Group dynamics

Ramadan party

The first thing I thought when I received the timetable for the master in TESOL was:

“All my savings for just 10 hours of class per week”

I did not tell anybody, of course, but after one month my thoughts are changing and I really appreciate to have ´enough` time to read and reflect on it from my own teaching and learnin experience. I would also like to comment on the workshops as this is something which it is not usual in Spain, especially in my classes. Being a teacher in the university, the students are used to receive lectures from teachers and they do not work in groups; I imagine myself imparting this kind of classes and my students saying something like:

`We could do it in the bar just having a beer´ 

or I imagine them  talking in Catalan about other soccer or the last look of Britney whatever. as I think that in Spain our students and even the teachers are more used to teacher-centred classrooms.

Anyway I am enjoying most of the ideas of the workshops and I think how to apply it in my classes.  So, what I thought is that 

• jigsaw reading in groups
• oral presentations to the other students in the classroom.
• reflection in groups again
• sharing our reflections with the whole classroom and the teacher.

 

Observations

 

I had a similar activity to the one used this morning in the workshop:

 

http://fced.udg.es/assignatures/didangles/VideoClips/PastSimple/ThePastTenses.ppt

 

 

This activity is worked in pairs:

 

-         Person A is playing the role of the student who is watching the video and so he must describe what he / she sees.

 

-         Person B will be sitting in front of Person A and will not be watching the video.

 

The activity manages to elicit (to obtain or produce something, especially information or a reaction: Have you managed to elicit a response from them yet?)  target language in order to fill in the information gap.

It can go from a controlled activity (video 1) to a more open type of activity, that is, a freer activity.  It will depend on the Ss levels

The aim here is to acquire:

-         Vocabulary: by bus, on foot – old information to new information.

-         Grammar: past simple.

-         Language use: predict, retell, summarize, interpret…

 

I will link this video activity to all the Second Language Theories studied so far:

 

 

Krashen:

 

-         Acquiring and learning is all mix together. We can’t test it.

-         Non-explicit grammar. They deduce grammar. Only we monitor grammar if necessary.

-         Affective filter. Motivation. We give input according to their own level. Low affective filter because preparation, work in pairs, music / video, laughing, they do not have to understand English.

-         Error correction at the end

-         Real

o       Krashen’s comprehensible input.

 

i                                  +                     1

 

o       Video Pair A to B:                                          new

o       Teacher instructions:

o       Example: Cup                                                 Hat (higher level voc.)

o       Shouting                                                         Quarreling,

o       Suitcase                                                          Briefcase

o       Elevator                                                          Lift

 

-         Swain’s Output.

 

Part B: communicative competence. Talk. Krashen didn’t arrive here. Krashen talks about speaking at the end but he doesn’t care about that. Swain talks about that from the very beginning:

 

Stimulus ———-à Response (output)

 

 

Universal Grammar:

 

-         Use of L1: teacher helps.

-         Do we automatically go to L1? Negative transfer.

 

L1   ß ———- your level —————————————– à L2

What is language, learning and language learning?

• What is language?

From a personal perspective and without trying to use any theoretical background, language is a tool that we use to communicate with other people. This communication can be verbal or non-verbal. Through verbal communication we use our speaking skills and writing skills. For non-verbal communication we use other resources such as mime, gestures and so on.

• What is learning?

Learning is the way we acquire knowledge through a formal way. It has to do with a more academic understanding of how we acquire knowledge. We can distinguish it from the concept of acquisition that takes us to a more informal way of acquiring a learning.

• What is language learning?

 Language learning is the different approaches and methodologies we use in order to become proficient in a language. Constant research is basic in order to know how a language is learnt and acquired.

What is language, learning and language learning? Workshop 2

I would like to reinforce the observations posted  on the 27th of Setember titled What is language, learning and language learning?  once I have assisted to the workshop 1 with several concepts explained there:

What is language?

During this session we discussed the concept of language with the other students and I would like to add several ideas taken from the workshop:

• Language as a communcation system - written & spoken.
• Within this system we can interpret language from the point of view of: phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, lexis and I would like to emphasise here: pragmatics and discourse.
  • Pragmatics: hidden meaning
  • Discourse: the stretches of language above the level of sentences. Here, a new concept appeared: corpus based.

What is learning?

Acquiring – unconscious process -

knowledge consciously – class association-.

What is language learning?

In order to perfect language, learning is important.

Motivation

 

 

 

In Spolsky’s model of second language learning motivation appears as one of the key concepts when trying to learn a second language, leaving age, personality, capabilities or personal knowledge in a more peripheral area.

I see motivation as a very important concept in trying to acquire a second language but I would like to link this concept to the concept of emotion. In fact, I’ve been thinking about how important is to link our emotions to our learning process and it has been reinforced by Ruby’s entrance on her blog on the 23^rd of October titled

 

Emotion in SLA; she states “how we not only define emotion but how we place it in relation to learning” and she thinks that “we don’t often

 

 take that into account. As teachers, we attempt to be completely unemotional in the classroom”. Perhaps, a cultural difference arises here between Spanish way of teaching and interacting with the classroom and the Anglo-Saxon way. Do you think that teachers in UK are not allowed to talk about ‘emotions’?

 

But how do we define emotion?

 

The first thing that comes into my mind when trying to answer this question is how a possible definition of this concept can change depending on the cultural background we are in. As a teacher in Spain, I feel that it is easier for us – teachers – to talk about more personal things with our students and I wonder if teachers from an Anglo-Saxon background or other backgrounds would feel it more difficult and even embarrassing.

 

But how do we place it in relation to learning? Could we start by placing our personal experiences?

 

I will just write down here two activities I usually use to motivate my students to talk about their personal experiences in the classroom where I show my own personal experience as a way of motivating them to talk about their personal experiences:

 

-         http://www.slideshare.net/oaktree/unit-1-trip-project-media-daily-life-the-teacher-an-example

 

-         http://sergi-mt21myfamily.blogspot.com/

 

Learner’s point of view

 

 

 

Observations in Ruby’s Research Lecture

 

•  All depends on which sight of the classroom we are. 

We were supposed to do a brainstorming activity about what we saw in the classroom and I wrote down words like:

 

Ears – egiptians – hairs – teacher …

 

It meant that what I was looking at was different from what the teacher was looking at.

 

It made me think about the learners point of view in the classroom; as we - as teachers – are used to see the class from a differen point of view, this exercise made me think that sometimes learners can see different things from what the teachers see and understand the procedures in the classroom in a different way.

My role as a teacher

motivator

facilitator

aid

encourager

participant

listener

giver of feedback

organiser

assessor

prompter

TESOL bibliography

As I told you in the last post, I promised you that I would read a lot and this is what I have been doing these firs days. Lots of ideas come to my head about what is language and lerning but what worries me most of all right now is the following:

WHERE and HOW can we keep all these theoretical backgrounds, all the information we acquire through reading, taking notes, exchanging information with other teachers…?

WHERE ?

I have started another BLOG: http://tesolbibliography.wordpress.com/

HOW ?

I will create several CATEGORIES that will help me to organize the books I am reading:

• Authors
• Books
• Methodology
• Subjects
• …

Moreover, I will write down TAGS within each post that will help me to search the topics I have read about:

• Data analysis
• Case studies
• Interviews
• …

The blog is still under construction but it is a way to organize the bibliograpy I am reading that I thought it would be useful.

Delicious

Ruby suggested the idea of using delicious as a way of organizing the bibliography. I know the tool and I think it is a very good tool to save websites. In Spain, I usually use a similar one which is called Mister Wong. I have created two groups:

• Unplugged where I save websites related to IT and English classes.
• Webquest where, with a group of other teachers, we save websites related with the creation of scavenger hunts.  

Motivation

More than 15 years ago I received a letter from a friend of mine from Canada. She was suggesting me that instead of writing letters we couls ‘e-mail’ each other. In Spain, Internet had not arrived yet and I did not have any idea of what she was talking about.

This was my first contact with this world of the New Technologies that I have been exploring in my English classes for a long time now. Why such an interest for the use of ICT in the classroom?

Motivation

“Given motivation anyone can learn a language” (Skehan, 1989:49)

Somehow I thought that new technologies would be a good way of motivating my students in using English. First, it was mail exchange, then, it was CD/Roms and then it was working with webs which were more developed; the last achievement is the creation of a virtual campus. The source of motivation is the learning activity itself: “the stimulus for motivation would be the inherent interest of learning, because classrooms or learning situations might be attractive places in themselves” (Skehan, 1989:49)

BUT

after reading “Individual Differences in Second-language Learning” (Skehan, 1989) and attending the first classes on TESOL and the Learner I realize that

“There are different methods but no single best one,

only one that works with our students, in our context”

Structuralism

Today’s workshop on SLA theories took me to the first years when I was taught English. I started learning English around twenty years ago. It was the beginning of English teaching in Catalonia and the study of French had started to decay for some time. The change was important as it meant that we would learn a language that would be much more different to us.

This fact makes me think about two aspects related with that time:

• The importance of this change would be very important from the perspective of the ´contrastive analysis` hypothesis as Catalan, Spanish and French share similar rules and so ´positive transfer` would occur. In fact, it is easier for Spaniards and Catalans to understand French or Italian people.
• My English teacher would know it perfectly because the methodology he used clearly  link to structuralism as we were supposed to repeat and practice a set of structures once and again. First, the teacher was doing it , then all the students were doing it all together and finally the tape started and one by one we had a kind of oral exam where we had to change parts of a sentence as in the following example:
  • ´What does the teacher study?’
  • ´The teacher studies music`
  •  (play)
  • 5 seconds
  • What does the teacher —–?

Accuracy was important for him.

Move, please!

It is really interesting how students in a classroom attach to a group of people and how they feel a little bit embarrassed when they are told to change groups – even teachers or adults as it is our case in the classroom.

This was dealt very well in the workshop this morning when our teacher gave a number to each of us and put a number to each table in the class. This way we had to move and go to the table that corresponded with our number. I was the first one to feel a little bit embarrassed but it was one to change a little bit the dynamics of the classroom.