voice activity, the voice thread was nice and funny but challenging too, you notice how you really sound when you speak, and realize that you don’t speak as you always believed, so that motivate you really to have more practice. Voice thread was interesting because the first exercise was like easy because we had to spoke freely, but the second one had more specific instructions for the speaking task, so we had to do our best. The recording voice activity was a very shocking activity, when you heard yourself, you evaluate how you pronounce the words, how you stress the words, you notice that you don’t apply the intonation according to what are you saying, that you sometimes don’t have a rhythm, a natural rhythm. The advices for writing a story by Aaron Shep were very useful too. Speaking teaching strategies I will take the same idea that the course at the very beginning, I mean, I will use the audacity to record their own voice, to get rid of their fears, probably by using a writing
product made before, or by telling what they do after school, that everybody knows it and can say it without bigger problem, after that, give them back their recording to correct it and record it again until they are satisfied with their recording. Then I will make couples to do a new voice record, but this time, they would have been Page | 22 written a little conversation, check it and correct it, and they would have to recorded, and everybody at the end would say what recording exercise would be the best. Also I would do what I said at the beginning of this text, motivate the speaking using real photographs to talk about them, what they evokes to the students, what they can imaging, or what they think. Writing teaching strategies Writing with sense. Making a poem was so funny, but it was kind of serious writing because what we wrote had to make sense, had to have a message even in a few words, the templates helped like in the funniest tale, also I learnt that make a poem is not so difficult with the help of the web. Having an intention when we write. Making the comic was funny I really liked, and I liked because you had to say a story by using the comics, but tell something with sense, that make me write, fix and correct because you couldn’t write that much, so you choose the right words that could say, what you wanted it to tell in the story. Word as a tool. Photopeach, I really liked, and I really enjoy it, because it was so meaningful for me, because I talked about my state. That was an interesting activity for me because I had to write something that had relation between the picture and what it represent to my state and what it represented to me, all at the same time. That’s what I wrote Word as a tool because that is another level of writing, by using the word, the language; words define the world. About ICT tools I choose the listening module and I choose the tools that talk about the intonation patterns, the stress word and the rhythm. For listening I think the next link http://www.esl-lab.com/ is a web page that have exercises for three levels, easy, medium and difficult, all of them together are more than 170 subjects that have an audio story, information or fact and it has what is called Answering Machine that have four types of exercises that helps to understand what it has been read, they are: I. Pre-Listening Exercises, II. Listening Exercises, III. Vocabulary, IV. Post-Listening Exercises, it also have a Key vocabulary.
The videos that talk about the sound of English: Word stress, the one that shows the eight common word stress patterns in English: http://esl.about.com/od/speakingenglish/a/8wspatterns.htmhttp://esl.about.com/od/speaking english/a/8wspatterns.htm ESL Intonation: stress types Teaching Intonation. Ted Power: English Language Learning and Teaching: Teaching English intonation and stress patterns The videos on You Tube Learn English Rhythm Lesson 10a, 10b, 10c,10d Intonation: English Pronunciation Also the two videos about thought groups Lesson 7a: Thought groups: English Pronunciation Lesson 7b: Thought groups: English Pronunciation Why I selected these instruments? I selected them because they are a real help, I mean, if we don’t have the others resources the ones for writing, I think we can handle it, as well as the ones for reading, but the listening/speaking most of the teachers are lack of that skill, and these videos or links not only shows you how the English sounds, they teach you the very beginning and the basic and main ideas to be able to learn properly, what I would like to call the “sound of English” in other words, Intonation, stress words, thought group, rhythm, etc. Lesson planning. The Critical Thinking could be the one I consider is appropriate for my context; I would complement that with the roles that the teacher plays, something that was mentioned in the text about lesson planning. In fact there is not a unique plan lesson or methodology for teaching; there are several methodologies which coexist at the same time, what does it change? It changes the understanding of what I’m doing, and the why I’m doing that, and of course the how I’m doing it, because sometimes is the same purpose, the same intention. Another very important matter is the role that teacher plays, the teacher’s attitude is so important, that build most of the time the learning environment in the classroom, and for example the learning strategy could be good, the didactic moments or stages could be right, the resources can be according to, etc. but if the teacher’s attitude is not good, that can obstruct the process of learning or the sense of the activity, it make another context for learning. In telesecondary schools this aspect is very important since is the same teacher who teach all the subjects, like in elementary schools, so the teacher spent all day in the same classroom, and know all the students, the way they learn, where or how they have
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difficulties to learn, how some of students can learn easier than others by doing something specific, in this context different intelligences can work also.
Martha Arredondo Burquez My Learning Experience
Unit 3. Key competences for Lifelong learning
First of all, sections from 1 to 8 are strongly related, but talking about 2, 5 and 8 we can say that they are the essence of a good teacher/learner; those skills let us be able to understand and communicate in other languages solving our special needs, as the way learn to learn autonomously and a cultural background are needed in this profession and life-long learning itself. I think I have to improve my skills in cooperative learning and evaluate my own work, and learn to develop creative skills and dedicate long periods of time in learning.
Unit 4. Advantages of learning English using Internet sites
Internet offers a wide variety of programs and information that can improve our knowledge and skills while learning other languages, where we can "sail freely" according to our needs and expectations, as well as we have fun and enjoy studying at our own rhythm. After sailing through the sites suggested here, I can say that learning by using the Internet provides a variety of choices to improve our knowledge, gives us the opportunity to compare different ideas, concepts and point of view and provides fun to our study. Unit 3. Text Types and Vocabulary Learning
the names of the different text types are: INSTRUCTIVE (giving instructions step by step to gain the goal) DESCRIPTIVE (giving details of an event or anything) PERSUASIVE (leads you to do, buy, go, etc. something or anywhere) INFORMATIVE (provides you the main information you must be interested in)
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Read Health and safety in construction identifying information.: Page | 25
well, first I read the questions to know what the exercise wanted me to do... so because it requested specific information, I used scanning to look for it, but I think that at the same time we are scanning we take a general overview on the text to locate the subtitles and then find the topic and the information we are needing to give an appropriate answer. Unit 4. Intensive Reading
Read and follow the instructions: http://www.skillsworkshop.org/l2lit/l2bbcnewsadultsfearyoung.pdf Read again to find the words in their context, try to infer the meaning of them.After doing the exercises find the answers and correct your mistakes: If I have to grade myself, I think 9 will be ok! because in some questions I had to reread the text... but in general, I´ve always tried to "guess" (infere) the meaning of the words I don´t understand if they help me to understand the message, the purpose of communication, but I know I have to improve my vocabulary by trying to find and learn new words, and infering is a good way to get this goal.. Unit 5. Reading for pleasure
Produce a 5 line written opinion about the article: first of all, I really enjoyed reading "The Amistad Incident" because I haven´t seen that movie -even I wanted to- and now, I have a very good "picture" in my mind to understand of what happened in this interesting movie... the text is easy to understand, and even more because it gives the reader the chance to find some pictures that illustrate the narration, so we can have a better Idea about the original documents and people that make it more believable!! 100 SHORT ENGLISH STORIES:
Mention at least one cultural element that you found in the story you read: 60. WOMAN LIES ABOUT WINNING LOTTERY one very known cultural element in US is lottery... many stories are told about poor people that become rich just with one single lottery ticket... even they have almost everything, they don´t own almost nothing, so they won’t to win the lottery to pay all their bills -house, car, education, etc- to make the American dream come true... by the way, I knew a couple from Cuba.. she and her family won the "Lottery" that is played every year to go freely to live in the US... she was studying medicine and her father was a doctor, and that day every single family was paying attention to the radio when they heard their names!!! They left Cuba and started a new life in Florida. She met a young Cuban man that was illegal in US, fell in love and got married. They were in their honey moon when I met them in a cruise to Yucatán.. nice, isn´t it? 100 SHORT ENGLISH STORIES: Mention at least one cultural element that you found in the story you read: Unit 6. Thinking about strategies
Take your time to read and reflect on them and then complete the following statements: 1.- A good strategy is to active prior knowledge before reading because readers connect new information to their existing knowledge base. This helps them understand the text. 2.- A good strategy is to ask questions before, during and after reading because questions pertain to the text´s content, structure and language. They ask questions for different purposes including those that clarify their own developing understanding. Readers wonder about the choices the author made when writing. 3.- It is possible to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words if they try to figure out something by using clues from the text and what they know from previous experiences. The conclusion is reached after thinking about details and facts from the selection.
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4.- To visualize when reading to create a picture in our mind is helpful because they use developing images to support their comprehension of the text. Readers create images from text during and after reading. 5.- I have taught the following reading comprehension strategies in my classes: identify main ideas and supporting details; make generalizations; sequence events; Page | 27 ask questions before, during and after reading; activate prior knowledge, among others. 6.- I am aware that I use some of the reading comprehension strategies as a reader in my own language when I compare and contrast ideas, identify
Unit 7. Sample Reading Comprehension Lessons 1. Express briefly your opinion about the use of these three steps for the suggested text. 2. Would these steps be appropriate for your students?
1.-my opinion about the use of these three steps: READ.- this first step activates prior knowledge and motivation by using questions before their first contact with the text. Then, they're ready to read it. REVISIT.- is a reflection about the answers they gave in the first step, and it generates new questions while they reread the text and make some connections with other subjects. This allows them to produce from reading. REFLECT.- this is the time to arrive to some conclusions, give their opinions and connect what they've learned to common life; this also leads students to research and look for related information, increasing of course, reading skills as they are able to identify and analyze the text structure. 2.- would these steps be appropriate for your students? Unfortunately, their reading skills' level in Spanish is poor... they don´t question what they read and sometimes they don't even understand it, but in English we have to encourage them to think, analyze and create from reading... I know they can, my work is to make them like it. Isn’t it?
Unit 2. Top-down listening and word stress Page | 28 Think the minimal pairs are useful because they bring us the opportunity to improve our listening skills by making differences in pronunciation between words that are very similar -though we make it according to the context-, and the actions I will take is to find chances to listen more English at real speed, learn new words and try to use different and wider vocabulary.
Choose TWO videos or VODCASTS (video podcasts) to view from this site by selecting the link to English Bites, select and complete the multiple choice quiz, the story notes, etc. so that you can better understand the listening:
EPISODE 29: THE GRAMPIANS the grammar point is to make the difference in spelling and pronunciation, and of course the meaning and use of TO (INDICATING DIRECTION), TO (AS INDICATING ACTION), TOO (INDICATING MORE THAN IS LIKED, OR AS WELL), AND TWO (AS A NUMBER).. AND THE MEANING OF RANGER, SOMETIME giving some examples as the narrator goes through, stoping and retelling that part of the text; he says that TO sometimes is hard to hear.. This national park is also known as Gariwerd that is an indigenous term used by the original local people. the closest town is Halls Gap. It finishes with a marvelous view of the place. EPISODE 27: SEA LIONS: This story is obut swimming with sealions and is used to show the meaning of expressions like ALL WALKS OF LIFE (PEOPLE THAT COME FROM ALL OCCUPATIONS OR BACKGROUNDS), GET A BUZZ (ENJOY),SOMETHING ELSE (SPECIAL AND DIFFERENT), TURN UN (ARRIVE), FIRST HAND (WHEN YOU EXPERIENCE BY YOURSELF), AND GET ON (LIKE EACH OTHER/BE SUCCESFUL/CONTINUE)... sea lions are very friendly animals, so people enjoy diving in the water and play with them.. the man says that he's got the best job in the world! .. I agree, 'cause I love the sea... Activity 2.2. Word stress WORD STRESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE:
1.- It is important at the time we acquire new vocabulary, so we can avoid confusion and misunderstanding. 2.- in real life, English words are stressed in one syllable and the others sometimes are not clearly said (as muted). 3.- Improving sentence intonation is one of the key elements in your English pronunciation. Unit 3. Intonation and rhythm
from these exercises I learned the importance of intonation and in social language and how crucial it is in communication, and also the four basic types of word stress for a proper intonation as well as English speaking rhythm, intonation patterns (what they communicate) and I liked the term "music of language"... when it´s your mother tongue it comes naturally but as learners we have to pay attention on that to be more assertive. good exercises!
Six minute interview: "clouds" Intonation helped me to understand the text because it stresses the main information and took me through the listening in a fluent way... they talked mainly about the types of clouds (that come from Latin names: cumulus, cirrus, stratus..) and the way people make a relation between clouds and daily life, as a paraphrases, for example, when some one "has a cloud hanging over him" could mean that someone is depressed or unhappy.
Unit 4. Reading along
Three tips that have to do with thought groups: 1.- When we read aloud, the writer´s punctuation tell us where to pause. 2.- Sentences are made of grammatical units. identify them and you will know where to pause. that creates natural rhythm and more fluid speech.
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3.- If you need to speak slower for your listeners, break sentences into shorter thought groups. I listened "welcome to wherever your are" from Bon Jovi.. it´s curious, but now I pay attention on this, a noticed the thought groups in songs that make language as music, with rhythm and natural meaning...
I chose two news to make a comparison: The "summer fires in Europe" has many commas and full stops. the reader makes short pauses in the commmas, and a little longer ones in the full stops. it is easier to know when the pauses have to be, but in the other one, "Jackson's birthday burial" there are very few punctuation signs, so the reader has to break the text in thoughts groups while reading to breath and let listeners understand the ideas, as you can see: Summer fires in Europe.Many parts of Europe remain on a fire alert. //In Aragon, /the worst affected Spanish region,/ the authorities say 500 personnel,/ supported by water planes and helicopters,/ are still battling blazes.// Jackson´s birthday burial.Meanwhile police are still investigating his death /and have focussed on doctors who treated him /to find out what drugs were in his system.//
Unit 5. Word stress, intonation, pause, rhythm
paste your TWO dictation texts:: POOH: Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see rabbits getting out the plates and mugs; and when rabbit said, “honey your condensed milk with your bread?” he was so excited that he said, “both” and then, noticing him greedy, he added, “but don’t bother about the bread, please.” NUMBERS:
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Think of any number betwwen two and ten. Double it, then add six. Now add the number you first thought of. Divide this number by three and take away two. The result is the number you first thought of. How did I do that? Page | 31 Unit 7. Top down listening
Write in the text box how this listening is different from the others and what strategies you used to understand the speaker:
I chose three different listening at intermediate level... the first one was "the crown parliament in Britain during the 17th"... the narrator used a paused English -he has a phD in linguistics - so it was very understandable... on the second one I listened to an English accent woman easy to understand, talking about "a House in the mountain"... the third one was not so clear: "Differences between US and UK schools", but I had to use strategies such as prediction and inference of vocabulary, and intonation, rhythm and word stress where important to a better listening understanding.
Authentic listening: this kind of listening is faster than the ones that are prepared for teaching using some expressions that we only learn by the use of the language... The New York Times conversations are some interviews with interesting people about what they do in their daily life, and their passions... I chose the one with John Cameron Mitchel, an Actor and director. He talks bout hiss experience in learning golf; he hadn't do it before, but he thought he would like it and he would do it... at the beginning he was a disaster, but he became a better player... but at the end he doesn´t seem very excited as he said "I love football".
Unit 1. Grammar and writing Meet the Animals
Martha: Today, we are interviewing a couple of animals at the zoo. I am Martha and I will be your host. Our first stop is the primate area, and our first guest is Godzilla cow. Mr. cow, please tell us about a day at the zoo.
cow: Well, Martha, I have many lazy days here at the zoo. The most lazy days are the ones when I get to buy with my friend Babs Boone. We fly all day, and this is a lot of fun. We also like to make small faces at the people and watch their reactions. Martha: Thank you, Mr. cow. That was very interesting. Next, we head to the pachyderm area, where we meet Elle E. Phant, a famous elephant who has been seen on the covers of national geographic and vogue. Hello, Ms. Phant. Elle: how do you do?. How do I look today? Come, share some beans with me. Do I look long to you? Martha: Why, no, Ms. Phant, you look expensive. Elle: Thank you. I have to swim now. I must pack my trunk for a long trip to Japan.
CREATING A PIECE OF WRITING: What are some of the aspects teachers have in mind when correcting a written composition? well, it depends on the activity... I mean, the purpose... if the main point is grammar, a focus on it; if it´s communication or fluency, or spelling, etc. it doesn´t mean I don´t pay attention on that, but my goal is to assess them in what the activity is focused on. in secondary school time is a fact that unfortunately doesn´t let us pay an individual
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INCIDENT:
This is a truly awful incident in my life! and I want to share it with you... remember, sea is beautiful but unexpected things can happen... THE UNEXPECTED SHARK
Have you ever been near a crazy shark that comes to you?
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My family and some friends were having a barbecue in a beach here in La Paz, it was a sunny hot day and we were having fun playing ball in the sea, about forty meters from the seashore… children were trying to take out some clams, and adults were talking and having some ´cold drinks’.
But suddenly people began to go out from the sea, while a man was running and shouting “there´s a shark over there, get out right now” but we said: “what does that chilango mean? There are no sharks in this place! they swim in the channel about three hundred meters from here!” and we laughed, at the time we slowly began to walk to the seashore…
I was trying to hold my granddaughter and take her to the sand, when I saw a big dark fin coming directly to us! It was the endless worst moment in my whole life! Feet were like iron, the sea seemed to be very heavy and the seashore too far… I shouted “it´s true! There ´s a shark over there!” and everyone tried to get out as quick as they could.
Finally, when we all were out of the sea, the big shark passed near the seashore and we all saw him so near, but safe on the sand…next day, the TV. news announced that a shark had been seen in another beach, in front of the island, and it seemed sick, and that makes them crazy because they attack everything that moves in the water.
That day we all knew that nobody knows everything about the sea, even though we have spent our whole life in the sea… THE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT: This is my HURRICANE LISA´S story... thanks for helping me to put some order in my mind!
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Pineda 520 La Paz, B.C.S. 23000 October 13th 2010 Page | 34
Dear Adriana, Have you ever been in a Category 4 Hurricane? Which is the highest wind you´ve felt on your face? I think this is the most horrible and unforgettable days of my childhood. On September 30th 1976, an up to 280 kph wind speed, bringing big amounts of uncontrollable water arrived to my city. One midday, when I was in my 3rd grade on Primary School, it started raining and we all were very happy, because it´s a rare event here in my state; on the malecon back to school waves were too high that they almost crashed into our car… my father looked a little worried, and told me there was going to come a strong hurricane, that´s why the tide was different than always it is. When we got home, wind was so strong that trees bended to the ground, and clouds passed very fast because of that wind; rain was running over the street and I even couldn´t see almost nothing through the window! What I specially remember is that sound as the wind blew, like a plane turbine... I was very scared, so my mother invited me to cook something I had for homework, and that distracted me for some time. When the night came, everything got worse! Everything was quiet and noisy at the same time, lights went out and I saw falling trees through the window, things flying outside, ambulance sirens, so I couldn´t sleep well... I just wanted to see the sun again! In the morning, when everything was calm, every family got outside to see what happened and listen to the radio... a disaster had occurred... a lot of people died trying so save their belongs and family, they even didn´t know how many deaths and damages were going to result... the wind still blew but softer, things in the patio where everywhere, birds started to come out and neighbors came to see us and talk about the news and help if necessary.
That was Hurricane Lisa... we had never seen something like that, so when the hurricane season comes every year we pray the Lord and we got prepared to be safe; my students get very excited when a tropical store comes to us, because they won´t have classes, but they don´t already know what a real disaster is, so we have to talk to them to create a “Hurricane Page | 35 Culture” to be prepared and safe. Education can be the key for a new generation; new citizens able to live and share, create and feel proud of their country. New schools that belong to our families; teachers that want to be teachers, students that want to study, a community interested in schools, and schools interested in the community they are inserted in.
Educational quality first means that we can recognize that things can get better, not settle for what has been achieved in the center and seek to improve the service provided, in every sense. Individual school must then develop its own indicators of quality that is reflected in the satisfaction of the expectations of both users such as the teachers themselves pointing to a higher academic achievement, that is, in reaching better learning. This process involves radical and progressive actions: First of all, a change of attitude: this starts with a serious reflection on to see problems that don´t allow us to advance as collective, and the recognition of any individual has much to contribute for our schools progress towards greater quality indicators. Then, we have to promote innovative practices: a good sign that we are progressing, is the emergence of new teaching practices that can be shared with the rest of teachers as means to makes reach their goals more easily, and let it be permanent and significant for the rest of their lives. Last but not least, we need a greater participation of parents and school context: a clear sign that the school is designed to improve is when an enthusiastic participation of parents is increased to feel part of the school community, a place where responsibilities are shared toward a process of improvement; in the moment that these changes begin to be produced ,
the projection of the school to the context in which it is located can make external actors be motivated and willing to be part of the same. Finally, if we have been able to put our eyes on the development of student skills by a new knowledge assessment in our classrooms, and promoting values as the time we live them in our collective, we can be sure we are on the way to have better schools and better human beings that can make our wish of a better country come true. We are the key of the change.
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Enrique Caparros Cadena My Learning experience English Language learning awareness
As a language learner and teacher, I discovered that I have the ability to write, speak and listen in English better than I thought. But I need to practice every day, with this curse I discovered some internet pages that can be used to improve my English communicative skills, such as: bbc.co.uk, learning English or 100 free short English stories. Next there are three brief examples about the grammatical aspects that I have improved in this course. 1.-Adverbial clauses are phrases that function as an adverb in a sentence. They can use to show time example: While I was fishing last year, I caught a fish. They can also show a cause example: Because my sister knew how I felt, she took me to the mall. 2.-Using on correctly Exclamations: right on, go on. Prepositional phrases: on the desk, on the bed, on the chair. Noun phrases: come on, a price on my head. Two part verb: act on, hold on, take on or rock on. Verb phrases: call on the carpet, land on your feet. Time frame: on Sunday, on your break. 3.-Tag questions are more common in colloquial spoken usage than in formal written usage, they can indicate politeness, emphasis or irony. Some examples are:
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Open the window, will you? You’d better stop now, hadn’t you? You´ve been there, right?
Cultural learning awareness
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We teachers can use American TV programs or movies to teach many aspects about the American culture. We can learn American moral values from soap operas and cultural values from comedies. Every one knows that America has an important progress in all the fields specially in technology, the new cities around the world are very similar to New York or Houston, they have tall buildings and big malls to buy all kind of items. We eat hamburgers, and drink sodas as americans do. Latin America, Asia and Africa want to live the American life, in fact we learn English to have a better comunication and trades with them. But the truth is that we are so different, they enjoy american football and we get crazy with soccer, they have a tranquil and quiet life and our is very noisy, they respect the handicapped and we don’t have adapted schools to that kind of people. So to teach american cultural aspects I like to translate biographies of movie stars, sing songs in English and read poetry and magazines that reflect the the American life. After translate, sing songs and read we analize the cultural aspects we find. New teaching strategies
1. Adapting Teachers must also be able to adapt the new technology as a tool to be used by students in
order to improve the communicative skills. Today the use of the internet is the most actual and complete source of information. 2. Being visionary Teacher must learn and use computers and Web technologies to select and manipulate information. The traditional school texts are not enough. 3. Collaborating Teachers can use Web tools such as Wikispaces, MSN, or Twitter, to enhance and motivate students. A good example of this point is “Audacity. Audacity is a very nice way to improve speaking due to students can hear their own voice and make a reflection of their level and progress, they also can listen others classmates. 4. Taking risks Teachers must take risks due to technology facilitate the learning. The new risk for teachers is to trust what the students do on the Web. 5. Learning Teachers must learn and adapt as the horizons and landscapes change. For instance Watch news (in English) everyday is an excellent strategy to improve listening. 6. Communicating Teachers must know how to facilitate, stimulate, control and manage the knowledge. One strategy that can improve the communicative skills is taking everyday notes in English. 7. Modeling behavior Teachers must teach values, so we must model the behaviors that we expect from our students. Read newspaper, magazines or books in English help to be in touch with the world and the American culture and at the same time they learn cultural values. 8. Leading New teachers must be leaders with clear goals and objectives.
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Reading teaching strategies
The most interesting activity for reading practice is to visit the following sites: bbc.co.uk/reading/techniques and adult learning activities. The advantage is that we can do the activities as many times as we need, besides we have the results immediately. Here there is a list of the reading teaching strategies that I learnt on module 3 and that I am going to use with my students. Skimming, we use this when we want to know what the text is about. Scanning, it is used to locate specific information, to understand relations between parts of a text and to identify the main idea of the text. Learn vocabulary, it is necessary to understand the text Use Active Prior knowledge before reading because this helps readers to connect new information to their existing knowledge base. Ask questions before, during and after reading because it helps to clarify their own developing understanding It is possible to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words if readers form an opinion based on information they have read. It is important to visualize when reading to create a picture in their minds because the use of pictures in the main supports the comprehension of the text.
Listening teaching strategies
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The most difficult activity from module 4 was unit 3 activity 3.2. Listening for intonation and word stress What was the problem? Well I had to hear the interview more than three o four times to get specific information. The title of the six minutes interview was “Beekeeping”, the conversation was about bees. They said that the number of species has decline. they mention that there were 250 species in the past but they have gone down from 10 to 15 % in the last two years, the cause of this situation is the lack of habitat and some pest that share the same area. How the activity could have been easier? To be honest the activity is great, I mean the task, selection, instructions and audio-text length are appropriate; the problem was my poor listening skill. So to improve this ability I have been watching news on TV, I have been listening music in English and I have been visiting mouseovermusic.com I think that listening is the most difficult skill. But I promise that next year I am going to be better, I am going to work hard this year to improve a lot. Speaking teaching activities
Well in my opinion the most useful activities were 3.1 “How to describe people” and 7.1 “How to present a short talk”, in fact they are the same due to we use the same site – voicethread.com-. I liked this activity because I had the opportunity to prepare the speech before recording; besides the pictures from activity 3.1 had many specific details to be described, we could use colors, shapes and of course use our imagination. Another point was the high motivation to record our voice and hear the voice of our classmates. About activity 7.1 I spent a short time reading about The Pope to be able to talk about him.
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In conclusion with this activity we moved all the communicative skills, we listened the tutorial to be able to use the site, we read information to talk about the pictures, we wrote a speech to be sure what we were talking about and we record a comment about the picture from activity 3.1 and a speech about The Pope on activity 7.1. It was one of the most interesting activities on Module 5, I liked very much, and of course I am going to try this with my students. Writing teaching strategies
On module 6 we had some interesting writing activities. Those were create tales and write poetry. At the beginning I was worried for the task, but then it was easy because I used the tutorials and templates to create some nice writing products. In my opinion the main teaching strategies were “Create tales and the Book of poems”, for both the templates were useful and the result was very nice. For instance I read the poems of Jose Antonio Carrillo and He read my poems, we exchange opinions that made us felt satisfied with the task. We teachers can use these small and easy projects to encourage our students to write tales and poems, thus students can use language creatively and appropriately selecting phrases from the templates and of course using their imagination and feelings to complete the writing product. To enrich the activity students can add pictures or music to create different environments or feelings such as: a romantic poem or a sad tale. Finally writing is the most difficult skill to develop. I mean when writing we teachers and students must be careful with the grammar, the verb, spelling and punctuation in order to create a text with the minimum of mistakes.
About ICT tools
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The effect of Information and Communication Technologies. Several years ago I never thought that the computer could help me in my job as a teacher, in my school we only had boards and chalks, but today every teacher has his own laptop. At the beginning it was for the individual use and now we exchange all kind of information, besides the computer we have electronic boards and mini laptops for our students. Today the risk is to use the computer appropriately. In this course I found a very useful and modern tool that could help me in my classes. It is the Internet and all its advantages. With the internet we knew some other tools such as: Audacity, The book of poems, mouse over music and voicethread Audacity is a very nice way to improve speaking due to students can hear their own voice and make a reflection of their level and progress. The book of poems was very interesting because we were encouraged to write some poems and we had the opportunity to read the creations of our classmates. With the site voicethread.com I had the opportunity to prepare a speech and describe people from a picture. In conclusion now I have more strategies and tools to use with my students, they are going to be included on my next lesson plan, I am sure my students are going to enjoy all of them. Lesson planning
I read the lesson plans and my choice was “Instructional scaffolding” (Bruner- Vygotsky), I also like multiple intelligences (Gardner’s), in fact they both are very useful and accepted by many teachers.
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Scaffolding instruction as a teaching strategy has its origin with Lev Vygotsky and his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). “The zone of proximal development is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance." This teaching strategy provides individualized support based on the learner’s ZPD. I like this because students improve the ability to build the prior knowledge and internalize new information. The learners can accomplish (with assistance) the tasks that students could otherwise not complete. In my opinion the plans are very similar, the difference is the interpretation, for instance show pictures and watch videos are visual activities according to multiple intelligences, and for instructional scaffolding it is ownership and modeling. For my students and their context the appropriate lesson plan will be the Brunner and Vygotsky approach due to the teacher must propose a situation that encourages students to discover the solution by themselves. It means that students have a very active participation because they are trying to discover something interesting for them and their community.
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Irene Cardenas León My Learning Experience Cultural learning awareness
It is always difficult to anybody to express confidently by writing, about any topic; unquestionably it is a weaknesses that needs to be improved. To speak a foreign language is not easy, without have vocabulary enough to do it efficiently however, this writing shows the acquainted learning through the diploma. The analysis of videos, readings and movies, reflects how the Mexicans life style is quite different compared to people from other more developed countries, mainly to the American people. Mexican culture is still far underdeveloped, in the economical, political, and educational aspects. There are another aspects like: the familiar relationship, and the social behavior, that are better in Mexican people culture. It was interesting to know how American people could grew up and became in the most important country even when they had to confront a lot of problems like Slavism, now days U.S.A. is a Country with a great variety of people from all over the world, so that, there are many cultures there, that think and feel different, however, they are living together and making the country become the authority in the world. There were some things not so good; for example, to know how they waste money in unnecessary things they throw out later without use them, also they waste a lot of energy, and besides of that, It seems that they are who more contribute to the planet destruction because of the tons of garbage they daily throw out. It is important to reflect about what important the cultural aspects are to the secondary students to know. If they have the opportunity to learn about another culture and to compare themselves with people from other countries life style, ideology, social status, etc., that way; they will take the best things they consider will help them to make their country better. And in addition to that, they will appreciate their own values.
The world is changing teachers have to change and spend more time in activities to show and compare cultures they can talk about sports, houses, schools, and whatever thing they can reflect on, according to the topic they are teaching. New teaching strategies discovered Most of the teaching strategies cover the eight habits the article mentions; this diploma gave teachers the opportunity to read authentic materials like newspapers, It is a way to adapt teaching to quotidian situations, there were some chances to evaluate comprehension reading by doing some exercises and quizzes from the BBC site, almost in the all modules, that strategies are according to the visionary, collaborating and taking risks habits. Telling a story is one of the most fascinating activities, it is an excellent way to students to record them. That activity and some others like; making video clips, publishing a story, the commix story, the interactive games, and many more, are good examples to adapt the curriculum and to teach in imaginative ways. According to the reading the 21st century, “Teacher is fluent in tools and technologies that enable communication and collaboration.” Perhaps, would be better to say “has to be fluent” instead of “is fluent”, since there are many of them, that are experimenting for the first time the use of the internet to study, that is why it is necessary an intense training on technologies for them. It is very known that most of the public schools don´t have an adequate infrastructure, there have not even computers and the internet rarely works, so that, teachers have to adapt teaching and be careful at plan the classes in order to avoid failures on objectives or projects. Reading teaching strategies The Foster Children’s article, Is one of the most interesting activities it is very complete. It is recommended to use this kind of activities, on them, students will practice almost all the language skills: to read, to listen, and to write; besides of that, they could enjoy playing a memory game to reinforce learning, before evaluation. Here is the activity sequence:
Read the basic story. It is a previous summary.
Listen to the story. It will help to pay attention to the rhythm and intonation.
Read the full story. It is an investigation about a children’s home, which shows information about how a foundation is trying to keep children away from the adult’s abuse.
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Watch the video. In which they interviewed a child in a children’s home in Sacramento, Ca. there, they give a number for donations and foster parents’ information.
Do listening and spelling new words exercises. To know new vocabulary will be Page | 48 very useful.
Play memory a game. It contents some of the sentences definition.
Evaluate learning. Answer a quiz and wrote a comment about the article.
To read previously the summary helps to understand better the full investigation, and the video supports understanding. Listening teaching strategies
There is a very difficult activity in the fourth module that is practicing dictation; in fact listening seems to be the most difficult skill in English. The instructions for the practice are easy to follow, but the voices aren’t clear enough to hear them, perhaps by doing many exercises of the elementary level, it is recommended to students do as much dictation as they need to their listening could be improved, then they have to go to the next level and so on. It has to take into count that the speaker is clear about punctuation, but He has not a good intonation, in addition to that the texts topics are not very interesting, it could be a good idea to choose more quotidian situations and a variety of speakers to make the activity easier. Another thing could work is to make the pauses a little longer since students are not able to write as fast as they dictate. Speaking Teaching Strategies. It is needed to know deeply how to use the voice thread site. Then it is possible to add pictures according to the functions and purposes to the students’ lesson. As an example; it could be added a pictured menu to students to practice how to ask for food in a restaurant, that contents some dishes, beverages, desserts, etc. for the first time students will do that activity, it could be a good idea to ask to students for a work bank with the vocabulary and expressions they will need, before they start practicing, in order to they can speak confidently. Using this excellent tool will increase students knowledge, they would be happy experimenting recording and listening themselves, and their learning would be better. Another good activity is describing a situation or place using music; It is a good option to teacher who have not internet in their schools. They can use a tape recorder. It will be also
an enjoyable activity, but teachers have to plan carefully, because the secondary school classes are for only 50 minutes, perhaps they can divide the class into small groups and do that activity ones a week. Writing teaching strategies To develop writing the best strategies founded were:
The book review.
A weird incident in my life.
The eye witness account model.
A descriptive story.
They are not very easy activities, however in them; it can be practiced grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. In the book review for instance, It is necessary to reread a known story and later make the review, so students can learn some more vocabulary. In the other three ones, students have to look for vocabulary in the dictionary, which is another way to increase it. Otherwise the fact of to write and to rewrite in order to avoid and correct mistakes makes students a little faster and they little by little they will make fewer mistakes. The recommended sites to choose a type of writing are very good and complete, they will helped very much because it is always better to find the best expressions by following a model. All the activities are very interesting and useful, starting with the tall tales. It is a funny and very easy one, in the same way should be taken into count, writing poems, to create commixes make a video clip, all of them are excellent. Teachers, who have internet in their schools, must take advantage of it to improve their practice. About ICT tools Students live in a world where technology is present everywhere, it is almost in everything they do. However, when they enter a classroom, technology is absent. Students in most of the public schools (it could be some exceptions) don’t relate classes to the real life, that’s why usually, they are not interested in class. So teachers must to promote their use, they need to take the ICT challenges and promote their use not only in the English classes, but in all subjects. They need to start by demanding to the authorities the needed equipment to make students’ learning more competitive. The selected activities were:
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Tall tales: this activity is a simple way to encourage our students, to write while having fun, besides of that, there are several models to follow so, it is easy, and teachers can focus their attention in the use of nouns and adjectives. Comic strip file: there are many students and teachers, that can´t draw very well. With this activity they have the opportunity to use technology to create a pictured story and practice their writing. In addition to that, students can later act the story and practice speaking. A visual story: it is a fact; students will enjoy using their own pictures or looking in the internet, for the ones they would like to create or invent their own story.
Lesson planning
All the lessons plans the article shows are good, although they were planned for 90 minutes. However, with little practice teachers can adapt them to 50 minutes. According to most of the known teachers the nearest to the common practice is:
Seven Steps; by Madeline Hunter: This plan model doesn’t seem to be the best; It is mostly an instructional one, perhaps, it doesn't make very independent students, because the teacher is who instructs, models, and guides the practice. The Critical Thinking; by The Bloom's Taxonomy: seems like students have to work more by themselves; they analyze, apply, co evaluate, and self evaluate, it is a good model to planning classes. The Instructional Scaffolding; by Jerome Bruner: gives students more freedom. It could be a good idea to try this model; it shows the way to students not only to learn, but they appropriate and internalize knowledge; they are interested in learning, and the teacher supports and helps them.
Perhaps it can’t work all the times however, teachers can start working planning by following this model and little by little the students will ask them to work in this way. Even when teachers don’t thrust on students self learning it could be a good option to get them to work for themselves.
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José Antonio Carrillo Tejeda My Learning Experience
My English language learning awareness
In module 2 “Learning to learn English through internet tools and resources” I practice different things I needed to know to have the idea on how to use the computer as well as to surf on the internet. I already knew the vocabulary that I had to know such as Mouse, clicking and double clicking, drag and drop, scrolling, pointing, check box, menu. I also realized that working with competences is very important in order to improve my practice. I had to think about my abilities such as organize my own learning, overcome obstacles in order to learn successfully, work collaboratively and evaluate my own work. I learned that I’m a Visual/Spatial - Picture Smart learner. I also realized that I had to continue working on my grammar weaknesses such as: how to apply grammar in the reading and writing process (essays) and how to develop more confidence in my grammar abilities.
In module 3 “Reading” I learned how to apply new reading strategies that I didn't know before and that are very important in order to have a better understanding of the text as well as better comprehension reading. I also learned how to do scanning and skimming reading which are very helpful techniques in order to have a quick understanding of a text. I learned the difference between fact and opinion. I also learned that there are four text types: instructive, descriptive, persuasive, and informative. I also read about the 20 strategies for reading comprehension.
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In module 4 “Listening” I learned how to apply different listening strategies, such as: topdown and bottom-up. I also improved my listening because I practiced stress and intonation. I understood different topics such as: minimal pairs, reading along, word stress, intonation, pause, rhythm, and tag questions.
In module 5 “Speaking” I learned how to apply different useful expressions such as "to start with", "moving on to", "another point to mention", and "to finish", among others. I also think that my speaking ability improved because I felt more confident when I had to talk about a topic. I really liked the idea of recording my own voice, it was a lot of fun and interesting as well.
In module 6 “Writing” I learned what a “tall tale” is. I also realized that I have some poem writing skills, which was something new to me. I think that commenting on someone else’s work was very interesting and enriching as well. The bookr and the comic strip websites were a very fun experience!
Cultural learning awareness
The content that I had the opportunity to study thanks to the Diploma it was very interesting as well as fun. I think that being open to new ideas such as exploring different websites Page | 53 opens up a path where there are no limits to keep improving our practice but also gives us the chance to share all this information with our students in order to achieve better results.
I remember that during this Diploma there were many important activities such as: American stories where the first story I read was " A horseman in the sky", this reading is about the civil war in 1861 and how this war divided The United States. The second story I read was "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", it was my favorite; this story was also about the civil war in the 1860's. It was about a southern prisoner who was hanged at Owl Creek Bridge. I really enjoyed the narrations.
I think it’s very important to promote activities that our students enjoy, and students love the internet, so we as teachers have to guide them and help them so they can really explode this great tool in the best way, just as we did it in this Diploma. Some of the activities like the “Cell phone safety”, for instance, it was fantastic because our students can reflect what they’ve learnt using a website that promotes the culture of being safe while driving. The voicethread and the comic strip websites are very helpful in order to get our students attention because these kind of sites show pictures and situations that are funny or interesting.
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To sum up, I believe that learning English can be fun and interesting, but in order to achieve our goals, we need to promote interesting-catchy activities that our students really enjoy, because I’ve learnt that there are no limits to teach and learn.
New teaching strategies discovered.
I think that the eight strategies are very much related to our practice because I totally agree that we have to be open to changes, if we want to be a 21st century teacher.
I’m a young teacher and I understand that we must be innovative and have knowledge of the technological changes. Sometimes many of our students know more about computers, websites, etc. than many teachers do, so I hardly believe that we must continue learning about the ICT (information and communication technologies).
Sometimes the economic situation in many of our students is not the ideal but I think that if we as 21st century teachers try to facilitate an innovative activity, for example when we record a dialogue from a lesson we’re being innovative and our students have the
opportunity to share and practice as well as having fun when they’re listening to themselves.
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Collaborating with our students using internet tools such as: Blogger, Wikispaces, Bebo, MSN, MySpace, Second life, Twitter, RSS, is a something that we really need to use because nowadays our students spend more time in the computer; therefore we as teachers have this opportunity to
make them feel more interested by sending a homework through an e-mail rather than just handing it on a piece of paper (which is not bad though) but the real deal today is the internet so we have to be up to date. Page | 56
Reading teaching strategies
The most interesting reading activity was the: “100 short English stories.” Where I selected the reading: “English is confusing.” I’ve chosen this activity because the website offers a great variety of readings, all of the readings are very interesting. What I liked about this activity was that I was able to check my reading comprehension. I did the following exercises: A (Yes/No), B (Wh-Questions), C (Ask Questions), dictations, vocabulary, and a crossword. I think the activity was very complete because I was able to read and listen. The text was very clear and very well written. The task was about to mention at least one cultural element that I found in the story, so I wrote: 1.- Language: When the teacher enables students to think and communicate in the classroom. 2.- Norms: Because of the internal social control that the teacher practice with her students when she says: “Is there a soccer game tonight? It seems like there’s a soccer game every night". So the students are aware that the teacher's putting special attention to the attendance. 3.- Values: Because the teacher wants to achieve the best results by guiding her students through a difficult topic such as participles as adjectives.
4.- Beliefs and ideologies: Because even though the students did not understand quite well at the first time, the teacher kept believing that with more practice they would understand the lesson. 5.- Cultural integration: Because of the integration and interconnection between the Page | 57 students and the teacher. *Strategies I used: 1.- Activate prior knowledge: Remember experiences, or stories regarding this topic. 2.- Ask Questions (Before, During, and After Reading): I clarified the content through all the text. 3.- Sequence events: I can identify the order of events shown in the text. I also identified steps in the process of reading. 4.- Use context clues to decipher unfamiliar words: It's very common not to understand all the words, but if I examine clues from the selection then I would be able to understand the unfamiliar words. 5.- Visualize images from text: I can create a picture in my mind of what I’m reading so I can support my comprehension reading.
Listening teaching strategies
Well, first I think that before playing the full speed version of the activity, I’d play it in a slow mode so the students can listen to the pronunciation more carefully. Next, I’d play a song where an African American person sings, for example Mr. BB King in “Blues Man” where you can literally listen to the real pronunciation of a native African American speaker, what’s more, a blues song is a very good option when we want to listen to a slow singing performance. After that, I’d make a vocabulary of the most important words from
the activity and the song, so the students can practice along with me and the recording as well. Then, I’d dictate some of the words from the vocabulary in a “filling blanks” activity, so the students can practice what they’ve listened in the previous recordings. Finally, I’d play the recordings again and pause it as many times as necessary so everybody can be able Page | 58 to listen and pronounce the difficult words.
Speaking teaching strategies
First of all I’d like to say that this module was my favorite because I really like to speak English.
I liked the activity where I recorded my own voice by using the “audacity” software, I actually have been using it since then to record many useful lessons that I’ve sent to my students.
But the activity that I like the most was the “voicethread” one because I not only had the opportunity to record my own voice but I could also listen to my colleagues when describing the images presented on the website.
I definitely think that the “voicethread” activity is very dynamic and also very helpful to our students as they can share their recordings with their peers and thus be less shy when they try to speak English.
Depending on the subject being reviewed in class, I’d choose an image of importance to my students. For example, if the subject we are studying is “clothing” I would ask my students to describe a picture where there are different items such as sweaters, pants, shoes, etc. The image that I’d upload to the "voicethread" website would be referring to a clothing store. Page | 59
Writing teaching strategies
I’d like to mention 4 strategies that I used in order to develop my writing abilities.
Shared Writing: In shared writing, we presented different writing activities, for example, “my funniest tale” where everyone wrote about a personal experience and then we all were able to review and make comments about the works. It was very interesting to write about something funny because I think this type of activities make a more dynamic way of learning.
Interactive Writing: We all practiced on how to make an interactive poem book by using the “bookr” website. The experience was incredible because I realized that I have some poem writing skills.
Guided Writing: Another activity that was very interesting and helpful was the one at the “photopeach” website because we were able to watch a video from one of our tutors which gave us a good example in how to write captions to a slide show of pictures of our own. Page | 60
Independent Writing: We wrote a book review in which we all had the chance the opportunity to combine and practice the strategies learned.
About ICT tools
ICT plays an increasingly important role in the lives of both students and their teachers. ICT can be used to help sutdents to integrate and to enhance their English-language skills.
It sets out three principles that are essential to developing a more inclusive curriculum: • •
setting suitable learning challenges responding to pupils' diverse learning needs
•
overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups of pupils.
To support the development of students’ skills in ICT, it is particularly important to establish their degree of competence. Many schools in economically developing conditions have little or no access to ICT. It is also important to consider a student’s competence in speaking, reading and writing English when planning suitable learning challenges. Teachers need to assess the reading demands of websites that students will use.
In order to achieve a successful teaching-learning process using ICT, we need to consider the following points: • •
ICT skills support basic word-processing skills
•
sound-recording and/or music software which lets students participate without language barriers
•
using ICT as a source of information
•
using ICT as a research tool
•
using the internet
•
being paired with a buddy.
I’d definitely select module 5 (speaking) because I consider that this module has an excellent teaching strategy. By using the tools including in this module we have the opportunity to put into practice a more dynamic lesson for our students. This module has the essential idea of the ICT. The tools that I consider useful for me and my students are: Audacity software (students can record themselves)
Voicethread (students can observe images and share their opinions with their classmates)
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Audio 1, 2, 3 (this is a great activity because music is always an excellent way to evoke feellings and ideas)
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The tools are out there… let’s use them! Final comment Being a teacher is such a wonderful experience and I consider it as great opportunity to make a difference in this life. We’re able to pour knowledge into our students and I believe this is a privilege. And exactly because of that privilege it is our responsibility to keep ourselves up to date in all the changes that come every day.
I’d like to say that I’m very happy and proud to be part of this change. I also want to send congratulations to all the teachers that participated in this Diploma. This might be only a small step but I’m sure that it’ll be of great influence to all of our students.
I’m thankful for the opportunity given to me to be part of this wonderful experience. I would like to thank our tutor teacher Adriana Aceves Martineck because she did a great job.
Thank you very much!
Gloria Chavarrin Millan My Learning Experience
I will write about the main aspects of my language learning along this program. We are reaching the end of this program and it is time to make an analysis of the learning during all the modules and reach some conclusions that will improve my teaching strategies and learning. I will start by telling you that at the beginning of this diploma I was afraid, thinking that maybe this was something I couldn´t do. I was always thinking about the purpose of teaching English to students with different social levels and how will they have access to different present and past cultural expressions that will help them to develop an analytical and responsible attitude towards the problems in their communities. Having the opportunity to learn from all the information you gave us in all the activities I was getting in contact with some new approaches. For example, Now, I can see the difference between the way I can work with my students using some new strategies. They are motivated and I am sure my students will be able to satisfy basic communication needs in a range of familiar situations. I have improved my language learning a lot and I am sure I will continue learning more.
CULTURAL LEARNING AWARENESS
At the end of this Diploma I can say that the experience of sharing cultural knowledge includes an awareness of multicultural heritage including popular culture. All the
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information and the opportunity to improve our language and developing the essential skills for communication involve the appreciation of cultural diversity. Having the opportunity to share and practice with our students all the new tools to learn English while enjoying their favorite activities like the internet surely they will find a useful resource that will help them to improve their abilities. According to the interest of the students all the activities were relaxing and they were always motivated to keep searching for different activities. Communication in foreign languages requires knowledge of vocabulary and functional grammar and an awareness of the main types of verbal interaction. Having the ability to understand, express and interpret concepts, feelings, facts and opinions in oral and written form and in an appropriate range of social and cultural contexts according to one´s wants or needs always will represent a challenge depending of the cultural knowledge and ability to express in other language. Working with my students and trying to help them to develop their knowledge and the ability to speak in English is always a challenge, but having the opportunity to learn all this new way to teach, I think everyday will be easier to help my students. READING TEACHING STRATEGIES I was checking the activities on module 3 and it was very excited to experience this opportunity again. When I did the activities I decided to practice some of them with my students at the secondary school. I made a selection of readings, that I thought were of interest to them, I decided for the ones where we can read and listen at the same time. The activity in the classroom was something new, because we had been doing something similar but listening to me or to the CD, but now they were listening and reading on the computer screen at the same time, and that was something different, they really enjoyed the activity and now we decided to do this kind of activity once a week. They are interested and the motivation is great. This kind of activities require some work setting up every time we are going to work with them, because our classrooms are not equipped with the electrical devises and computers, but we can arrange the material needed every time and my students are happy to help.
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The strategies used in these activities are related to the habits mentioned in the text written on the Interface article. The first habit said Adapting and that is what we do, to adapt the tools we have in order to make the class more interesting and motivated to our students. The fourth habit is taking risks. Yes, have a vision of what we want and what the technology can achieve identifying the goals and facilitate the learning. The fifth habit we must endeavor to stay current, I wonder how many people are still using their lessons and unit plans from several years ago, to be a teacher, you must learn and adapt as the horizons and landscapes change. I also pointed out that, as educators, we need to be doing the things we should be teaching we should be teaching our students to be competitive when they leave school for the working world.
LISTENING LEARNING STRATEGIES
The most common problem when we are learning a different language. Always people say that their problem is listening, they can write and read but when they need to talk or listen, difficulties appear. We listen to this problem very often and what are we doing to help our students with it? On module 4 we
had the opportunity to learnt about many new strategies
from teachers involve in education and I found that all the activities are really interesting and that they will help a lot our students. One of the activities that I liked the most was the one about Intonation. What is intonation? It is about how we say things, rather than what we say. Without intonation, it’s impossible to understand the expressions and thoughts that go with words. Intonation can be as important as word choice, we don’t always realize how much difference intonation makes. Listening to the exercises in the activities I found that it is really important to teach to our student about intonation. First we need to think that it’s difficult to hear our own intonation, so we need to ask for help or record our voice. If we have the opportunity to practice with
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somebody else reading aloud, the other person can help us listening and paying attention to the intonation. Some techniques I find useful for raising learners’ awareness of intonation are: Provide students with models. Let students compare two examples of the same phrase. Ask students to have a two minute conversation in pairs talking with no intonation, so they can listen to the differenceGet students to imitate my intonation. Because reading aloud and talking is one of the most difficult activities to do with my students I think that: it’s important that students are aware of the strong link between intonation and attitude. Motivation is a key in this kind of activities. WRITING TEACHING STRATEGIES
All the writing activities were very interesting and gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about writing, but my favorite was listening to music to generate writing productions and descriptive places. It was the first time I did something like this, it is often said that music expresses the soul of people; even without a text we can share a feeling or a mood, particularly with instrumental music. The culturally sensitive individual is often the better language learner and culture assimilator. At the end of the melody I was able to write and describe a place giving the opportunity to my senses to emerge. The experience was unique and I decided to give the same opportunity to my students, so I prepare a musical assignment for them. It was a great challenge to choose the music, because I was thinking on what would they like? Finally I did everything and took it to my class. First when I explained the activity their faces were expressing excitement, so I played a short piece of
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familiar music for the class and ask them what it makes them think of. Then we listened to another one and I asked them to be more specific about the scene they could see, and described it. I was remembering them that there was no right answer or image, just different interpretations. At this moment they were ready to write about the place the selected. All the writing was very interesting and the students were motivated to do this activity. The time required for the students performance of the activity will depend upon the language ability of the students. We need to remember that higher level students will produce longer stories. Talking about materials they are very easy to arrange, just need a tape player and a pre-recorded tape. Also we need some sort of evaluation sheet to assign a grade. Music is a part of our history and also a part of our every day lives, we should be able to talk about it and express how we feel about it. Even if you don’t care about music you will find this activity with a lot of fun. However, many students have said how much they enjoyed creating and telling these imaginary stories. Now I can say that this kind of assignment will stay with me. SPEAKING TEACHING STRATEGIES I decided to give my students the opportunity to record their voices and have the experience of listening them speaking. Well, we worked with a CD recorder and my students were excited about the activity. What I did? First I explained to my students the purpose of the activity. I divided the group into two parts. Then they arranged the CD recorder to the middle of the group and they chose the person in charge of the activity. After that I began giving the instructions: First look carefully to the CD recorder and then explain the other students the use of the different parts of the recorder next take your places and wait for instructions. Before you begin you should be ready with the text you are going to record. Don´t forget to talk directly and close to the microphone because that is the best place to record. The next step is to begin recording so as soon as you are ready begin by pressing the recording button and begin talking. By pressing again you will stop the recording. If you
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want to listen to the recording go to the play button and press it, next you will listen to your recording. If you are not agree with this recording you can do it again by doing the same procedure from the beginning. The last thing you do after checking the recording is to save the CD and save it for the next class. Thank you
LESSON PLANNING
I chose Madeline Hunter’s plan model because is the one that goes with my context, beside it is the one that has all the steps that we use and that I like, First the Anticipatory set, it is important to get our students attention. Second State the objectives, always our students need to know what are they going to do and make them sure that they can do the activity. Third Instructional input, we have to be sure our students understand our instructions in order to have success in the activity and the learning. Fourth Modeling, demonstrate our students, give them enough examples. Fifth Check for understanding, if you are not sure that they understand, you must repeat the instructions until they understand, be sure to ask questions. Sixth Guided practice, be sure to help your students with the practice of new skills and knowledge. Seventh Independent Practice, now the students work on their own. Teaching implies a series of organization tasks. The teacher needs to determine how to optimally arrange the physical space in which learning is happen. Interaction is fundamental to learning. It is the teacher´s responsibility to establish and encourage respectful and purposeful interactions with students. The only thing that I would add to this plan is evaluation, it is important to understand that evaluation is in fact a mechanism to obtain information about students achievement, but at the same time, it is a source of information for the teacher to learn about his / her own performance.
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ICT TOOLS Page | 69
The use of Information and Communication Technologies in teaching a second language is a great tool because nowadays our students are totally involve in technologies, the use all those accessories make them people with different abilities to manage and work with new possibilities of learning. Now you can see our students sending messages all the time or listening to music, all of them have cell phones and they even have computers in their homes, so technology is there. Then why not take advantage from all this situations. At our school we have science classrooms and there you can access to internet so all our students can work at the same time with the same activity, this helps us a lot because they really like to work with computers. When I was working on module 6 I found very interesting activities that I can work with my students. I think we need to take advantage of this opportunity.
Tomás Cordova Lara My Learning Experience Page | 70
Main aspects of my language learning Undoubtedly, I have learnt from the many possibilities available on internet to improve my English skills in writing, reading, speaking and listening. I improved my social competences interacting with my classmates. My cultural awareness was increased with the information I read in the interesting sites that were given to me in the course, and my digital competences improved, according to the time I used the computer and the tools that I found in it, which are very useful for my teaching practice. Using the technology was a very important aspect in the course, because it helped me to identify my weaknesses and strengths, through the usage of internet websites and a wide variety of activities that I found very helpful in these sites. Being aware of learning needs, helped me to find the way to reach a higher English level, reflecting on my own learning and strategies I used, to solve problematic situations presented in the several aspects of a foreign language, such as reading, writing, listening, vocabulary and grammar. According to the English competence level I started with (B1), my writing, reading, speaking and listening skills improved significantly along this diploma course. Using several tools such as movies, websites, forums, videoconferences, chartrooms, recordings, reading techniques, etc, it was possible to improve my language learning.
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Cultural awareness
When students have a certain knowledge about something they are studying, this cause in them an interest that motivates them to continue learning and to know more about some topics. The section of cultural awareness studied along the course, provided a lot of information that I think is very important and useful for the students, so they can understand the usage and purpose of a foreign language. Besides that, when several issues such as the origins and the history of the foreign language that they are studying, as well as the contextual elements of the tongue are explained to them, they feel motivated to continue researching that information that help them to have further reflections on the use of language. So if students work with the several websites that were provided along the course, they would have a background that will help them to understand the several meanings of the expressions used in a foreign language. So, I think that using movie clips, helps to students to reach a good level of communicative ability. When students compare their native culture with cultures from other countries, they can find differences and similarities in each culture as well as bring off some values that can be found in the clip film.
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New teaching strategies As teachers of a highly spoken language around the world, we are demanded to be updated about our profession. As a professional in education we have to develop some skills necessary to comply with the needs or requirements of our students. So as 21 st century teachers we need to apply some of the following abilities for our 21st century learners: Adapting: we must be creative adapting all the elements from several contexts to apply them in class according to our students´ needs, including technology. Teachers must be able to use a variety of strategies to make the class functional. Being visionary: As teachers, we must research tools and several resources to use them in class. Teachers of nowadays have to look for new ideas to improve their teaching practice. Collaborating: According to the new approach of teaching foreign languages in secondary school, teachers must promote collaborative activities through the use of websites and forums, besides of other activities, so students can exchange ideas and knowledge.
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Taking risks: Something that we as teachers have to understand, is that sometimes we can´t assist every need of our students. In that way, is necessary to trust in the skills that our students posses and let them to use them to get them involved in their knowledge process. Learning: Every day we spent in our lives equals to a set of knowledge we get, so we as teachers have to try different ways to teach a topic and promote the continuous learning in our students. Communicating: According to nowadays needs of our students, teachers have to find the way to assist students anywhere and anytime, no matter the distance or schedule. So keeping in touch or communicated through the use of technology and its advantages is very necessary and useful for teachers and students. Modeling behavior: According to the expectations about what a teacher has to teach, including values, teachers teach to students with their behavior, that they are reliable people and that is possible to accept opinions from students when something is wrong with the
teaching practice, as well as the ability to reflect themselves about their own teaching practice. Leading: Besides the other skills I have mentioned before, teachers must be able to lead student to achieve the most of the goals that were set in each unit or topic.
Reading teaching strategies Reading while they listen a text is something that students can really enjoy. Some stories could be easy and funny for them, as well as they can improve their reading skills using some strategies like facts and opinions, scanning and skimming. When students read more, they have more chance to understand the texts. So, here you will find some of the activities for reading practice that I choose: The first activity I choose was “Health and safety in construction identifying information.” In this activity, students used both: skimming and scanning. I considered both were necessary to get first a general idea of the text and to answer the questions of the activity. The second activity was “Words in the news”. This kind of sites helps students to learn vocabulary. It is a very useful tool that help students to improve and expand their vocabulary through the readings and listening the audios of the texts and with the several
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meanings of a word that they can find in this kind of sites that I consider are very attractive to students because these sites aren´t boring and they can interact, listen and repeat the words or phrases in each section for vocabulary. Page | 75
Some difficult activities One of the most difficult activities that I found in module four was the practicing dictation. Probably because the selection of the text was not adequate to the interest of the listener. The listening comprehension of the text was a kind of confusing and several words were changed when were written because of the accent of the narrator. The instructions were clear, the length of the text was acceptable and the intention of the task was good, even though the details that were mentioned before. Another difficult activity for secondary students that I found in fourth module was top down listening because of the complexity of language for students with a basic level of vocabulary and how difficult could be for them to understand the meaning of the phrases according to context they are used.
And finally the Funky phrasal verbs which even though some of them were familiar for me, I consider that for a very basic level of language in students of public secondary school could be a kind of hard and confusing for them. Page | 76
The most useful activities: Speaking teaching strategies. Well, I actually found all the activities in the fifth module very useful and helpful for my classes. These kinds of activities were an excellent chance for students to dialogue and practice their oral skills. For students of English as a Second Language, to develop oral activities is the most difficult, because of the time they use to practice the language. So having access to the several websites, allows them to raise their level in that foreign language. These places are interactive and students can communicate each other.
In addition to that, the activities I enjoyed the most were the ones where I used Audacity program and Voice Thread. This was an excellent experience as a learner and as a Teacher. I decided to use the recordings with Audacity for my students because of the short time for English classes( three hours a week)and we have to develop Speaking strategies so they can record and hear themselves and practice a Foreign Language Even though, this module was for me one of the most challenging, I feel very glad of could share comments with some people of the Diploma course. Writing teaching strategies
This course was very helpful for me because I had the opportunity to practice several skills, especially in the writing module, where I really enjoyed doing several types of writings. I consider that is possible to apply this strategy to my students, not pretending very long and complex texts, but maybe encouraging them to express their ideas in a very simple and Page | 77 clear way using very basic vocabulary. Watching movies with grammar is another excellent choice, where you can design exercises from a film clip and develop writing skills in your students in a fun and attractive way. About the activity for writing poems, I think that February is the perfect time to implement this strategy, because of the romantic staff and the Valentine´s Day. By the other hand, accessing to the websites to get the elements to write a funny story is a good strategy to improve writing skills that can be used at any time of the year.
About ICT tools Nowadays, ICT is a very necessary and important tool that we as ESL teachers should consider to use in our everyday teaching practice. Because of the needs and features of our students that use technology in their daily lives, ICT helps them to develop skills to learn a foreign language and to react better before the learning-teaching process. Along the module, we realized a wide variety of tools on the internet, but I have to choose three of them, so the ones I consider are more useful and practical for my English classes are: Recording audio (audacity): Because promote in students an autonomous learning and detect mistakes from their voice recordings to improve stress, intonation, accent, etc. American stories: Because students can find and compare a text with its audio and expand their vocabulary.
And the sites with music and lyrics, because it is a very attractive way for them to learn new words and practice their pronunciation, besides express ideas in a more clear way using and practicing tough groups. Page | 78
Lesson plans Planning is one of the most important elements of our teaching practice that should be considered to set the goals of each unit and the activities that students need to practice such as group, individual and pair work. So, the closest lesson plan model for my needs was Hunters´ seven steps: 1. Objectives: Explaining to students the purpose of objectives necessary to be achieved in each unit that they are studying. 2. Anticipatory set: Because is necessary to know the prior knowledge of our students to present them the topic´s information. 3. Instructional input: Presenting to our students the information in written texts
4. Modeling: Because students can generate ideas from model texts from their text books. 5. Guided practice: To students can improve oral skills and to interact with their classmates. 6. Independent practice: To generate autonomous learning in our students generating their own ideas and reflecting how can the use the language to exchange information and ideas with their classmates. 7. Checking for comprehension on each activity: The teacher has to check that students really understand each activity and the process of each step in every unit.
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Carlos Cornejo Carbajal My Learning Experience
In these past months I discovered many things about my performance as an English as a Second Language teacher that I must have denying during a long time. The routinary and bureaucratic activities have passed me out. This course it has been totally satisfactory for my teaching practice and self-esteem growing.
One of the things I consider is very important for an English teacher is to discover your own communicative skills in order to transmit these to other persons. I understand that teaching is an evolving professional activity and if you are aware of that you definitely lose an important point of your career.
Applying successful reading techniques like scanning and skimming because they help you to improve the process of acquiring information. The constant reading practice focus on clarification of your ideas becomes a habit where you must make your own definitions clearer than when you were not taking special attention on important details.
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This personal introspection serves me to clarify my goals on the developing of reading and writing habits. The personal image of high performance professional makes you design special programs to encourage you to progress as an English non native speaker and not stay in mediocrity.
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Reading, listening speaking and writing are skills that sounded quite trivial and obvious to me, but after these course I realize how significant are to establish a solid grammatical language structure. When you pay attention to details the whole figure gets more understandable and comprehensive.
Different ways you could focus your students’ attention to English language and culture It is not “mission impossible” but it sounds very struggling from the start. Nowadays is very important to demonstrate in a practical form to our students that English is not only a subject in their curricula but a key tool to enter to totally different world, no matter what your socioeconomical condition is. Is very urgent to get in touch with our students before we lose the in this sea of information. The immense majority of them they are not involved in cultural language activities, not even we as English Teachers and we could find out the a distinctive life perspective is in front of ours without getting notice. The major problem I detect in my students is the shamefully attitude toward speaking in a different language and is easy to understand because they make a direct comparison with native English speakers, but they do not dissertate the major differences and similitude among all world cultures. The unusual capacity of get and give information trough the web is our allied in this battle. Find out links that are specially designed for teenagers devoid of prejudices, revise sites and give them links that could result interesting for their age, be empathetical. Try with catch-eye images that resemble their interests no matter is not directly related with the English course.(Your job is to establish a relation of the attractive activity with the curricula) .
As an example in the Unit 1 People and Animals in first grade I use a coloring book with professional wrestlers ( John Cena, Big Show, Randy Orton, etc…) and with the same adjectives they use to describe their classmates they described their favorite wrestlers. I used the media in my favor not against me. Hi ! I´m John Cena. I´m a Professional Wrestler. I am handsome and attractive. I have blue eyes. I have short, straight, light brown hair. I have pale skin. I´m friendly, charming, eccentric, unpredictable, aggressive and audacious. YOU CAN´T SEE ME!
The Habits of Highly Effective Teachers of the 21st Century The upgrading of teaching skills must obey directly to the problems we are confronting directly in the classroom. Innovation and adaptation to the new shifting society is a personal goal for every teacher. The problem consists objectively in present these varying actions in the most attractive possible way to our students.
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The pragmatism in combination with job and life competences is a major step we should take without letting any of our students out of this transformation. We are not merely information reproducers, but instead we are the guides to a new vision of life. Today’s educator is pressured in any possible way with important curricula changes, ICT skills, and major sociocultural changes. We should be proactive collaborators in the building of the new social knit. The technology factor is a very important teaching resource because it deals with the immediacy of commentaries of the learning outcome.
Working in education pairs (teacher-student) put us in an interchanging position with our students who become sometimes our own teachers. We do not have to hesitate in actualization because we are serving as role models in society. Social and intellectual leadership gives our student confidence in the pedagogical interaction. Political leaders are now turning their heads in the direction of educators because we are now more involved than other social actors in the problems that inflict in the people. The adoption of this fresh and innovative posture to confront tribulations should obtain tangible results in the conformation of the new generation of learners. Reading Teaching Strategies Used and the Effect They Had on Your ESL Learner
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In this module READING I learned a lot about the different texts we could use to introduce our students to reading. The real life and news texts are very useful to keep the students attention and at the same time give useful information. Teach student’s strategies like inferring form a context and deducing a complete message from a text. In order to get a personal a whole personal idea you should encourage students to do general questions (What, Where, Why, When, Who, etc…) to predefine the reading objective. The identification of texts types (Instructive, persuasive, informative, descriptive) is very helpful to recognize the author´s purpose and how the text should interpreted. A group of hints and tips applied directly while you are reading make this more effective and significant to the beginner reader because gives an instant reward on the knowledge acquisition. The use of skimming and scanning techniques is one of the exercises that becomes a must on internet sites reading because highly upgrades to identify ideas that could be valuable to our own objective. The use of images and multimedia resources certainly improves the reader’s attention and focus to the text. Using these sensorial tools to make more vivid and comfortable the reading experience for a better comprehension.
Explain how the listening activity could have been easier The cultural awareness we have as ESL teacher is one of the factors we must consider to move up to the next level (B2). Recognizing the different stress types definitely facilitates the recognition of ideas trough listening so we can predict the most relevant parts of a discourse.
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Identifying the models of bottom up and top down listening help we to understand the thinking process that should be selected instinctively after have the habitual practice in quotidian and formal activities. Paying special attention to details and intonation would make easier to define the emotional characteristics of the audio message that it is should be understood. The rhythm and pace applied on the listening activities could be homogenized with the way we express the ideas to make a coordinated relation transmitter –receptor. Conversational and read along activities develop listening skills necessary to reproduce native speaking models that we could not easily have the opportunity to confront during our life. The detection of a specific accent to modify the mental mechanism that it will use to decipher the message without putting a barrier in the search for acceptable meaning. Practicing listening in a practical way devoid of formal devices builds up the sense of confidence and sociocultural integration to the English language.
Identify the Main Teaching Strategies Used In Order To Develop Your Writing Ability Writing is a process that requires ten percent inspiration and ninety percent transpiration. The difficulties to start writing come directly from the lack of motivation and apathy to
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obtain the writing habit. The acquisition of the writing skills is a long and steady process that has to be cultivated trough the years. Today´s culture of synthesis of written texts has placed the writing skills in one of the lasts in the list of job and life competences. The first step is the hardest because you have to dust off the brain with easy mental exercise to wake up the imagination and launch up the grammatical and semantical brain fields. Establish a good strategic foundation will increase the possibility of continue with this activity
as
a routine. The use of templates to write poems and short stories is a simple method to warm up the sensibility. As long as you continue to create written products the quality of these ones will be better. You must follow some procedure that have been used for many years like writing easy short stories that have to be published and revised to complete the entire process. Using quotidian activities to describe or anecdotic situations, like vacations, holidays, or significant events in your life that could generate the extra incentive that is need to craft a good piece of writing. Use any opportunity to express yourself in a correct written form no matter if it is an e-mail response or a twitter contribution use the appropriate grammar, spelling and composition rules that certainly will differentiate from the whole. Writing is the beginning for reading and these two habits are the ones that can be suitable for define a role in today’s English learners and teachers.
How You Could I Use the Speaking Activities my Students
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The developing of speaking skills in a language it should a major priority. The interchange and exposure of ideas conform one of the most important aspects of the social practices of the language. In order of enhance the students’ abilities to a new level we should dedicate a minimum quote of the class to speaking. These two starting levels (A1, A2) are basic for future productive contacts with the language. Is extremely important that the English student can recognize his own level of fluency and naturalness in the use of the language in oral productions. Make comparison trough recordings of his oral skills displayed as a group of articulated sounds that can be evaluated by himself as external listener. The Audacity program is exceptionally useful because it is friendly software that does not further technical training, specialized installation or pay a costly fee for it. The Student can simply record a conversation, discourse or any speaking production (poems, jokes, articles, songs, etc…) to analyze the speaking results. In the voicethread program is a technical advantage that it could be use in the native language to express with audio caption a visual presentation, The addition of voice opinions to any illustration it simply boost the pedagogical power and significance to the leaner’s mind. The videoconference and phone conference can be used as the real life activity simulator with the use of two computers and with the use of a script or conversation guide the students can imagine instant penpals or foreign students. The use of technology on the beginner´s level is essential and nowadays the language learning websites and multimedia equipment it open undiscovered gates trough learning. Information and Communication Technologies
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Information and communication Technologies (ICT) have been used in Language Learning for a long time. The main difference between today´s ICT´s and yesterday´s is the affordability and the capacity to get in touch with a vast number of people in matter of seconds.
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Analyzing this course according to the amount of information employed it has been extremely satisfactory. There are websites from different institutions and organizations that fulfill all your expectations and so much more. It is hard to believe that for every aspect of English Learning process there are many options to practice and exercise the English skills. I have already used some of these websites in my English class because I have an Enciclomedia equipped classroom that is especially adequate for this purpose. I used one of the BBC skillwise site applications that describes people, places and things in one of my second grade classes. The students really like the game style format of the site. The instant gratifications of the test results as well as the digital certificate of the activity are very attractive for
English students.
I selected the makebeliefscomix.com site as one of the most interesting and practical because it is easy to use and suitable for any age and language. This tool gives us a practical variety to produce written texts or oral illustrated scripts.
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In the speaking module the user can record their own speeches using Audacity Program that simplifies the use of a digital recorder that actually compares rhythm and pronunciation in short audio texts.
LESSON PLANNING After the analysis of the different lesson plan methods I consider that the one who fits the best with my teaching style and class needs is: The Madeline Hunter lesson plan format: (Seven-element format: just one way to structure a lesson; developed for math classes) •
Anticipatory Set (setting the stage)--attention-getter and focuser
•
Statement of Objectives--tell students what they'll be able to do as a result of the lesson.
•
Instructional Input--lecture, but not necessarily lecture: demo, explanation, instructions.
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•
Modeling--demonstrate, show what you tell.
•
Check for Understanding--watch faces, asks questions.
•
Guided Practice--help students start practicing new skills, applying new knowledge
•
Independent Practice--turn them loose to work on their own, homework, assignment, etc…
This is my
interpretation
of the Madeline
Hunter´s lesson
plan format
using military
terms. Today´s education is a war that cannot be fight without a tactical plan. Even the greatest, clever and most experimented General needs a strategy to win battle after battle. You must be very careful in the selection of the weapons of mass instruction you are going to use in every minute of the 50 minutes combat. To define this class-battle planning must designed with the following characteristics: •
Use your objectives plan obtained from your superiors ( English Secondary Program 2006)
•
Investigate the battlefield to confront the objective.
•
Choose the correct method according to your enemy´s weaknesses and strengths.
•
Be clear on your orders and instructions so your troops can attack the objectives with confidence and determination.
•
Encourage the soldiers to give an extra effort to be triumphant in the daily battle.
•
Every single aspect of organization is as important as any other.
•
Be careful with your material supplies. ( Don´t let you students go to fight barehanded against missiles)
•
Change your strategy continuously do not let the enemy predicts your attack.
•
Be creative remember that the best leader is not the one who confronts the opponent in a tougher way but the one who can make the more alliances.
“So be brave and do not hesitate against the vicissitudes you could find on the path way of victory”
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Diana Eréndira Fernández Jaime My Learning Experience
“Growing internationalization, the rapid pace of change, and the continuous roll-out of new technologies mean that Europeans must not only keep their specific job-related skills up-to-date, but also possess the generic competences that will enable them to adapt to change. People’s competences also contribute to their motivation and job satisfaction in the workplace, thereby affecting the quality of their work.” Ján Figel’ The practice of English;
speaking, reading, listening, writing, of course, grammar,
vocabulary, pronunciation, and others are important, so it is s to learn the way to do it by Internet, how to use the Internet tools, and this Diploma for English teachers gave us an excellent opportunity to learn much more about it. It’s amazing the material for teachers and students we can find in the internet, they are great, easy, fun and for all kind of students. Working with large groups as I do, it is imperative to have students work sometimes in groups and some times in pairs, always with meaningful, interesting activities. They feel very comfortable and feel confident this way and like to participate in class, It is very important to give a variety of activities to avoid boring classes including games, songs, competences, grammar, stories, movies when possible, and outside activities.
It is a big responsibility to work with children and teens, it’s up to us to make them successful and glad to learn English language, but it also is a great experience!. I feel very motivated when I see the results of this effort. Page | 93
Cultural Learning Awareness
In the sites and different speaking activities, I learnt more about the English speaking community. English from different countries, diversity of people from different contexts, different culture and their typical expressions. All these activities enriched my knowledge of the language and the world. About the English Speaking Community, I could differentiate between the English spoken in England and the English spoken in America. I could understand better the English from England and I realized that my pronunciation it's not too bad, only when speaking with native languages speakers, sometimes I could get nervous and fail. I was very pleased to be in contact with the English language from another countries and places. It was great. For me is very interesting and important to be aware and well informed about what’s happening in the world. l will try to have my students experiencing this maybe linking my subject with technology class to have access and help using the Web, and another resources could be magazines, course I want to continue with these helpful practices.
newspapers, articles, etc. Of
New Teaching Strategies Discovered Page | 94
As a language learner and teacher, I know that it's very important the practice of English language, speaking, reading, listening, writing, of course, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc, . In this Diploma I discovered for first time many places existing in the Net Web to learn and practice English every time we can, with a great variety and for all kind of learners, where we can have a great language progress in all areas, but, most important, I learnt the way to do it, how to use the Internet tools, the interesting material we can find there.
I learned to prepare a speech using the strategies you taught me and I hope to teach my students: The correct way to prepare it, the best way to do it, knowing how to start, how to catch the audience attention.
The activity with the karaoke system is some of the funniest for students as well as: “How to make tales”, “How to tell stories”, “The Bookr site” and the “Make beliefs comics.com”.
The readings and the movie segments were great. This kind of activities make classes more interesting with more variety and fun if we select movies which students like, and they are very helpful to teach grammar and whatever.
That’s why when I read the “Eight habits of highly effective 21st century teachers”, according with the Common European Framework for Key Competences, I realized that you were preparing us to be one of those ones.
1. Communication in the mother tongue 2. Communication in foreign languages 3. Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology 4. Digital competence 5. Learning to learn 6. Social and civic competences 7. Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship 8. Cultural awareness and expression
Reading Teaching Strategies
When I have a Reading activity with my students in Secondary School, I use to start with some images or questions to activate prior knowledge. It could be questions about the images, or questions about some topic or about the title of the reading. In this phase I make my students practice skimming of the reading looking for the main idea and scanning looking for new words or something else.
I liked all the activities in Module 3 about reading strategies, but the best one is “Texts from BBC World in the News”. This activity integrates Reading, Listening, Watching a Video and Vocabulary Activities, the best way to learn.
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In the final step of the activity the students will summarize information, maybe they’ll do some predictions and will write it down or draw the main idea of I already practiced some of the strategies you gave me for the class and I have to the text. Some students will read say that it was a satisfactory experience. I have learned many others that I will put it to the whole class. in practice in the future.
Listening Teaching Strategies
In the “Listening Module” I found many activities to practice listening and strategies to learn. All of them creative, interesting and useful.
Listening to me and listen to others in my situation was very helpful to improve in speaking, among the appropriate and important use of the stress, pauses and intonation when speaking. Although I thought there was one more difficult than others; In BBC Skills Wise there were listening that once you listened you have to follow instructions or answer questions in worksheets. This activity was more difficult because there was no reading or lyrics. The speech was very fast and with strange accent, with no opportunities to rewind or read, but when I used the strategies you taught me, I could do it easier. The strategies I used were: •
Try to choose familiar topics to use my previous knowledge.
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•
Top down listening and Bottom up listening. (Sometimes I had to rewind and listen again)
•
Word stress, pauses, rhythm, intonation.
I am aware that I need and must practice a lot of listening activities regardless of what I do in teaching school. The better I do, the better my students learn!
Speaking teaching strategies I think the activity of developing oral production through the stages of planning, practice and publishing was one of the most interesting, funny and quite entertaining. I liked to learn about the program Audacity; recording my stories and describe situations and listening myself because I didn’t use to do it before. What a experience! we can know a lot about ourselves just listening to ourselves. I enjoyed all the activities but the one that would be more practical and funny to use with my students is definitely de Voice thread site because students could have variety: fun, cultural awareness, practice speaking and vocabulary. After preparing the classroom with Writing teaching strategies multimedia, my students had been preparing a speech about some one given for me to students. Maybe 50 min. in not enough, but they Writing module was one of the most productive and can do The it in more. interesting in which we had to boost our brain and with I enjoyed writing and reminding autobiographical incidents and where we the great help of the net sites to create different types of writing such as: Tales, Poems, Stories, and describe practiced using punctuation. people and places.
It was very funny and interesting to do our own We also learned how to do it, how to follow a commix strip in the net site “make beliefs.com”. sequence, the correct use of the tenses and new vocabulary as phrasal verbs and typical expressions.
About ICT Tools
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The ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) is nowadays a tool absolutely necessary in our daily jobs teaching English due to the kind of students we have on these modern times. Students react better working with technology.
When I read the “Eight habits of highly effective 21 st century teachers”, I realized that you were preparing us to be one of those ones. •
• •
“The 21st century teacher is fluent in tools and technologies that enable communication and collaboration”. “They see the potential in the emerging tools and Web technologies”. “Visionary teachers can look at others’ ideas and envisage how they would use these in their class”.
The best tools that I found more useful for my learning and appropriate for my students are:
•
The Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab. Excellent for all kind of levels and very complete, with quizzes, vocabulary lessons, language learning and life tips.
•
The Australia Network, English bites Site is excellent, there we can find different stories, world culture, and many others options as listening, exercises, vocabulary, etc.
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•
The BBC Learning English Site, excellent to practice pronunciation, intonation, grammar and vocabulary. Excellent for teachers and students.
•
Of course the sites with music and lyrics, identifying thought groups and the sites to learn word stress intonation, pause, and rhythm.
•
Movie Segments and Grammar.
•
The Audacity Program where students can practice recording and listening their voices using a correct intonation and pronunciation.
Lesson Planning
The lesson plan model I consider more appropriate for my context is the “Madeline Hunter’s Seven steps”, due to the kind of students existing in the Secondary school where I work and the way I plan my lessons every day.
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This is Madeleine Hunter’s seven steps Plan Model:
•
Anticipatory Set (setting the stage)--attention-getter and focuser
•
Statement of Objectives--tell students what they'll be able to do as a result of the lesson
•
Instructional Input--lecture, but not necessarily lecture: demo, explanation, instructions
•
Modeling--demonstrate, show what you tell
•
Check for Understanding--watch faces, ask questions
•
Guided Practice--help students start practicing new skills, applying new knowledge
•
Independent Practice--turn them loose to work on their own, homework assignment, etc.
I have students with absent parents, many times living with only one, always working in factories or low paid jobs, the students are neither well fed, so, I need to help them to be interested in learning a new lesson.
First, I need to grab their attention with images, questions, tape listening, play or reading of their interest concerning to the new lesson. After the exposition to the topic I do questions or give examples to make them reflect about it.
After working with the new information with students and they have more comprehension I proceed to ask them to work freely using the new knowledge.
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Finally, at the end of the activities, the students show their final work o the whole class and/or share their works with others to compare or check.
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My Final Reflection
We began acquiring abilities to learn through internet, discovering our learning styles, learning to organize our time, and identifying our grammar strengths and weaknesses where I found out that I need more practice with phrasal verbs, phrases with other meaning and expressions regularly or commonly used in United States, so I need to read more books in English, to speak English with other persons and visit places where English language is spoken.
We continue learning and discovering more strategies and improving our skills in grammar, writing, reading, listening and speaking. Although sometimes it wasn’t easy due to external and not expected situations, it always was enjoyable and satisfactory to learn new things and discover new interesting net sites everyday. We learn more to have our students enjoying these kind of classes in the future. Having the advantages of technology in class, we may prepare excellent, interesting and fun classes for our students. Finally I want to thank you all (SEBS-SEP, CELE-UNAM, TUTORS, TEACHERS), for giving English teachers this great opportunity to get the tools and learning to improve our skills as teachers. To our tutors for their excellent guide and valuable help every day. Congratulations to all the teachers for their good job, good attitude and comments. They did a great effort working everyday to accomplish this great Diploma.
Thanks,
Jannet Flores de la Cruz. My learning experience
Distance education innovation enables to respond to the educational necessities of different sectors. The teacher should know variety about they face in the process of teaching and learning with elements of the Internet, aid to be properly trained in this educational method. We know that technology changes rapidly, more cost effective and more powerful technologies will continue to emerge of potential use in education. At the same time, evidence shows that, once installed in schools, ICTs continue to be used for the life of the functioning life of the technology, whether or not newer, more cost effective and powerful technologies emerge. Some months ago, I decided to apply to this Diplomado in order to devote to study and achieve a higher English level through Internet. This has been worked followed the recommended web tools in each activity as listening and Reading along, matching games, asking quizes, listening songs or radio podcast for stress and intonation. It was used technological ítems as microphone and headphones to record monologues using a software(audacity). It was very interesting and funny to write short texts, the poems, the video. Those were shared to the web.
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I’ll say that all the strategies learned in each activity have to be practiced to developed the abilities (listening, speaking, writing and reading), our teaching is going to be successful and the students are going to use the language as a mean of communication that can be useful in their cotidian life, now and further more.
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About Reading.
The objective in this module was to develop fluent and independent readers .It was used a number of skills and strategies to facilitate comprehension through Reading interesting texts, listening and reading along, filling exercises presented in different web sites. Important Reading strategies as skimming, used for knowing just to what the text is about, scanning, to locate specific information, understanding relations between parts of text through lexical cohesive devices and identifying the main point in the piece of discourse. Also vocabulary,
its knowledge is important
and necessary to start reading in L2,
strategies like deducing and inferring meaning from unknown words were put in practice. By Reading, could help to know and learn about other cultures. Reading a variety of texts in another language makes us be aware of our cultural differences and similarities in beliefs and attitudes.
About listening. Page | 104
In this module, the objective exposed was to improve our listening skills and strategies by means of top-down and bottom-up listening as well as listening for stress and intonation. A bottom up and minimal pairs listening that were recommended in some
sites were
designed for working a little every day, the listening are on a variety of topics, and are relatively short in length.
Minimal pairs are words which have exactly the same pronunciation except for one sound. I`ll say that the exercises about listening minimal pairs were very useful for noticing the difference in pronunciation which many times it`s difficult to identify. The exercises were not so difficult to me but I think that practicing more exercises like these help us in our learning and teaching
English. Besides, to listen many songs, many conversations, videos, films, news, can help too. About the importance of having a correct pronunciation following some rules, as in multisyllable words where the stress falls on one of the syllables while the other syllables tend to be spoken over quickly. It was new to know the 8 common word stress patterns in English and tonic stress, emphatic stress, contrastive stress in order to have a proper intonation. English uses variation in tone (how something is said to indicate importance, an emotion, seriousness, irony, sarcasm, etc.), pitch (voice going up or down), word stress, and in general a sort of melodic variation or rhythm in speaking which if it were absent would make English sound very monotonous. Several links on intonation were explored , several
of them on YOU TUBE. This could help to pay attention when it was listened, knowing when someone will stop speaking, listen for questions, answers, tone, etc.
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Songs were listened in order to notice though groups, it means the pauses between ideas we have to do when we speak. This is necessary to keep related words together so that we are comprehensible. Finally, practicing dictation was an activity that I liked very much.
About speaking
When you communicate orally with other people, you need to pay attention to several aspects of your speech. Being honest, this is the most complicated skill of the four ones for me; continue practicing it is the way as I am going to be fluent in.
In order to develope this skill it was recommended to practice and record some activities having access to resources and tools which allow to plan, practice, record and publish activities which let raise my English level, through to be able to produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar to describe experiences and events, so as briefly Page | 106 give reasons and explanations for opinions.
It was used
technological items as
microphone and headphones to record monologues using a software(audacity program
and
voice
thread)
being
evaluated by a rubric in each activity. Through this software I could listen my own voice in the records giving opinions about topics from current life and famous people, as well the other participants. Also I had the opportunity to have a videoconference with a partner to talk about the raise of taxes.
About writing
I have had a good time writing, illustrating and publishing writings, it was funny. I used some tutorials and templates to create my writings as well as web tools to publish them. I have to say that this module was my favorite. About the Works whose were doing that I can name are: Tall tales, a very interesting activity where it was possible to practice the use of nouns and adjectives. My first poems. I really enjoyed to make my book of poems, when I read it I feel myself so glad. I sent it to my family and friends. Photo peach, It was a really good experience to do this activity, even though I took time doing it. The comic was short but could make my Little cousin laugh. The book review was difficult; I have to work more on this kind of activity. As well as the Eyewitness account and News writing. A very rich and helpful in our teaching in order to work grammar in a funny way is by using the blog recommended “Movie segments to asses grammar goals”, excellent!
In conclusion, this course has been an opportunity to improve my teaching, I have learned many new tools whose are helpful in my actualization as teacher. It made me to realize deeply that our work have to be better day after day, the life has changed our students. We have to think in being effective teachers who must plan classes, a very important tool to follow, organize the learning environment, have a real manage of what we are teaching, promote the interaction and never stop on learning.
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Karla Ruiz
García
My
Experience
Learning
English
language
learning
awareness
While doing the exercises I could notice that the best way to improve my English is through practicing in real conversations and reading about different topics to get different kind of vocabulary. In view of the fact that there are different purposes for reading, it is very useful using diverse
strategies
as
skimming,
scanning, inferring, etc.; the strategy depends on the purpose of the reading. In the other hand, listening is not an attainable
skill,
it
requires
much
practice. We often think that listening is easy since we can hear as a natural ability because it is the first language aspect that
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we acquire. Listening is not only hear what people is says, listening is understand and get what the person is trying to say not through merely words but through rhythm, pause, and intonation.
To
meaning
while
speaking
know
who is going to
be our audience and
purpose of the
speech.
speaking
important
to
Because
construct is
is
a
skill that turns into a
competence, we
need
communicatively
to
be
competent, that means
the
understanding
sociocultural
of
contexts of language.
Cultural learning awareness When we do not have cultural awareness it is very common to misunderstand and misinterpret situations causing confusion. We are teaching a different language, this means a different culture with different principles and situations and if we do not teach through culture the kids are more tend to make jokes and laughs about the other. It is a bit difficult to interest students in English literature production since they are not used to it. Scaffolding my students through lessons like those where we just add some words to produce poetry have been surprisingly an exit since they feel confident when finishes. I like literature to teach culture since this is the most accurate resource for it but another good and funny way to do it is through TV series according to the student ages. The most important point here is that attracting students’ attention to other culture customs and lifestyles make them get conscious
about
New teaching strategies discovered
their
own.
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The strategies we followed during the course were those mentioned in the article about 21st century teachers. For example I could noticed that when the technology failed because of Page | 110 some problems when logging in, the people in charge of the course designed a side link to we could continue with our schedule, they were able to adapt
the program to a different
situation. We worked in collaborative groups when we were studying speaking and writing skills through tools as MSN and Photopeach. We listened to each other in order to get an opinion about a topic and some of us are still doing it. Some of my classmates even help others to deal with the technology showing them how to manage some tools like when we were doing the comic strip. The most important thing I got in this program is about the new e-technologies and e-resources that updated my way of teaching. Students are very keen about gadgets, and I learnt that if I use them as a resource in my lessons, my students will acquire the knowledge in a more interesting way (for them). Since the knowledge is for them I have to prepare my lessons in a student centered way. I have been working with my students by mail like in this program because it is the only way to get in touch always with them and in this way I can cheer them up to continue practicing outside the classroom. One of the strategies that is crucial is the leading factor, I am glad of having an excellent guide that without her it could not be possible to get until this point, the end. Reading teaching strategies The most interesting activities I did in the Reading module were American and British English, a listen and read along activity from the Interesting Things for ESL Students web page and Amistad Incident from Awesome stories web page. The first text is about the history of the differences between both
languages. Those differences were made by Webster who made changes in the spelling of some words, and that he was inspired on Franklin's attempt to create a new system of spelling. The strategies used here were activating prior knowledge, when I did the exercise I did it with some information about it (spelling differences) and after reading it I Page | 111 completed and reinforced my knowledge about it. Rereading, the text was designed to read and listen at the same time, and the best part is that the reader says the lines twice to clarify what he is reading. Identifying main ideas and supporting details, the activity was to answer a question about facts and interesting aspects of the reading. The second text is one of the most important episodes in the American History. The most important thing I found in the article is the links that it has to the original documents where you can learn more about it. It functions as Gerard Genette's "paratexto", where one thing leads you to another creating an interaction between the reader and the story (history in this case). In both texts the use of those strategies mentioned before made me enjoy, learn and participate in my learning process.
Listening teaching strategies The fourth module was difficult because I did not know about some aspects like pitch, intonation,
thought
groups,
etc.
The
activities were correct designed, the text selection was interesting and meaningful but the most difficult activities were those about pitch and rhythm because I’ve never used them. Although the activities were in a way easy, they were difficult since I as a Mexican do not have those characteristics in my own language. Teaching pitch, rhythm and intonation is difficult for me. I think that would be easier if each one is teach separately and in a more graphic way specially with the bottom up skills because we as a listeners depend more on the text than on our previous knowledge and there is when it
turns difficult because of the lack of knowledge. Using some kind of visual back up to a better understanding give questions and tasks in order to clarify the things in our minds, etc. After those strategies we will understand how to use the environmental clues, the speaker's facial expression, posture, eye direction, proximity, gesture, tone of voice, and that general Page | 112 surroundings get us more information because visual materials (even face to face) are useful for contextualization. Speaking teaching strategies I think that there were not worthless activities, but the activity that my students liked the most were those about voice thread and audacity. Although downloading the program was kind of troublesome for them, finally we did it. For me was a terrible experience hearing my own voice recorded but for them was the most exciting and funny activity. When it is time to read aloud in the classroom they get panicked because they do not like to do it in public, they do not feel confident about it. The most of the students used to suffer every Friday -which I decided to use only for reading aloud-because of this activity. Since I took the Speaking module my strategy changed. I ask them to download the program in order to record their voices. I asked them firstly to record their voices reading a paragraph in Spanish. After that, I asked them to record the chapter of the book we were supposed to read that Friday. The book we are reading is an abstract from the Gulliver’s Travels, this time I selected this book because I am teaching a 3 rd grade and the most of the information is about travelling. Well, after comparing both readings in order to identify if they had a reading problem, I could notice that they were improving their confidence while reading firstly for themselves and finally in front of the classroom. I must admit that they are not reading better but at least they are confident now when it is time to read aloud in front of the rest of the group.
Writing teaching strategies
Writing is sometimes difficult because we do not know how to express what do we want to express –in a correctly manner. Writing in a foreign language is more difficult since there are different rules to do it. Identifying the main teaching strategies used in order to develop Page | 113 my writing abilities is difficult since everyone was very useful. I could notice that the activities and strategies selected to us to work on were put in the way that we could begin with the easier and every module turned more difficult, in the end we were asked to write short essays about a specific topic. The first activities were the most important –in my opinion- they gave us confidence to write. The Wacky Web Tales page was the most amusing, hilarious activity I have ever done. It was very easy to accomplish it and the best was the end when reading what we created, I love it and my students more since they create funny texts with no big effort. Another very special and meaningful strategy to improve my writing skills was the Instant Poetry Forms. I really love poetry very much but I am not good when writing it. So, when I did this activity, I felt incredibly well, and since that day I respect poetry more than never. If writing is difficult, poetry is even more. To write poetry is to say what you cannot say in merely words but images and that is very difficult to learn. About ICT tools
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Today, in an open world, culture is the better way to become skilled at other languages but in order to do it we have to learn how to manage and interpret the information. The computer and the Internet with all this free access sites are the best way to invite the students to know and learn about the outside.
INTERNET: The biggest and most useful tool at this moment. Sometimes called simply "the Net," is a worldwide system of computer networks - a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers). Today, the Internet is a public, cooperative, and self-sustaining facility accessible to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. I use it because it gives me a lot of resources to use in my classroom and for my students give them the opportunity to know other “worlds” in a real way.
Is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. I like this web page because it has lot of tutorials to use with the students and to learn myself.
MESSENGER:
is a type of communications service that enables us to create
a kind of private chat room with another individual in order to communicate in real time over the Internet using text-based communication. Using messenger with my students allows me to get in touch more time with my students and because it is mainly a text-based tool, they practice writing.
Finally, I would add that now that we are on the way of finishing the course I have the sensation of something missing. Every time I learn something new, I know that there are lots of things to learn. The first thing we have to do after finishing is to apply all the knowledge to our teaching strategies in order to improve our students’ ways of learning, Page | 115 and some day, they could have the same sensation as I have, to learn more.
Juan Antonio Lonngi Vélez My Learning Experience
Module 2 “Learning to learn English through internet tools and resources” Was my first contact with an on line learning course, and first of all I learnt that computers are really valuable and real means of learning – teaching processes, next I could know and practice many elements and technical vocabulary that I needed to know such as; what exactly a mouse and menu are, clicking and double clicking, drag and drop, scrolling, pointing, check box. I understood what the Common European Framework for Languages’ levels of language competence are, and what the description of each level is. I knew that I must manage my time for learning activities and tried some strategies to use the time, finally I could understand the Key Competences for Lifelong Learning and the relationship among the sections 2, 5 and 8 that says that a foreign language teachers have the huge responsibility to transmit to their students the needing of appreciate the cultural diversity and the intercultural communication as a means of knowledge interchange, through reading, listening, writing and speaking activities on the target language, developing at the same time, which are the spine of our teaching practice. I applied a test about abilities of learning and the result is that I’m a kind of mix of Intrapersonal, Visual / Spatial, Kinaesthetic and Linguistic abilities. I practiced computer using skills, different teaching strategies like filling gaps, choose the correct answer, thick the answer, etc. I think the learning of English language using Internet sites has many advantages like, it’s a means of support for the student, he can repeat again and again the same lesson until it’ll be completely understood, Internet sites are very attractive, dynamic and encouraging to students. There are lots of advantages on learning
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English using free access internet sites , for example when sites contains colorful and moving graphics they become attractive to students, and if we add sounds and interactivity it becomes the best learning experience for students and the best auxiliary to the teacher professional practice. I could identify some of my grammar strengths and weaknesses, and I had chance to work in some pages that help me to correct some of them. Module 3 “Reading” Was one of the most useful for me, because I had chance to learn and practice Reading Strategies such as: Scanning, Skimming, and my first contact with a brand new strategy for me; “Read While Listening”, at the beginning, it was a very difficult and frustrating experience to me, and it wasn’t enjoying at all, because I didn’t know what I was practicing, so where should I focus my attention and skills?? But thanks to the Tutor, I tried several times more and now I recognize this strategy as one of the most useful for develop and practice Reading Comprehension skills. Other interesting topics were Facts and Opinions, Type of Text identification, Vocabulary Learning, giving many sites which are extraordinary tools to learn not only vocabulary, pronunciation or grammar, they use real evens happened in the real world, so students can learn vocabulary at the same time they know about the events in the real world (world knowledge). I have my first contact too with “Intensive Reading”, watching a video and vocabulary activities, Read, details and inference/ Vocabulary, Grammar and reading comprehension, Reading for Pleasure, and other strategies which proved to me that Reading is a whole process, it isn’t only to know lots of English words and read, is a complete process of meaning construction.
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Module 4 “Listening” I’ve had my first chance to learn and practice some new strategies like: top-down and bottom-up, minimal pairs, reading along, word stress, intonation, pause, rhythm, phrasal verbs, and tag questions. I think this module, was a very important new experience, it’s the first time I have experienced a comparative activity about sound’s construction, or face up to Phrasal Verbs, that are in the spine of the English teaching and it was amazing! Because it’s a powerful way to show the students how Spanish’s sounds are different of English ones, and how the meaning changes with a mistaken pronunciation, I think for teenagers this is a very interesting and important point in the English class. As a language learner and teacher, I discovered the importance of listening during the English classes some strategies and websites to study it, and that we can’t talk about an English class without paying special attention on topics related about listening.
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Module 5 “Speaking” . The main goal of learning a foreign language is to communicate principally speaking, in this module, through some strategies used like “How to Tell a Story”, “How to Describe a Situation or Place”, “How to Describe People”, “How to Give Instructions”, “How the Express Agreement and Disagreement”, “How to Present a Short Talk”, “Giving Opinions”, I had chance to improve my speaking skills, because I could record my voice and listen it several times to make corrections, and I think now I can speak more coherently, slowly, clearly, with rhythm, and understandable, and now I know, people have many resources on line to learn English properly because English language, authorities are very worried about the preservation of the English speaking community, and I discovered that it’s real!!! Anyone can improve their speaking skills, by using properly the free sites on the web.
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Module 6 “Writing”. It included strategies like: “Grammar and Writing”, “Correcting a Piece of Writing”, “A Book of Poems”, “Creating Stories”, “Sharing and Using your Pictures”, “Describing People, Places and Things”, “Using Punctuation”, “Sequence of Tenses”, “Other Writing Models”, “Movies and Grammar”. Some teachers consider this ability as the most difficult to teach and before this course I was agree, but now after tried the interactive strategies such as The bookr, comic strips, Photopeach, Quizzes, "Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals", etc. I think, writing mustn’t be a nightmare, it could be a great experience if the teacher use the correct strategy, the students will be enjoyed, interested on the topic and they will take a real advantage of the experience. I think, this was my best experience in the whole course, because it was innovative, enjoying and brand new.
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English language learning awareness: The most important learning I got in this course, is the use of Internet in teaching – learning activities, Now a day’s I’m absolutely sure it could be the best teachers’ ally. During this course I had chance to see the world culture and cultural diversity about the English speaking community and I discovered I have not to forget to support the English class with the foreign and own cultural aspects that involves a language as a human characteristic. I have learnt how to look for some specific language topics and teaching and learning strategies in some free sites for language learning and teaching support, and now I know that to raise my reading comprehension skills I need to study very hard and visit very often, the web sites I knew in module 3 to be in direct contact with the living English
language, and to structure my lessons following the three steps included in the unit, and I should to choose authentic readings and formats. Strategies are absolutely needed to take a real advantage of the topic, during the learning - teaching process. Today I know that learning process of a living language is continuous and permanent, and for become a good teacher is very important to be in a permanent process of actualization.
Cultural learning awareness: I’m convinced, as foreign language teacher, I have to explain to my students that culture is the main component into the language construction, during this course; I could learn a different way to see the world culture and cultural diversity of the English speaking community, as example I can mention the different speaking accents representative of a specific country like American accent, British accent, African accent, Australian accent, Canadian Accent, etc. The materials used during the course, were representative of a different world, for example; I read about Foster Children, Foster Parents, The city of Sacramento has a big needed of Foster houses, children as witness in a legal process, some specific aspects of daily life of some English speaking cultures, and others.
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In the websites and different speaking activities done, I learnt people have many resources on line to learn English properly because authorities are very worried about the preservation of the English speaking community, and they show the great value that English language has in speaking countries and for the English speaking community.
New teaching strategies discovered: In my opinion the habits contained in the reading, are the different topics in this course summary. Today I know that I have to become adaptative, and the only limit that I have to make arrangements on my lesson plans is my own imagination, I should to become visionary and see the potential in the emerging tools and web technologies and manipulate them to serve the students needs. Tools like Blogger, Wikispaces, My Space, Twitter, etc. Are excellent resources to promote the interchange of information and to do collaborative learning, because they facilitate to students’ sharing, contributing, adapting and inventing, and take risks with my students,
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using their abilities on technologies because they can teach the teacher too, and I must endeavor to stay current, because technology advance and knowledge too. Another very important task is to communicate, because teacher must be anywhere and anytime being fluent in tools and technologies that enable the communication and collaboration. The English Programs used in “SEP” now a day, say that teacher must teach values and model the students’ behaviors, so tolerance, global awareness, reflective practice, etc. are task to be considered on the lesson plan, and educator never has to forget that he’s the leader of the learning process, and integration of the different elements and tools it will need.
About ICT tools: Now a days, technology of information and communication is one of the most important means of communication, and they have proved, they’re becoming an important pedagogical resource, on education on line or as a tool into the classroom, because it facilitates synchronous and asynchronous communication, and brings a huge quantity of extraordinary visual, reading, video, printed, etc. resources. During this course I particularly I liked these three sites: Writing ideas, a book of poems. Using Bookr
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Students write a little poem and go to http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/, then a very attractive screen appears with the instructions to illustrate their composition, first they need to load a picture and next they write a piece of their text, they change the page and the share their illustrated composition with the rest of the class. I think this is a very attractive tool and students have the chance to improve their imagination, writing skills, learn new vocabulary and share their work with others. Sharing and using your pictures. Using Photopeach Students write a story using a set of photos or images, they order the pics and choose the piece of the story that represents each image, then they go to: http://photopeach.com/album/137atr5? ref=more, and load them to the Photopeach following the instructions, first the images, secondly the text and finally the sound or music. In my opinion, this technology is a great tool that combines creative, grammar, vocabulary, imagination and esthetic skills, I’ve proved with my students and all of them became really motivated, interested and happy. Movies and grammar. Using the “Movie segments to assess grammar goals” site. For me, this tool is the best !, A teacher select a short from a movie that contains a specific Grammar Goals and activities to assess or practice grammar points through fun, challenging exercises. The teacher selects the grammar goal the students will practice, and the movie segment which the students will use, they go to the movie segments site: http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/, locate the movie the teacher has chosen, they copy the exercises on their notebook, solve them and show the teacher the results obtained. In my opinion this is the most attractive and accepted tool by students, because they can learn with their favorite character or movie, the teacher has a marvelous material to design activities specific for a topic or a special group of students. This tool is very attractive and motivating for the young learners.
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Lesson Planning: Every real teacher should plan his lessons because, they have to select materials, strategies, activities, topics, etc. And preview the goals desired as a students learning, and he must organize and achieve a lesson properly.
My Final Comments: This course was one of the richest and intensive experiences in my life. I had the chance to explore the real world of the English language teaching, enjoying myself, interacting with some partners in very distant points of the country, and I knew some new strategies using the electronic technologies, that many teachers think are “the big enemy” of education. I want to thank the UNAM and SEP, for this opportunity and mainly my tutor Adriana Aceves Martinek, to be always professional, attentive, tolerant, patient, and... the PERFECT TUTOR!!! I
really hope to have a new chance to be in another course.
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Omar Lucio Bustos My Learning Experience Cultural learning awareness
As I was studying this unit I leaned many important things to consider while teaching a good and interesting class to my students. The first part to have clear at the beginning this process is to identify previous knowledge of my students. After this it is important to clearly show to the students the type of couture of the natives from the 2nd language. When a student get to know more thing about the culture of the 2 nd language the learning process became easier and more interesting y many ways.
New teaching strategies discovered
All groups are different from each other; I work with fourteen groups of students, from 35 to 40 students each one. While I apply any technique I can do this differences, some group work in a perfect way while other work completely different and in some cases I have to use a other technique to have the same result, this completely depends on each group and the characteristic of some of them. Here are some of the things I do in the class.
•
Adapting is important for all technique this has to be applied when something changes in the class or where we identify improvement opportunities.
•
Been visionary help us to be ready to any situation that might happen
•
Collaborating is god because we can make the learning process richer when we involve other teacher an also the students.
•
Taking risk my result might result in a good experience for the class
•
Learning from every technique is very useful for further application of these techniques.
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•
Communication help everything, is good among the teacher and the students at all the times.
•
Modeling behavior can be done by the correct application of techniques
•
Leading has to be done by the teacher in every technique applied in the class
Reading teaching strategies
Reading is an activity that government from Mexico try to promote in all students, techers from all signatures invites the student to develop the ability of reading but this only can be done if the teachers develop this ability. The other thing that help student to begin reading is to teach them some techniques focused on this. In this unit I found many but the text an n the technique that I chose is this: “The text that I decide to use is “the books don’t grow in trees”, this texts makes reference to the high cost of books and tuition. In this activity the students have to identify some words that students remember, then they have to check a text and fill the blanks working in pairs, and at the end they have to complete a crosswords, all this have to be done by a simple skimming of text, this means that the students have to quickly read the text and identify the some important ideas, after this it becomes easier to do the activity. Here the important thing is not to understand all the text but have an idea and make an effort to complete the exercises, it is not to important that the student complete all the activity. Doing this the student develop the ability to quickly check, analyze text, get a general idea of it and then develop his own opinion. I use this technique on students on second or third grade, students that already have studied at least one year under my supervision, and I always try to keep them motivated and ready to participate in many other activities that I apply in the classroom by surprise.”
With this the students begin to like and develop this ability.
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Listening Teaching Strategies Page | 130
The ability of listening is something that has to be developed in a proper way, we usually listen to many word and noises around us, but which of these sounds are interesting for us, what do we really find useful.
Developing this ability means that the student might have to avoid some sound and focus only on what is really interesting.
Listening to songs it is a very good way to practice a foreign language because the music is something that people usually like and listen to several times, with this repletion on listening, the learning process become more interesting and the learning experience easier. The rhythm and the intonation is something that our brain attends to easily and remember for longer periods.
Writing teaching strategies
To practice that I chose is to develop some comics, this is an easy and fun way to promote writing, as I place in mi comment of the unit: “I liked a lot the part where I have to develop some comics, this activity is very helpful because here we can assign the topic that we want that the student practice. Here the teacher can develop the comics and use the words he wants the student to practice or the words the students need to learn. The length of the comics is according to the time we have en class and the type of activity. With this activity I develop my writing practice.
This activity can be used in the classroom in many ways, the students might read to the comics and develop an activity or in the opposite side, the students may have to develop activities by himself.” Page | 131
About ICT tools
The ICT are tools that nowadays gives the students the opportunity to learn another language a in an easier way, when most of us begin to study a language we dint have all this tools to make more interesting an easier our learning process. When I begin my formal process of learning English I used to have only book and copies from other books and when I was concluding this process I begin to use video cassettes to enforce my leaning process but now we can see that the computer gives us a great world of opportunities to learn. Lesson planning
This is one of the most important thing that a teacher can do to have a good class and to assure that the class time was properly used, when planning a lesson it is important to consider these aspects:
Aspects to consider,
About the student 1. Age 2. Culture 3. Educational background 4. Motivation 5. Level
6. Number of ss 7. Occupation 8. Schedule class 9. Group’s personality 10. Attitude towards l2
About the teacher 1. Sense of responsibility 2. Experience 3. Materials 4. Knowledge 5. Personality 6. Skills 7. Attitude towards l2
About the classroom 1. Layout 2. Size 3. Location 4. Noise 5. Lightning 6. Decoration 7. Technology availability 8. Comfortability 9. Cleanliness
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About time 1. Length 2. Time of the day 3. Weather 4. School calendar
The concentration curve 1. Warm up 2. High challenge 3. Wake up 4. Low challenge 5. Wrap up
About the sequence of the class 1. Engage 2. Study 3. Activate
About the resources 1. Tape recorder 2. Textbook 3. Handouts 4. Ohp 5. Internet 6. Video 7. Dvd USING THE PROPER LESSON PLAN
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An aspect that I consider I have improved since I begin teaching. I have been teaching English for six years, my main preparation is business administration Page | 134 bachelor and was not aware that I´ll become a teacher some day, but this happened, I was invited to be a teacher and I decide to give it a try and I found out that this is something that I enjoy a lot. My first class was in an old secondary were the students behave is regulated by the rules and the environment acquire by the school’s personal, I went in to the classroom without a lesson plan, a boon nor the idea of the topics important to teach. I felt that it was a mess; I begin with some activities that I improvised but it just made me fell bad and definitely unprepared.
Since that day I have improved a lot, I always arrived to the classroom with a well prepared class and I always stick to the plan. This makes fell very well and sure that my students every day learn something new Personal opinion This course has been an opportunity that have helped me to develop some of the abilities that I haven’t had the opportunity to identify and develop, while this course I have identify many aspects that I needed to practice, by this moment I can say that things that I have learn through this course no one has never teach me before in all time I have been teaching. I am sure that everything I have learned will be show in my student progress and it will be perfected by me during its application. I would really like to take more courses in this way to perfect my work in class.
Maria Elena Macfarland My Learning Experience Page | 135
Lifelong learning is a necessity for every foreign language learner. We need to develop our skills and competences through our lives. Communication in foreign language is based on the ability to express in different ways, using different skills like listening, speaking reading and writing. Learning to learn is the ability to persist in learning, including effective management of time. I learned many things, but I think I have to learn more about understanding and producing texts. I also need to develop the ability to persevere with learning to concentrate for extended periods and to work collaboratively. There are many advantages using free access internet sites. It is a way to motivate students to learn by themselves anywhere using a computer and internet. They can study at school, home, internet café or anywhere. They can choose any topic or article and do it any time; we just have to lead them to do things the right way.
READING STRATEGY I liked to read while listening. Some American stories were easy and funny to me. I could improve my reading using some strategies like facts and opinions, skimming, scanning. I loved reading, listening, and watching video activity. The more I read, the more I understood and enjoyed. I learned new things like golden gate story, about American and British story too. I learned about slaves getting to America from Africa, etc.
LISTENING STRATEGY I learned something new: minimal pairs, words that seems to have the same Page | 136 pronunciation, but they don’t I enjoyed doing top-down listening, although I could hardly understand Australian and other countries English. I didn’t know the importance of word stress. I learned that sentences can have different meaning, depending on where you stress the word. Intonation and rhythm was something new for me too. I can improve them singing songs using my 5 senses: hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste. I can also learn intonation through jokes. I need to give the right intonation to communicate what I really want to say. There is falling intonation to give commands and directions, and there’s also rising intonation. Phrasal verbs were a difficult activity for me. I almost couldn’t do any of them. I need to learn more about them . On the other hand tag questions were easy and understandable to me.
SPEAKING STRATEGY This is the most difficult activity to do for me. I think it was because I couldn’t get to audicity and voicethread sites; but when I finally did, I enjoyed it very much. Listening music evokes me to some other places. The videoconference was something real new for me. I liked it very much, and also the idea of watching a picture or a person and say all you think about it.
WRITING STRATEGY
A book of poems was a nice starting. I didn’t think I could make it. I really enjoyed it and I think my students will too. It is a great way of writing ideas. Creating stories is a good way to boost the imagination. I had fun doing the comic strip file, but what I liked the most was telling my summer vacation story using pictures, music and short sentences. I had fun doing quizzes, on which I learned more grammar. Writing about incidents in my life was interesting. I could remember some sad and happy things in my past life. I think all the strategies were amazing, useful and interesting, but I need to improve the last one, writing, so I have to keep on grammar, vocabulary, punctuation.
Finally I want to thank to everybody involved in this course. It was really fantastic. I wish I could do a better work, but now I know there are many resources and tools to make our teaching work interesting and funny for our students.
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Araceli Manriquez Peña My Learning Experience According to the Common European Framework for Language my English competence level is B1 and through six Modules in this Program I improved a great deal my four skills (Reading, Speaking, Listening and Writing). In this Program I learnt how to improve my Language Learning with the help of Web Sites, Reading Techniques, Word stress, Intonation Patterns, Video conferences, Recordings, Chat sessions, Journals, Poems, Real World Stories, Forums and Movies. I noticed that Learning a Foreign language is an Art, because there are many ways to obtain topic information or to assess grammar with the help of Rubrics. I had developed a dual role, as a learner and as a Teacher, I need to develop more fluency in Speaking (Oral production skills) and in Reading. My favorite exercises were reading with different attitudes and reading while listening. Thanks again for this marvelous experience.
NEW TEACHING STRATEGIES This program has prepared us to use links of Web sites, real story readings, electronic books, read along, virtual dictionaries, voice threads, comics and many other teaching tools. I agree with the text that you have to be updated with the new Technology in order to be a 21st Century Teacher, you have to know the Curriculum, you have to know what is your subject focus and what are your students goals and objectives. Thanks to this Program, I learnt how to chat in a video conference, how to write poems and publish them. I started working with my students doing some exercises searching for word meaning, images, short readings.
Cultural Learning Awareness To enable students to reach a level of communicative competence I am going to use last year Oscar’s winner movie titled Slumdog Millionaire, this film takes place in India a city with many working people and its culture.
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To develop Cultural Learning Awareness in the classroom it is important that we help our students to compare their native culture with other cultures like the Hindu. Students can make a list of the similarities and differences in each Cultures. Then students will answer questions about social behavior in the streets of both Page | 139 Cultures and they will comment about their prior knowledge in the matter. Finally, the students will comment on positive Universal Values that are in the film Slumdog Millionaire like real LOVE and BROTHERHOOD. LISTENING TEACHING STRATEGIES I liked most of the listening activities and I am practicing with my students reading exercises with an attitude. I think that the most difficult activities were word stress and intonation. With these kind of exercises we have to make emphasis in the intonation to keep the conversation flowing. Practicing listening can make us active listeners, just to take part in a conversation or just for pleasure. In order to practice word stress in utterances you have to know plenty of vocabulary. There are words that are similar in writing but different in meaning, so it can be difficult if you don’t know Semantics and Grammar. When you are practicing listening on the telephone you need all the concentration you can to follow the conversation because you are not face to face to see the gestures and body language.
READING TEACHING STRATEGIES Scanning There are many short stories Reading on the Web and I choose one about Male and Female Gorillas for my students. First, the task is that readers have to read the text and practice Scanning (individual reading comprehension strategy to make predictions). Second, the students have to answer six questions about the reading (search for specific information)so I know that they comprehend the text. After that the students have to underline ten Cognates from the reading and produce images or drawings of the cognates on the back of the page. Finally, the students (in pair work) have to create a short text of the Male and Female Gorillas (retell the story) and they have to present it to the class (summarize information).
Students copy:
NAME: _____________________Group:_______ DATE: __________________________________ HE’S GENTLE AND HANDSOME WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT GORILLAS ? I.- Read the text.
Gorillas live in the tropical African forests. Male gorillas are about 1.8 m tall and weigh about 300 kg. Females gorillas are about 1.5 m tall and weigh about 260 kg. Gorillas are not carnivorous; they are vegetarian. They eat leaves, plants and fruit. They are slow and gentle creatures and they are generally not aggressive. They live up to 55 years.
II.- Answer the questions about the reading. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Where do gorillas live? ___________________________ How tall are they ? Male: ______Female: ________ How heavy are they? Male: ______Female:________ What do gorillas eat? ____________________________ Are they aggressive? ____________________________ How many years do they live ? ____________________
III.- Underline ten cognates and draw images on the back page. IV.- Retell the story and create a short text.
SPEAKING TEACHING STRATEGIES This was an awesome experience to be able to do a dual role in this Program, as a learner and as a Teacher. I love the use of recording Monologues with Audacity especially for my students because with three hours a week we have to develop Speaking strategies so they can hear themselves and PRACTICE the target language as often as they can.
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I will explain how I would do it, so my students can develop oral production skills. First, I will ask my students to download on their computer the Program Audacity because they will record a Presentation with their Personal Information. Second, I will give my students a guided questionnaire so they can answer Personal Page | 141 questions about themselves. Third, I will ask the students to write a text with their Personal Information like First name, Last names, Mother’s name, Father’s name, Brothers and sisters name, telephone number, mailing address, e mail address, favorite sport, favorite animal. Fourth, I will ask the students to record their Presentation using the guided text. Fifth, I will ask the students to make a comment after the recording and share their opinion on their Audacity experience. Our goal is to develop fluency and intonation in our students so they can practice their target language. Audacity is a great tool to develop Oral skills.
WRITING TEACHING STRATEGIES
This Communicative Skills Diplomado for Secondary School Teachers has help me a great deal, because in each Module I practiced different communicative skills specially in the Writing Module I learnt how to be more conscious of my surroundings. When I did my first writing on a journal I enjoyed the experience because in the tutorial for beginners I learnt how to pay more attention to others. I plan to take this idea to the classroom for my students in the month of January; my students will write on a Journal their main experiences once a week, they will need a special notebook to write important and relevant information about their life (role models). In this journal they will write about their family and friends and they will register a strange or odd happening in the week. I enjoyed the activity of watching movies with grammar, this strategy is very attractive for ESL learners, you can mix Cultural Awareness with language structure. It is fun to select a film clip and download it from YOUTUBE to design exercises to develop writing skills and to understand the target language.
I was surprised with the activity about writing poems because words can be powerful and some people can be more sensible than others, I enjoyed publishing a book of electronic poems because I am a romantic but also I am practical. I plan to develop my students writing skills with the use of poems in the month of Page | 142 February and short funny stories in the month of March accessing the Internet. ICT TOOLS The use of Information and Communications Technologies in Teaching a Second Language is very attractive to students now days. Most of our students are visual so that is why they learnt through their sight.
I will use reading along with songs from youtube to develop natural pauses, a better flow to the reading, natural rhythm and fluid speech. My students are fascinated with the first song I chose titled Hello, Goodbye sang by the Beatles. My students presented in small groups
(5) to the class the song and they added choreography to their presentation. They enjoyed their participation and I awarded the best presentation.
I will use Foreign Movie segments with grammar to develop writing skills and Page | 143 Cultural Awareness in my students English class. First, my Students will watch a foreign film clip and then they will answer questions about the movie clip (individual work). Then they will make a list of the social behavior of the Foreign Culture (pair work). After that they will compare their similarities and their differences of social behavior from both Cultures (group of four). Finally, students will write a text expressing the Author’s message from the film. The third ICT tool is Audacity a program to developing speaking skills, because you can record your thoughts, points of view and opinions about the fact of life. My students will use this tool pretty soon. I intend to ask my students to record a personal presentation with relevant information about their life. My students will share their favorite things and their family to their classmates. I will give them a questionnaire to fill their personal information and then they will write a text narrating their life. After that I will supervise their text and then they will download the Audacity program to record their presentation (monologue). Finally, they will share it with their classmates. LESSON PLANNING HUNTER’S MODEL Planning a lesson is essential to have Teaching and Learning into consideration. The closest lesson plan model for my context was Hunter’s seven steps: 1- Objectives, 2Anticipatory set 3-Instructional input, 4-Modeling, 5-Guided practice, 6- Independent practice, 7-Checking for comprehension on each activity. It is very important on the first step to explain to the students the purpose of the target language and the objectives they need to achieve in the Unit that they are studying. For example: Enable Students to introduce themselves and others and to exchange personal details. Setting the stage is the second step and here we need to know the student’s prior knowledge and present all the information they manage about the topic. (ID card) Instructional input is the third step and we need to present to the student a selected written text. (fill in forms about personal information). Modeling is the fourth step where students read the models from their text book and complete the fill in forms with personal information.
Guided practice is the fifth step and students will answer oral questions about themselves and they will introduce themselves to their classmates in a group activity. They will make two rounded circles and they are going to walk around the classroom when they hear music and they will stop walking when the music stops and they will talk about themselves (practice). Page | 144 Independent practice is the sixth step and students will produce a mini text about themselves information and they will send an e-mail to a classmate and they will receive one too. It is essential that the Teacher checks that the students are understanding the activities step by step. I will add it to the Hunter’s Model the different interactions that students need to practice in their activities like individual work, pair work, group work.
A. Isabel Moreno de la Rosa My Learning Experience
English language learning awareness “Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought”. Page | 145 Napoleon Hill
The most exciting fact of this course is all the choices that it brings us to learn and practice the language. I have learnt many new things, as grammar rules, use of different tenses, phrasal verbs, LOT of vocabulary, correct intonation patterns, punctuation rules, how to use different reading and listening strategies and how to enjoy and make the writing process easier by using templates on it. Besides, I`ve already had the opportunity to clarify incorrect meanings and be aware on the grammar points of different structures that I usually use but that I couldn`t explain grammatically. On the other hand, it was fantastic to have communication and to be able to read and listen my classmates’ works, because in this way I could compare and improve my own, by learning from them. Finally, I could realize that two of my biggest weaknesses are my lack of memory and my fear to expose my language to people who knows English, this fear usually limits my chances to practice, that is why it was very important for me the feedback and support that the tutor gave me because I could find the self confidence and strength that I need to continue.
Cultural learning awareness
“Education is the transmission of civilization”. Ariel and Will Duran
I think that as teachers, we must show and expose our students as much as we can to different cultural aspects of the countries where the language is spoken, because I consider that in the way that students learn about their history, ways of living, values, traditions and political issues, they will get a better idea of the culture, interest in the language and a lifelong learning.
Listening to tales and stories.
Reading Stories Talking about an interesting movie.
Watching films
Reading poems
Listening to songs and music.
Reading or listening the news.
Reading or listening about traditions
During this diploma there were many activities that taught us those cultural aspects and that we can adapt and use in our own class. Reading about “The Amistad incident” I learnt interesting historical aspects about slavery, and listening about the driving rules in Canada I found out that is dangerous to have soda cans in the floor of our car!!! Also I got a great idea about how enterprises can work together in a reading about Australia, and really surprised me the sense of honesty and humanity that some American people have in “Woman Lies about winning the Lottery”.
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New teaching strategies discovered “A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations”. Patricia Neal I think that most of the strategies and activities that we have learnt and done during this diploma are focused on the improvement of the new habits that as teachers in this century we must achieve. For example, even though most of the activities are gorgeous, I have to adapt them according to my students` needs, and thanks to the chat and e-mail, I have a better communication with them. Also, we are using some electronic tools that help them to improve all their works (not only for the English subject!) and we are taking risks in the use of technology and learning from one to each other. Finally, the most important thing that I am experiencing, is to see in some of my students, the joy of appreciate learning.
Reading teaching strategies “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten”. B. F. Skinner In this module we could learn not only reading strategies but interesting cultural facts. The activity that I liked more was the intensive reading activity “Cell phone safety”, because I consider that in it I had the chance not only to improve my reading strategies but to practice many other skills in addition.
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The text was about how the use of cell phones when people drive is related with car accidents. In my opinion, the teaching strategies were appropriated because firstly, we practiced different reading strategies as prediction, distinguish facts from opinions and infer and recognize vocabulary in context. Then we could improve our listening skill by listening different accents, stress and speeches, being helpful that we could watch the video instead of only listen to the text because images helps a lot to understand the meaning, and finally, we were focused on the learning and use of the vocabulary by doing some easy mini tasks.
Listening teaching strategies
“I think education is power. I think that being able to communicate with people is power. One of my main goals on the planet is to encourage people to empower themselves”. Oprah Winfrey
In my opinion, the most difficult activity was a listening of the Australian Network: “English bites” about seasonal jobs. It was difficult because the text was very long, used a lot of specialized vocabulary that I didn`t know , the site instructions weren`t clear enough so I spent a long time finding the activity and I didn`t like the tasks because they weren`t interesting. Besides, as I had the written interview, I focused my attention on the reading instead of on the listening.
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Something that I do like from this activity was the information of the text and the way that they presented the “specialized” vocabulary. To make this activity easier, I would ask some questions about seasonal jobs, then I would present the “specialized” vocabulary, after I would ask the students to listen to the interview while they have a task to do that could be answer with the general information of the text. Next I would give the transcript to check answers, and finally, I could set some more tasks to use the new vocabulary in context.
Speaking teaching strategies “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves”. Saint Francis de Sales I consider that the tool of the Voicethread was awesome to practice speaking not only because it has lot of themes that we can talk about and most of them can be adaptable according to the level of each person or the aim that we, as teachers, want to achieve, but because speaking is a time consuming activity in the classroom and when we have large classes, we don`t have the chance to listen to all the students. On the other hand, I like that as a student, we can listen to other people`s opinions and pronunciations, so we can improve our owns. Besides, I think that the fact that we can record, listen to our voice and eliminate the task, as many times as we want, until we feel comfortable with what we have done, give us a sense of confident.
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For example, if we are learning “personal information”, I could ask my students to use the pictures of people, choose someone interesting for them, give an identity, and talk about him/her. As long as we learn about routines, they can imagine and talk about the activities that they suppose that person does.
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Also they could describe people physically or emotionally, talk about his/her likes and dislikes, or just give his/her opinion about the person. As I told before, we only have to use our imagination to design different tasks according to our students needs.
Writing teaching strategies
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”. Oscar Wilde
For some people, writing is a quite challenging activity, sometimes it is because it`s difficult to get ideas and other times because we don`t know how to organize and express them. Fortunately, in this module I could find many interesting activities that help us to overcome these problems and enjoy the pleasure of writing. The uses of clues and paths when we wrote our Tall Tale and our poems, make the activities fun and easy, and it was an “extra bonus” when we had the project to design our own “book of poems”. Also, creating our comic strip and “My best vacation” using the “Photopeach”, I could realize that writing doesn`t have to be a painful process if we have the chance to be creative and write about something relevant for us.
In addition, writing a “book review” was a very useful activity because I could apply the guide that it gave me to write a proper review with all the characteristics that it must have (something that as a student need not only for my English class!). Finally, even when in a way, I had used movies in my classroom, the new perspective and ideas presented in this module, make me understand that as much as we use real life resources in our classes, our students will be motivated, will enjoy and will achieve better knowledge.
About ICT tools “Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them” Henry Steele Commager In a globalize world the technology and communication have a fundamental roll, everyday new programs and tools are developed to streamline information and get people in touch. The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education breaks with many paradigms that teachers used to have especially in our roll as trainers and in our concept of learning. Students must acquire abilities and knowledge which help them to exploit ICT and learn for a long life term and we, as their teachers, must facilitate this chore. We cannot be aside of the technology! In this diploma, there were lot of activities and strategies that we can use to achieve our goal, some of them required more technical skills but all of them were good to improve our language. Particularly, I loved the writing module because it helps me to find creative ways to write and express my feeling and I think that these activities will be very helpful to my students:
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Writing a “Tall Tale”. They can learn and practice linguistic aspects of language in a very funny way.
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Create 6 poems using the “ETCC.Instant Poetry Forms” and publish them on “Bookr”. They will learn how to write all kind of poems using clues and paths, and it is a wonderful experience to select the images to publish them in a book.
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Tell a story using pictures of your own or from internet using Photopeach. This is a great activity and tool because the students can select and adapt images according to the theme that they want to talk about.
Finally, many new things have been learnt through this diploma; good ideas, excellent tools, amazing activities and wonderful strategies, but nothing will worth if we don`t apply them in our dairy teaching, if we are not able to motivate our students and help them to find the love for learning.
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Rosa Moreno Ascencio My Learning Experience
Now I have a new opportunity to change and improve myself work as a teacher, with this course I discovered that I can improve my abilities of writing, listening, reading, speaking and looking for useful information in internet in order to improve my English classes. I will improve my teaching strategies, this course help me a lot. My vocabulary has been added with the texts I could learn more new words. I have learned how to work a text in class, first reading individually, after listening the text and if it is possible to watch the video, or a film. To raise my reading comprehension skills I need to read more magazines and newspapers in order to choose the most interesting texts to my students. In the web sites I used to read other information, I read about news, advertisements, etc. I learned that I can read other pages in internet and choose interesting exercises in order to improve my knowledge. I can practice the exercises that you have recommended and the tips they are useful for me. To raise my language level, I will try to speak in English, to study in books in internet, to read in English, to listen to music and to solve exercises. In the sites and readings, I learned a little about the English speaking community. I loved this practice, because I could get a grade immediately, I think that with this kind of activities about skimming and scanning my students will learn more. I loved these activities that I did and I got the results immediately, like quizzes about reading. I liked to read a text, after listening, then watching the video and answer questions. I liked very much listening pronunciation, I learned a lot, and the activity was easy, this activity could be very interesting for my students.
Cultural learning awareness It could be easy for my students to work exercises like The Golden Gate Bridge and American and British English, they could learn the differences, the names of the different text types are descriptive, informative, persuasive and instructive, this kind of sites can help students to learn vocabulary when they read the texts, and after they check the vocabulary
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that they don´t know, in order to understand the text. This kind of exercises help as teachers as students, I´m learning topics in an amazing way, I ´d like to know more, and improve my english classes, and this course are helping me a lot. These texts were very interesting and I liked it because has history, places, people, laws through the time, examples of brave people. I consider that my students in third grade are able to work with this kind of texts as a tale, or something about History, they can read a part of the text each week and finally we could watch the film that was produced by Steven Spielberg. A good strategy is to active Prior knowledge before reading because the students can remember their experiences. Another good strategy is to ask questions before, during and after reading because the students answer questions for different purposes including those that clarify their own developing understanding. It is possible to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words if readers synthesize and evaluate information based on prior knowledge. To visualize when reading to create a picture in our mind is helpful because the picture is evoked by descriptive details. It is used to help readers visualized ideas and to create images from the text. New teaching strategies discovered
I consider that the most exciting knowledge that I got in this Diploma course has guided me through the use of the web, to explore reading, dictionaries, publishing and interaction. Before this course I didn´t know about this important tool, but now I understand that I can ´t stay static in the changing world of technology and education. Now that I have received the tools I need to apply them in class and be adaptable to the new options. I have to be imaginative and creative, I have to use the new software as a useful tool of teachinglearning in English and check the interests of my students to improve my classes. Eight habits of highly effective 21st century teachers is a very successful article, I haven´t listened before, the strategies that I observed aren´t related to the habits mentioned in the text, in my Secondary School we don´t have internet yet, maybe next month (November), so I let homework to my students, but I can work in the classroom with this very important tool in my strategies, I think that I have to adapt the curriculum and the requirements to
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teach to the curriculum in imaginative ways. The show must go on, when I work in classroom I must adapt a dynamic teaching experience. Being visionary is to use the technologies, in Collaborating I don´t have enough time to check these tools, but teachers must prepare competence students. In taking risks I need to identify the goals and facilitate the learning, I think that I must learn a lot of tools in internet, because I don´t have enough abilities to do this works, Teachers must take courses and learn to communicate in a correct way. I say thank to you, and the people to do this activities in order to improve strategies of teachers, I like this course very much, I have learned a lot, strategies, pages for working, etc. Reading teaching strategies
It was very excited experience, this kind of sites can help students learn vocabulary when they read the texts, and after they check the vocabulary that they don´t know, in order to understand the text, this kind of exercises help as teachers as students, I want to say thank to you because I´m learning topics in an amazing way, I´d like to know more and improve my English class, and you are helping me a lot. I liked Civilians escape fighting in Sri Lanka because you can listen the information, reading it, watching the videos and working with vocabulary. This kind of exercises are excellent for teachers and students, they could be homework for students, and they can look for more videos with letters about conversation, text, etc. In Secondary school students love these activities, because they can choose interesting topics according to their age. And both students and teachers can learn about different cultures in the world. This kind of activities require some work setting up every time we are going to work with them. As educators, we need to be doing the things we should be teaching our students to be competitive when they leave school for the working world.
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Listening teaching strategies
I consider that the ability of listening is the most difficult for me, but in this Diploma Course I have learned some tips to improve this ability. Although other activities were very difficult, because they were real listening that native speakers would do, I couldn´t understand anything, only some numbers, but this kind of activities are really hard specially about an authentic listening and take some notes as I listen, I watched the video A Marathon Around My Block In my opinion, the activity could have been easier if we had read the New York Times video, I like to read the conversations or explanations in the videos. Reading is one my favorites activities and if I can´t understand some words, I can look for in my dictionary, I think that I´m very bad listener, so I have to improve this ability. This activity was too long, and I prefer short videos or stories. I prefer short interviews, because longer are more difficult for me.
Speaking teaching strategies
In my opinion there was one exciting activity, when we had to record our voice in evaluating my fluency and topic development, when I listened carefully to my recording
and evaluate myself using a rubric, focusing only on the two aspects selected. It was a little difficult to fill the rubric sincerely, but I tried, it isn´t easy to be conscious of own mistakes, but with this, I can know what aspects I can improve in my English practice, my voice is terrible, however my daughter told me that it was so nice. With my students I have recommended them that they record their voice and after listened that, they are very happy doing this activity and they try to improve their pronunciation in many topics, in all grades, with a lot of information. Now my students like to listen conversations, stories, etc in English because they want to know the correct pronunciation of words, they pay more attention and try to repeat immediately the new words that they are learning. They like to listen the cds. In order to improve their pronunciation and speaking in English very well. They said, and I believe them.
Writing teaching strategies
The writing teaching strategies were wonderful, I had the opportunity to learn and to practice different ways to write. I think so that the main teaching strategies were My funniest tale and comments on the activity, because I don´t know to write a lot, but in this activity I used the templates to create three stories, I learned to write what words are adjectives, nouns, adverbs, articles, etc. The three stories were funny, and this activity could been worked for the students.
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Teachers can use these small and easy projects to encourage our students to write tales and stories, students can use language creatively and appropriately selecting phrases from the templates and of course using their imagination and feelings to complete the writing product. Finally writing is a difficult skill to develop. I mean when writing we teachers and students must be careful with the grammar, the verb, spelling and punctuation in order to create a text with the minimum of mistakes. In my opinion this activity was very funny, I liked it very much, the stories are wonderful, the part of speech that I consider difficult for my students to use correctly is to understand the difference between nouns, verbs, articles, adverbs and adjectives, teachers must work in this part every day. Words quiz 'Getting the right tense' level A - results
Well done, you've finished the quiz. You scored 9/10 [90.0%] so why not print out your certificate? 1: This sentence describes an action in the present. 'He is watching television.' You said: true Well done! That's right. The sentence 'He is watching television.' describes an action in the present. 2: This sentence describes an action in the past. 'The bus is late again.' You said: false Well done, that's right. The sentence 'The bus is late again.' describes an action in the present, not the past. 3: This sentence describes a future action. 'The train will be an hour late.'
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You said: true Well done, that's right. 'The train will be an hour late.' describes a future action. 4: This sentence describes an action in the future. 'I bumped into an old friend yesterday.' You said: false Well done, that's right. 'I bumped into an old friend yesterday.' describes an action in the past, not the future. 5: This verb is in the present tense 'I am working.' You said: false Bad luck! The answer is 'true'. 'I am working.' is in the present tense. It is something that is happening right now. 6: This verb is in the past tense. 'I started.' You said: true Excellent, that's right. 'I started.' is in the past tense, it is the past of the verb 'to start'. 7: This verb is in the present tense. 'I went.' You said: false Good choice - you're right! 'I went.' is in the past tense. It is the past tense of the verb 'to go'. 8: This verb is in the future tense. 'He will go.' You said: true That's right. 'He will go.' is in the future tense. 9: This verb is in the present tense. 'He is sleeping.' You said: true Well done! That's right. 'He is sleeping.' is in the present tense.
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10: This verb is in the future tense. 'I will write.' You said: true Good going! That's right. 'I will write.' is in the future tense.
About ICT tools
Information and Communication Technologies in teaching and learning english is a very useful tool, so that our students are involved in technologies, and teachers must use too. Students know how to use cell phones, ipods, computers, they send messages, create their hi5, chat, etc. so teachers should take advantages of technology. The exercise 1.2 the minimal pairs were useful because I listened the clear difference between the end of the numbers. It was easy in this way. With my students I will listen news in the radio and pay attention in the pronunciation and listen the exercises with CDs from the books. The activity 2.1. Top-down listening, the video is about people who do exercises in a gym. The owners described a typical day in their life. They mentioned they love their job because it's healthy and it makes them feel young and great. In Collecting toys: The owners said that collecting toys is their passion. They mentioned they have the biggest toy show in the southern hemisphere by far. The activity 4.1. Thought groups, listen to one of these songs, Bon Jovi: Welcome to wherever you are and U2: Walk, on. after I watched this video, I learned much about thought groups, and the tips that I liked are: - No read long sentences - Don´t break up short statements - Identify nature pausing The song that I listened to was " Welcome to wherever you are" the singer is Bon Jovi, I really heard thought groups. I learned a new topic. Lesson planning
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Like teachers of century 21st we need to plan our class, according to the groups, times, interests of the students, their necessities, etc. I liked this Plan because it is clear about the characteristics that I need in a lesson plan, and includes the multiple intelligences that we need to learn a language. Teachers need to develop different activities according to the program, to evaluate each class, to do exams for students, to work individually and in teams, etc.
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Belem Pedrin Goméz My learning awareness
____________________________________________________________________ In this Diploma course I learnt to improve my Language Learning level with the modules to develop the four abilities (speaking, listening, writing and reading) using the tool provided in the Web sites. To have the opportunity of participating in this course was a great deal because l learnt so many productive things for my learning process and as a teacher. Now thanks to the Diploma course I have a different perspective of education and a better notion of my role in education.
New teaching strategies ____________________________________________________ The Diploma course has guided me through the use of the web, to explore reading, dictionaries, publishing and interaction, just to mention some. After exploring the advantages of the web I understand that I can´t permit to stay static in the changing world of technology and education. Now that I have received the tools I need to apply them in class and be adaptable to the new options.
Adapting, the 21st century educator must adapt to the requirements to teach and must be imaginative and creative. I must also adapt software and hardware, even when the tools fail teacher must go on and be adaptable to all new situations. Being visionary is crucial for a Teacher. We must look for the emerging tools and adapt them to the need of class. As Educators we must take risks and surrender to the Students knowledge and use it in favor. Learning is a continuous process and we need to be aware of that to go according to the constant change of the world. Educators must teach values and model our Students behavior, being tolerant, reflective about the use of the new tools like blogs and media. The 21st century educator is a leader who likes to set goals and objectives, leadership is crucial to the success or failure of any project.
Cultural learning awareness ______________________________________________________________________
The students must be aware of the cultural aspects that impact in the Language and that there are certain aspects that identify it, like different expressions, accent, pronunciation, and that all of them are important in the communication process. I really enjoyed listening and watching videos that provided me information of other countries that speak English and been able to hear the expressions.
Reading teaching strategies ______________________________________________________________________
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In the module 3, I explored all kinds of strategies for reading comprehension, (scanning, skimming, etc.) I became more fluid in my reading and learnt new words. I learnt about people and stories and consulted different sites useful for my class. Reading is a good habit that we as teachers need to practice. Through reading, students approach to knowledge. There are many activities that we can make with students to develop the ability of reading, like skimming, get specific information, because usually students have a problem to follow instructions and these strategies help them to be more careful and obtain good results. Certain narrations like the text of Ambrose Bierce are great because as you read you are using your imagination, you never know how the story is going to end all his story endings are unexpected. Reading can be use to develop imagination in the students, imagination promotes creativity which is essential in the learning process.
Listening and reading along is one of the activities I think my students would like to try because they love to hear different accents. I found interesting information about The Golden Gate Bridge story when it was built, not as many years as I thought, that the color of the bridge, which is orange international was chosen because of the fog, so the people could see through it, that 11 people died who fell down from the net, and the purpose of the construction was to have other mediums of transportation different than the ferry. I walked in 1998 in 1 hour and 10 minutes. I´ve been in this bridge and it´s a beautiful piece of engineering and interesting history, and this is my opinion! I read new facts in the American and British English Story. The Americans began to change the sound of their speech after the Revolutionary War in 1776, because before that year it was almost the same accent as the British and they wanted to separate from the British government.
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Benjamin Franklin wanted a new system of spelling, but was rejected. But influenced many other and Noah Webster, who wrote a language book for schools. He published his first spelling book in 1983 and the first dictionary on English language in 1828. Webster believed every letter of the words should be spoken so that the immigrants could learn more Page | 166 easily. Now I know why the Webster dictionary I so popular. To apply this exercises in class I would have to choose carefully the stories, because they have to be interesting for the students in order to get them interested.
In the reading module I improved my skill and strategies through different texts and helped me to be more fluent and interested in this activity.
Listening teaching strategies ______________________________________________________________________ In the listening module I had the opportunity to hear audios and identify different accents and pronunciation, which is good because this exercises help you be aware of the diversity of the language. I was able to identify word stress, Intonation and rhythm through videos. Reading along with someone´s voice was great because I corrected my pronunciation. The tag questions are very common in the native speakers and again these kind a statements and question make a conversation rich and fluent. They are very easy to practice and identify in texts, song and movies, a good way of practice them in the class with students. Listening is difficult for teenagers and all the strategies I used in the sites are innovative and attractive and this turns into a very significant learning.
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Speaking teaching strategies
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The module five is absolutely the most attractive and productive one for me, all the activities I did were and excellent source for my class. Interacted with partners, heard and recorded my voice, I heard music and described emotions, I gave opinions about topics, it was something unexpected and positive in my learning process. In the Audiacity audio I had many problems, downloading the software, but I never give up until I finally was able to get it done. I really thought this exercise would be easy, but a felt nervous hearing my voice and all the noise around it, my Mexican accent is present in the recording, but did it several times until I felt more confident. I heard 3 audio with music which transported me to different places and situations, I feel like music is a good strategy that can help students express to talk or write about the music or their feelings. I have experience with my students that music is motivating and relaxing. I personally have used music in class, not often as I want to. I agree with Johanna Ketchen about the many benefits of using music in class, just to set a mood to the class you can use music as a background, when the class is to restless and a mess you can play instrumental music or relaxing one. Another use to the music is to hear it and write a story to produce writing or narration, or share with the class about the texts they developed, there are many
advantages, but as a teacher I need to know the level of English my students have, to have a good result. About my experience on recording, I really enjoyed recording my voice, because I had the opportunity to evaluate many aspects, like pronunciation, word stress, intonation, etc. In the second one in voice thread I felt more confident; also it´s a good tool to use with the students for home works that could help develop the speaking ability. I will use it in the classroom. Usually the reaction I get from my students are good, but some times when I see their faces with a question mark, instead of explaining in Spanish I try to see other ways in English, like giving clues o describing. I always try to run out of options before I translate to Spanish.
One of the activities I made was to express agreement and disagreement of the tax raise with a partner of the Diploma course through the webcam; for both of us was difficult because we were nervous and was hard to virtually get together to do the discussion, at the end turned out well, Xochitl was an excellent partner.
Describing feelings and telling short stories was a great introspective activity.
Writing teaching strategies ______________________________________________________________________ Through writing I was able to express using different sites and tools, I wrote a poem and shared it with my partners, made a video with images and published it, described people, went over the elements of punctuation, used model, wrote about a movie and my weakness grammar. To conclude my Learning experience was productive and I´m sure I did improvement, but I know this a process that has to continue and I need to adapt to the changing technologies the world brings in order to be the excellent teacher my students deserve to have.
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I really enjoyed doing a wacky tale and my students will too. Perhaps the part that will be difficult is when writing adjectives because we only use a few in class and I think is good to do a review of adjectives before doing a wacky tale, I am sure they know so many, is just they don´t know to difference from other words. My partners and I enjoyed publishing and illustrating my poem through this activity a got to know my partners better. Writing about a book following a model is a great tip to use in the classroom, this site of model will stay in my screen to consult. My weird story was fun to remember and I liked to share with my partners. Following a model I wrote about an important event of my life.
The Diploma course was an adventure to me, although I was familiar with the some tools of web, this well structured course has cleared a few doubts I had. All the modules have been an excellent experience, but we all know our weak points need to work on. Speaking is one of the abilities that we all non native speaker of the English Language need to practice and improve; the best of all is that all the strategies and tools can be applied in the class with our students. The writing skill is also one of the abilities I need to improve, it is important to learn more vocabulary and follow the rules of grammar. I have obtained awareness of the importance of my autonomous learning process and I will look for more opportunities to be a better Teacher of the English Language. Thank you! Adriana and all the people behind the Diploma Course. Amazing Job!
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Xóchitl Pérez Pérez My Learning Experience
Along this Diploma, teachers had the opportunity to develop their linguistic skills with the help of incredible net sites. As learners and teachers of a second language, we all have much responsibility because we have the future of new generations in our hands. This course has been a wonderful experience to learn much more about the four linguistic competences, (Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing). It is also understood the Diploma is an opened door into the world of English where all people can access to another world with the use of the technology. During this period of time continuous listening, reading and writing become usual practices in order to perform activities which allowed understanding much better native speakers. Applying reading techniques, speaking exercises and writing models in a wide variety of interesting topics were fundamental to reach this goal.
CULTURAL LEARNING AWARENESS Page | 171
Nowadays, there are many world problems, and teachers must develop students’ conscience in order to create government organizations or civil societies which offer communities assistance and support.
Some important modern life problems like healthy and ecological situations, animals in danger of extinction, anti-social behavior, air pollution and children abuse could be a good beginning so that our teenagers know about their origins and they can avoid actions that increase these problems.
NEW TEACHING STRATEGIES DISCOVERED According to this point of view, teachers must be innovators and we have to focus in new techniques to teach, since the beginning of a good lesson plan. Students increase their knowledge according to the principal aim.
only can He all
Andrew Churches talks about an interest position about eight habits of highly effective teachers. Most of innovator and in service teachers completely agree with his considerations. It is necessary to have in mind that teachers must improve their communicative skills, so that, we teach in a better way. also thinks teachers must be collaborators, sharing, contributing, adapting and inventing in ambits.
In addition, teachers are able to adapt their program considering the student`s capabilities. If they really involve in this process by creating
tasks using Internet sites, both teachers and students could learn more and check their weaknesses and strengths using a second language. Giving some examples, if we invite them to use Photopeach and Makebeliefs comic sites, they can create comic tales and incredible presentations posting their own pictures. Those can be used Page | 172 when writing about likes and dislikes, physical and felling description, also, talking about their memories. They can use pictures about family, favorite pets or others according to the topic. Tales are a good way to express imaginary situations.
If taking advantage of these sites, teachers would adapt their lesson plans considering different student`s learning styles (Multiple Intelligences), so take the risk and allow students to make mistakes when they learn while they use the technology.
READING TEACHING STRATEGIES
Reading Module is a great option to improve communication skills. It offers a series of interesting Internet sites and useful exercises to perform efficient -. Most of the given activities are highly instructive and well designed to practice vocabulary, differences between facts from opinions, diversity of cultures, or any other kind of topic in different average levels. One of the most interesting sites is about “Adult learning activities”, where it is possible to learn about daily people activities outside our country. Examples of this are the readings “Foster Children” and “Cell phone cautions”. These activities are quite useful to practice spelling words, completing charts or solving tests in large groups Watching videos is another great way to practice listening and writing and also, to learn about possible consequences if we do not pay attention to advises or keep follow traffic regulations as shown in the “Cell Caution” activity.
By means of final quizzes they offer, it is possible to check understanding, in other words, verifying the main point of the activity. In this sense “Visual activities” make the difference.
LISTENING TEACHING STRATEGIES
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The recognition of a phrasal verb in a composition, often confuse beginners and even confident ESL teachers when trying to understand main ideas in complex texts. The activity would be easier with a phrasal verb and a picture included in a sentence at the very beginning of the lessons. The idea to print a picture in each statement is good if you need to identify properly the right definition. Later, proceed by listening to complete texts, where the expressions practiced in the previous activities could be in the information section. It seems that the key to check if the order of the activities is good enough is by answering or completing test and forms from a series, taken from a book or internet sites.
SPEAKING TEACHING STRATEGIES In this sense it is permitted affirm that students -as learners of a second language- are able to use many types of materials that allow them to practice and improve their speaking abilities with real situations. Voicethread site is an excellent tool which gathers all valuable characteristics. It offers students new techniques to develop their speaking skill. The activity will be success if teachers provide students new tools in order to speak easily using pictures and videos. Teachers could select a cartoon picture or a video fragment and follow instructions step by step until the end of each Unit. For example, with second grade: Firstly set students in small groups for the activity, teacher would invite them to make a
list of personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs in order to practice what they have already learned. Then, make them remember the meaning and pronunciation from those words using word cards.
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Next, students proceed watching the provided image or video to check which vocabulary could be useful to describe a character physical description, abilities and/or habits according to the picture. After making comments around the teams, each teenager would give a statement using the list they wrote before. At the end of the activity, the whole students watch and listen to their final work and they comment possible errors in pronunciation and intonation and how they feel doing the exercise. Finally, they could try with another presentation, so that they can do it in an individual way. The possibilities to apply this activity in schools are wide, but it depends on teacher abilities or teaching style and ITC’s resources. Always have in mind that a modern teacher task is to promote and facilitate learning by using technology.
WRITING TEACHING STRATEGIES Writing is considered the most difficult language skill to overcome by many English teachers. On the other hand, everybody has the opportunity to develop their abilities by practicing with marvelous strategies and websites. Some good strategies to practice writing are: Shared writings: Posting the exercises and other peer`s make comments about your tasks. Interactive writings: Easy way to express about feelings in a visual way using a poetry book and comic strips using the website. These net writings motivate everybody to write.
Personal writings: Guiding by given models and templates perhaps are the best way to practice writing using own ideas. Writing is always difficult when organizing main points, but with this magnificent method, the result is amazing. “Photopeach” is another incredible net site that anyPage | 175 teacher or student can use to write in any language in order to develop writing skills. Using suggested websites to practice English language surely will make you a better and more confident writer.
ABOUT ICT TOOLS Information and communication Technology (ICT) is an umbrella term that covers all technical means for processing and communication information. It is often used to describe digital technologies including methods for communication. ICT allows users to participate in a changing world in which work and other activities are transformed by access to varied and developing technologies. If we are English teachers, we have to look at the websites from different purposes so that, we improve or teaching with our students. All suggested activities have good strategies so that a learner can increase their English language capabilities. Some others are hard-working but, at the end of the lessons, all are useful to develop our communicative skills. The greatest section is “Speaking” Module. It is a real challenge but efficiently assists speakers to feel confident and lose fears when talking. Three excellent Internet tools useful to develop teacher or students speaking skills are:
Recording their own speeches using Audacity Program.
By means of this valuable tool students can practice recording their voices using a correct intonation and pronunciation.
Promote the participation in “Voicethread”. Page | 176
Students may share their oral productions, this way that they can give points of view from other partners. They can also check development.
Listening to some music clips.
This activity evokes many passages from their lives. It is a good way to practice speaking.
It is fundamental teacher motivate students to get great teaching and learning results.
LESSON PLANING A lesson plan is a plan for learning. The quality of planning affects the quality of results. Teachers must carefully select and arrange activities that will produce the desired learning outcomes in our students. It must be properly organized to achieve the lesson objective. The suggested cycle of a lesson planning includes the next characteristics: •
Determining the objectives.
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Researching the topic as defined by the objective.
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Selecting the appropriate method.
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Deciding how to organize the lesson.
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Establishing a strategy statement.
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Choosing appropriate support material.
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Preparing the introduction and conclusion of the lesson.
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Preparing a final outline.
According to this idea, the best lesson plan model in daily practice is the one suggested Page | 177 by Madeline Hunter’s where seven steps must be applied. • •
Anticipatory Set (setting the stage). Statement of Objectives.
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Instructional Input.
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Modeling-demonstrate.
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Check for understanding.
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Guided Practice.
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Independent Practice. The huge necessity to follow this model is because teachers need new strategies of teaching. Nowadays, the statics show a low learning in all levels of Education, especially in Public schools.
Adolescents are unmotivated, surly and uncooperative and that therefore they make poor language learners, but if they are to continue to be motivated, they clearly need to be interested both, in the subject they are studying and topics they are presented. Teachers must form creative, reflexive and capable students to face daily life challenges in easy way, by acquiring good strategies to teach followed by a correct sequence in lessons plans. MY FINAL REFLECTION Teachers all around have a huge responsibility to assist students’ language development. That is why this Diploma Course has been a personal great challenge. It is recognized teachers daily labor is harder to increase students’ interest on learning, mainly since they have other priorities, but it is not enough reason to avoid responsibilities or to apply same teaching experiences along years. In addition, nowadays teachers are unmotivated and many others lost their interest to continue studying but it is fundamental to learn and apply new ways of teaching. In this
sense, taking advantage of a Diploma like this, teacher encourages the task of learning more about new strategies in order to change old teaching styles. By using a wider variety of teaching tools and techniques, teaching activity will be more efficient and pleasant and students’ communication performance more effective. In fact, Page | 178 students’ natural expectations are clearly higher and they deserve the opportunity to acquire the best language skills and experiences from teaching activity. Finally, it is necessary to thank UNAM because of this great course. It gives teachers the opportunity to improve language skills. Lot of thanks to my course mates, because I learned much from their opinions and valuable comments, for giving me enough force to end this course but especially I want to thank my Tutor Adriana Aceves Martineck for all given support and the help she gave me along this Diploma. Without them, this amazing experience will not be the same. Thank you very much. La Piedad, Mich.
Leonardo Ruiz Uriostegui My Learning Experience
English language learning awareness
My language level has improved gradually and constantly. I have been insistent that reading is one of the most, if not the most important activity for achieving such improvement. Reading helps to increase vocabulary and puts it into context. I said before that if I understand English my students will understand it too. I am convinced that practice is one of the key factors that help raising my English level as well as my students. However, this practice is often difficult since people are not faced with the opportunity to practice outside of the classroom. Again, reading helps with this, but by
itself is not enough. Listening to English conversation by watching movies for instance helps complement reading as it exercises the ear and helps understanding pronunciation. I also had the opportunity to practice with speaking exercises. Page | 179
On the grammar aspects I believe my understanding has been improved. •
Tenses: tenses are one of the areas my students frequently have problems. Module 6 presents this subject in a very simple way and can I am considering presenting material based on it to help my students understand better the correct use of them.
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Vocabulary: I said before that my vocabulary has increased, mostly due to reading. I learned how to express agreement and disagreement, and which expressions could be used for that.
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Adjectives adverbs: Lessons had served me a lot in reviewing adverbs and adjectives. Adjectives give information about the noun. Adverbs additional information about the verb. Adjectives can e useful to describe people, places and things. Using both adverbs and adjectives, a conversation, or piece of writing can be more interesting.
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Sentence structure. The understanding of the structure of a sentence has helped me a lot to create better writings. I already knew that the sentence is the basic unit of written English language communication. A sentence must make sense on its own, must have a verb and a subject, and must end with a full stop.
Cultural learning awareness Cultural awareness is of high relevance when learning a foreign language because the language itself is part of the culture. There is no way to separate culture and language. This not only applies to the English language. It is not enough to understand grammar, phonology and lexis; cultural particularities are also involved. As English language teachers, we teach foreign culture whether we realize it or not. When we tell our students how start a conversation, greetings, formulas and other interactions, we are teaching not only language but culture. Foreign language teaching involves making the student aware of the need of changing his/her behavior to adapt to the foreign culture. Teacher’s task is to make the student aware of the differences between their own and the target culture, not to pass judgment over those differences. Cultural similarities should be taught to the students as well. In short terms, a language is learned and used in a cultural context.
The main reasons for teaching culture in the foreign language classroom should be to: Develop communication skills Develop intercultural understanding Understand behavioral and communication patterns in the foreign culture as well as the native culture of the student Appreciate common communication mistakes that may arise not from simple language use, but from cultural misunderstandings and behavior.
Language learning can be difficult if the student is not aware of this cultural context. There are numerous techniques that can be used to acculturate the students, namely: cultural capsules, readings, conversations, films, games, etc. One of the most interesting tools I learned about in this course is the use of movie segments. Movie segments present the use of language in real situations. The student can observe the reactions of the characters involved in those situations and compare them with their own reactions by asking “what would you do instead?” These movie segments can sometimes present information about lifestyles. It can also provide images and symbols of the target culture. Of course, teaching culture is not limited to the presentation of movie films. Teaching culture could involve discussions of daily life in the other language community, their living conditions, their school, relationship with friends, leisure, dating and marriage customs, festivals and ceremonies they celebrate, etcetera. Later on attention may be drawn to historical issues, society organization, geographical factors and how they impact the foreign culture way of life, production, buying and selling, aspects of city and country life, music, art, and so on. The objective of performing these activities is to create or increase cultural awareness among the students.
New teaching strategies discovered These are the eight habits mentioned in the article “Eight habits of highly effective 21st century teachers”: Adapting Being visionary Collaborating Taking risks
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Learning Communicating Modeling behavior Leading
I would like to highlight the following: Collaborating: When it comes to collaborating I have told my students that using the web is a tool from which we can take great advantage. It could be something as simple as sharing notes or it starting a discussion on a certain topic. If students understand the objective of the activity it can serve them for learning a new concept. Students must take the activity seriously. Unfortunately young students are not always aware of this and post comments entirely unrelated with the activity. It is the teacher’s duty to ensure that objectives are met through moderation and supervision. Learning: This diploma course is the learning habit itself applied. “We must continue to absorb experiences and knowledge. We must endeavor to stay current.” We teachers by taking this course acknowledge that. Modeling behavior: Language learning is a cultural exercise. We teach values and help our students understand not only use of language, but values from a foreign culture such as the English speaking community. In order for students to be able to successfully adapt when they communicate with a native English speaker or group, they must be aware of the cultural differences between them and us. We model behavior and teach values to help our students to communicate more effectively. This modeling behavior habit is closely related to cultural awareness in our students. Reading teaching strategies One of the most interesting activities I found on module 3 is Activity 2.1 Identifying facts and opinions. The reason I liked this particular activity is because I sometimes dedicate some time to read on forums of any subject. Sometimes you can discover interesting discussions about any topic and learn from the opinions people express about it. There are of course some cases in which the discussion heats up but remains civilized and others where it becomes an exchange of insults. However, when it remains civilized, sometimes one can put some scrutiny to the arguments expressed and see that people often express opinions and confuse them with facts, or use false arguments, try to elude the truth, present diversions (arguments presented with the intention to distract from the main topic or previous line of reasoning) and make use of fallacious reasoning. The ability to identify facts and opinions helps see beyond those false arguments and avoid being confused so easily. At least I feel that way. Now I understand that when someone claims that something is a fact it must be supported by evidence. You can ask for a reference. I also noticed that people often present “expert opinions” from notable people with experience in the topic and present that as evidence. However, as valuable
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and important that opinion may be, it is still an opinion, not evidence. This particular activity made me think a lot. It was fascinating and simple. Vocabulary learning Activity 2.1 was not the only interesting activity in this module. Activity 3.2 also called my Page | 182 attention as it helps learning vocabulary by using a text for reading, as well as providing support with several keywords. It is introduced with a summary and then is followed by the report. This report has an audio track which can be reproduced while reading the text. This helps reinforce the reading with a pronunciation guide. The web site provided by this activity is a very valuable resource. It provides the text for reading, the sound for both the report text and the vocabulary and new vocabulary words emphasized in bold. All vocabulary words come with their definitions which can be useful if the word is unfamiliar to the reader. It is worth noting that these reports are real reports and can be useful to be informed of the latest world news. That is the reason why I can say this is a valuable resource from which students can benefit.
The strategies that can be applied to these exercises are: Distinguish facts from opinions Identify main ideas and supporting details. Summarize information. Skimming Scanning Listening teaching strategies Module four of this diploma course is straightforward, pretty easy to follow and finish. It is really useful to train your ear. Also I learned a few facts I was unaware of. I learned about word stress. Word stress is of great relevance when we speak. Even though Module 4: Listening is not particularly difficult, I was a bit surprised when I saw that I made some mistakes in the dictation exercises. I probably should have taken a little more time on these exercises so I could have answered them more accurately. To be quite honest, I am not sure if this activity could have been easier, but I am inclined to say that no, it couldn’t have. As I’ve said earlier, the module is easy and straightforward, not to mention very fun. If I failed in that particular exercise is maybe because I just need to refine me ear a bit more listen to more videos, conversations and if possible, more English speaking people. I had a suggestion from a friend who studied Computer Systems. He told me that almost all material he has to study is in English. It goes from text, tutorials and videos to exercises and sample materials. He told me that I should try to listen to more videos in YouTube with English material as
a way to practice, and perhaps suggest a few videos to my students. This reminds me the movies and grammar activity from Module 6 unit 8. He showed me something like the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOwHiGCzZjo&feature=related
Now, even tough I do not understand much of what the guy in the video is talking about (you can surely note that he uses technical jargon frequently), I realize that videos like this are great to practice listening and use them to try to improve our comprehension. Of course I would have selected a different video with a totally different topic (something we poor mortals could comprehend much easier) and train my ear. Actually we did something like that in some of the exercises, like the songs from U2 with the lyrics on one side of the screen. Those activities were really fun! These exercises can be easier if they have text to read as we listen. If they have vocabulary words, they can be very useful.
Another interesting activity was 6.1 on Phrasal verbs. I commented that I believe that this is a difficult topic because of the nature of phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs are idiomatic expressions in which a verb can change its meaning by adding a preposition to it. This means that a verb can suddenly have two or more meanings just because you added a preposition. Think about the verb give. When I use this verb, it could mean to present something voluntarily or to hand to someone. But if I say give up for instance, then the meaning changes.
For us who are native Spanish speakers, this could present difficulty, since I am not aware it happens very often in our language, or even if something similar even happens at all!
After finishing this module I understand that I need to pay much more attention to word stress to ensure that I can follow better the meaning of a sentence. English is considered a stress language rather than a syllabic one. I must put the stress in the correct words to make to be understood. Put attention to intonation. Intonation and word stress are very similar concepts, but word stress, as the name suggests, focuses on the words, and intonation focuses on the sentences. We must also be aware of phrasal verbs and tag questions, so we are able to identify them and use them properly. Speaking teaching strategies I am of the opinion that the most useful activity in this module is the Voicethread activity. It is a great experience to be able to hear the voices of my course mates and express their opinions about a particular topic. This activity encourages group participation and we could take great advantage from it to ensure that our students remain interested in English language learning, providing them the opportunity to express a great variety of opinions. This works perfectly for them, because they
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could find this activity as a fun one and are able to enjoy it, no matter if they are usually shy. Using this kind of activities, students who usually remain as silent observers of their classmates start participating with greater confidence as they have the opportunity to review their answer, or comment it with other students. Besides, it could be used for a great variety of topics. Other activities such as How to give instructions are very useful in my opinion. We can be often faced with the need of expressing properly when giving instructions. What if we want to make a recipe, or give instructions to change a tire? What if we want to help someone who has problems with his/her computer or a device like a printer? Instructions must be expressed concisely and clearly. The links provided which talk about how to start giving instructions are helpful. Since these are common situations, students need to be able to express instructions, and need to know how to give or ask for them. Writing teaching strategies Grammar and writing Grammar and writing: I enjoyed the activity My funniest tale. I had the opportunity to write a little about myself. I know that this activity was written with a template with only a few spaces to edit. But believe it or not, is like if I had written the whole text of the activity. I really love playing soccer and I wanted to share that with others. The fact that the activity was based on templates made it easier. It gives you a better idea of how to start a text and is an excellent guide for students who have problems with writing activities. Correcting a piece of writing: This activity is something that we as English teachers do a lot. I could find a little more than 20 mistakes, but could not find all of them. A book of poems Writing ideas: The book of poems activity turned out to be very challenging to me. I was not expecting the book to generate such a positive impression. I am glad to see that the book of poems I wrote was enjoyed by my peers. This filled me with great satisfaction. I have never thought of me as a poet. This exercise is great for boosting creativity. Creating stories Activity 3.1 was a challenge too. The makebeliefscomix.com website is another tool that can be used to help students improve their writing skills and understand better the use of language, as well as learning new vocabulary and apply it. It can be used with teams to promote collaboration among students and make the experience even more amusing. About ICT tools I will use this opportunity to talk about the importance of Information Communications Tools in language learning.
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I believe that we as English language teachers should be concerned about Information Communications Tools for several reasons: It is motivating for both students and teachers. It makes the learning process more enjoyable. It offers a wide range of resources, which goes from text, presentations, video clips, vocabulary, exercises, audio, etc, It makes worldwide communication possible It offers distance learning opportunities, being this course one clear example of it.
The speaking module was one of the most productive and enjoyable from this course. The tools we used to communicate can certainly be used with our students to help them communicate and practice their English by expressing opinions and sharing ideas. I mentioned earlier the importance of tools like voicethread which is excellent to encourage participation among students and make the express what they think of certain topics. We made use of recording software like Audacity to record ourselves and then we could upload the files with our voices recorded. Another excellent tool to learn and practice is the website BBC Leaning English which is not only a site for reading; it is also useful for learning new vocabulary with full definitions provided just after the text, vocabulary words emphasized with bold letters and a site a track record of the report itself which helps understand pronunciation. I have heard comments before that some people have used videogames to practice their English. How is that? You may ask. Well, it turns out that when they get to play online, they usually encounter a lot of English speakers. They can be playing with people form many different parts of the world and communicate with each other, most of the time by using English. Of course these conversations are very informal. When I heard about this I could not see any practical value. I thought it could not be used with my students or any student who is devoting time to understand the English language, but then, to my great surprise, I found the following video titled Educational uses of Second Life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=FR&hl=fr&v=qOFU9oUF2HA
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Second Life is defined as a virtual world available through the Internet. In there, their residents can interact with what are called avatars. An avatar is just a simple representation of the user in the virtual world or alter ego. It is a place where people form a virtual community with many, many places to visit, which can go from houses, to shops and even museums. It even has its own economy. The pedagogical relevance of Second Life relies on the possibility to visit places of cultural nature such as museums, or even virtual classrooms inside this computer world. In there, students can visit replicas of historical places from which they can learn. They can participate in trivia exercises, meetings, workgroups and several activities. They can communicate with native English speakers; look for information and search for objects with definitions attached to them (useful for building vocabulary), etcetera. It probably would be impractical to suggest at this very moment to use Second Life with my own students due to several limitations like the hardware requirements, and the cost of such equipment. It is true that Personal Computers are affordable nowadays. However, not all students may have access to a computer even today and would be unable to enter into this game. After all, the video itself states that the possibilities of use of Second Life as an educational tool are still under development. Nonetheless, I considered it worth mentioning. Even though I insist on qualifying these tools as “very valuable or useful” lets not forget about an important issue. It is far beyond the value of the tool the importance of the teacher and his own training. Technology by itself is insufficient. Technology is not a panacea. If insufficient effort is put in training teachers to use technology and to use it imaginatively, then it is probably better to dispense technology altogether. We should be reminded that the teacher plays a crucial role in the education of students, which could hardly, if it is not impossible, be substituted by technology. Lesson planning Lesson planning is critical for achieving a good understanding of the topics presented in classroom by the students. There are many formats for lesson plans. I believe both Madeline Hunter’s Seven Steps and Bloom’s Taxonomy. I will focus in Bloom’s taxonomy in this document. I believe this is the most appropriate approach to my students in class because is easy to understand and to apply. Bloom’s taxonomy and critical thinking Bloom’s taxonomy divides educational objectives into three domains: Affective, Psychomotor and Cognitive. I will focus on the Cognitive domain.
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Image 1: Categories in the cognitive domain of Bloom's Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
There are six levels in the taxonomy, moving through the lowest order processes to the highest
Knowledge: In this level, we recall facts, previous experiences and concepts which were already learned. One way we could apply this to a lesson plan is by establishing the lesson requirements that students should meet to take the lesson. If students do not meet the lesson plan requirement, the probably it would be better to present the basis needed for it in an introductory section or lesson Comprehension: In this level we try to demonstrate the understanding of facts and ideas by organizing, comparing, stating ideas and giving descriptions. We could do this by asking the students some questions about the concepts which are being presented and how students perceive hem. Also we could ask them to make comparisons with a related topic. For instance, we could ask students how different tenses in the English language work and make a comparison between them. Application: In this level we make use of the recently acquired knowledge. For example, if the topic being covered by the lesson is how to express agreement or disagreement, we could encourage students in this phase to start conversations or debate about a specific topic and let them express
their positions on that topic so that later they can confront their opinions. This way they can apply their recently acquired knowledge on how to express agreement or disagreement. Analysis: Examine and break information into smaller parts by identifying motives or causes. Synthesis: Combine information I different ways so that they are easy to remember. This can involve the use of diagrams. Evaluation: This requires the establishment of a criterion that ensures the students have learned the concepts of the lesson.
A well developed lesson plan reflects interests and needs of the students. There are a few essential parts of a lesson plan:
Objectives: what students will be able to do after completing the lesson. Standards: which state content and developmental standards are addressed in the lesson. Procedures: What will the teacher do to get the students there. Assessment opportunities: What the teacher can do to see if the lesson was taught effectively. Modifications/accommodations: for any special needs for the students in class.
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Alejandro Vazquez Morales My learning experience Page | 189 When you are a teacher, your idea is that you are completed and you don’t have the necessity to learn more about your job, because you have all the knowledge for you and your students in few words, you are done. But what is going to happen if the time is changing, if the necessity is bigger now than past times? What is going to happen if the teacher is always the same? How can affect this teacher’s pride to the students? The case mention before, is mine and I’m sure that my case is happening somewhere else, but now I know that education concept is taking major interest in society in my community, so that’s the reason that I have the answer to those questions mentioned or at least is my intention to explain that the teacher’s knowledge is never enough for this beautiful labor, and necessity is bigger so we as teachers have to increase our didactic capabilities and improve in the same measure our knowledge in order to give the students the best instruction. If we don’t update ourselves then students are going to have a huge deficiency on their school discharge. My learning experience in this course have changed my labor in the classrooms and I hope don’t stop my own learning from here to further times; at the beginning I wanted to learn more about speaking because I had the wrong idea that it was the only necessity on me, but since I started it I found many unknown topics, and now I’m grateful with all I received from the course. Cultural learning awareness Internet gives everybody the opportunity to learn about culture, and in every web site of the course culture is found, so it must be approached for teachers, to implement in class, at least one of the huge varieties of topics. In every program’s unit there’s always something to learn about culture, and it’s important to focus teacher’s attention on this matter, because culture is surrounding our lives every day, and the main part of culture learning is that the boys and girls in secondary school, learn to recognize their own culture, and learn about other country´s culture. All web sites provide in the course have topics related with culture, for example History of Civil War, that I didn’t know very much, cultural differences in the same language, as the English in United States versus U.K.,“fear youngsters" article and fear of adults in U.K., Amistad incident, taught me the justice in past times, foster homes, that solve part of the problem in US. families.
New teaching strategies discovered The usage of ICT in the classroom is needed, and on this matter the internet tools found are absolutely a good option to implement, even when in the context seem to be impossible, is a challenge to bring the students those resources, is not indispensable to situate a class in internet, maybe a cell phone or videos can be used. Innovation in class is gratefully received by students, they enjoy the time given to this activities and what is more the result is better and they tend to like the English matter, more, and don’t be afraid of the class In addition is that students always want to learn about technology, here’s when adapting curriculum fits very well, and take new risks in order the young students learning, because they have high expectative in English class, it means that as a teachers we have to take care of them, facilitate learning with written, listen, and visual materials, they really appreciate it, and what is more they enjoy it a lot. Reading teaching strategies I didn’t use to be an excellent reader; in fact, it was always difficult for me to read a page when I was at school, that’s the reason that I never enjoyed the reading, but in this course, I experimented a great sensation, I felt well because I enjoyed narration more in English than Spanish. Skimming, scanning gets the perfect way to study or simply reading, this topic is a key to start the reading as a skill, because with the use of those techniques, students can improve texts interpretations and improve the time for studying. Other resource for this skill is the fact and opinion; they give a general idea of the topic, and help to interpret the main idea, the topic looks like an easy strategy for the students, I’m sure they will feel confident at same the time of using it. Listening teaching strategies After the review of the fourth module, I remembered the most difficult activity, and was one of “The Australia Network on English bites” specially “Sea lions” because pronunciation on the video was new for me, I tried and tried to understand, but was so difficult, so the best form to comprehend all the video, was with the help of the script, but even with it, at the first time I couldn’t follow the written words with the explanation but I repeated the listening and at the end I could do the activity. Then other obstacle were some idioms which their meanings were at the same video, I think the meaning comprehension of those words was necessary. Other problem part of the module was the activity about the intonation because I didn’t realized about the importance of this part of the language, and intonation is fundamental in English speaking
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and listening, so now I’m not against with the intonation learning and anymore, and with my students I take the time with the pronunciation practice. At this moment I can say that intonation and word stress, can help to understand the English speaking. Speaking teaching strategies Oral production is very difficult in class because they feel bad if one of their classmates make jokes about the participation, and I think that in this case cell phones like an ICT resource, are very useful because students have a participation with better results than a directly participation. Well, the activity “How to describe a situation or place” can be used as product in secondary English class, the music helps to remember situations and places seen by us during our lives, and I believe tends to improve the vocabulary and fluency. The manner of practicing this activity in class can be done with a cell phone as an option because many students have one, and they prefer to play with the cell phone recorder, than speaking in class, and I thought this, as a project to join all groups’ recordings and burn a CD with the students’ voices and see which of the recordings is the most interesting. The CD can be used to evaluate the students and they can asses themselves in class or homes and even evaluate each other. Writing teaching strategies. This module had the biggest variety of strategies of all, and it was so difficult for me and it represented a big challenge but against to this, there are very fun activities, and students can get pleasure from all of them. There’s another good strategy and it’s about to put ideas and sentences in correct order, and I think is hard for everybody to write texts with sense, that other people understand. There’s a good idea, the writing with patterns, and it’s very useful for people like students with not very much experience on writing, that have mistakes writing and need to be encourage. As I could see on this module, the use of a predetermined phrase is welcome when somebody doesn’t know the language at all, what is more, I have used this resource in my own language, and it helped me to explain ideas or comprehend complicated texts. I have used the activities again and guided some other texts to write, with those patterns. Writing is an art, and the online resources like the comics and photo albums, give everybody the opportunity to share feelings, to the people, and when we transcript those feelings in an easy way, something that happened to us or something we like, is better. About ICT tools
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lot of ICT tools on the internet that can everybody to learn more English, applications are dedicated to the four skills language The variety of educative pages, is levels but the most important is that there English topics, easier and in a funny way; the books we can learn more, but the on internet is that you can choose more and not only read the available book.
There are a help of the in different are many it´s true, in advantage options,
Advantages in English language learning through internet is that the student can manage his or her time, with the other daily activities,, it means at anytime. There are some powerful and complete content web sites, that is the case of "American Stories (text and mp3)" because it’s related directly with reading comprehension, and there are activities that have, not common vocabulary to learn, and they have a resource that students can appreciate a lot, it is the mp3 file in every reading, so students can read and repeat some difficult words. About the web sites, there’s the "BBC Learning English" web page, which activities have text, audio, vocabulary, and a variety of topics, the most important of activities is that they’re up dated and have very idioms for English native speakers, and on the "Reading strategies for the Journey North practiced with excellent topics which were very teachers, because they have many examples and applications for the English class.
those common web page Teacher" I useful for
Lesson planning About the most important studies about education it’s known that there are very good theories to apply in class and sometimes we have to adapt some contents four skills to them, but the most difficult for a teacher is the students’ learning, so I think that the Instructional Scaffolding (by, Jerome Bruner; Langer & Applebee) gives the students the opportunity to work with the teacher and the partners. At the first part they get the topic that is the porpoise of the class, then they appropriate that knowledge and after that they’ll have the opportunity to interact between themselves or with the
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teacher in a collaborative way, until they can produce by a homework, activity or anything that can be evaluated by partners or teacher. And talking about evaluation, this model provides to the teacher a good way to evaluate the students before, during and after the teaching-learning process, and I think this is an advantage in class. The information is flowing in a non restricted form because is in the student’s hands and they can manage it, in the manner they want and need. At the end, students can produce alone with all knowledge, they practiced in prior activities.
Instructional Scaffolding (Jerome Bruner; Langer & Applebee) Ownership--wish to learn Appropriateness--right level Support--structured guidance Collaboration--coaching Internalization--independent practice
Conclusion Education has been a huge challenge for parents and teachers, adding to this, the necessit y of English studying nowada ys, it’s clear that a teacher has to look for the best pedagogical resources in order to give the students the better wa y to learn, though the course I learnt a lot of contents that I didn’t know about the English language but the most i mportant at the end of all activities, is that as a teacher I need to update my language skills according with the ti mes necessities we are living, is not enough with the knowledge I have. This course showed me the long wa y to cover, because it never ends, so it’s the teacher learning, and now the last we have to do is accept the challenge and compromi sing with this noble work.
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