TEACHING IN HIGH SCHOOLS

Introduction

In this blog you will find the different activities that the students developed in the subject Didactics of the English Language through the semester I 2017 ; for example, teaching English in the high school they chose to teach and technical English on diffent majors  in the University of El Salvador that were chosen from the teacher.Besides that you will find some of their experiences they got from the semester which made them grow as a future teachers of the English Language.More important you will find the diffents materials they used to reached those projects.

By : Blanca Yohana Bolaños

        Dalia Gabriela Gonzàlez

        Natalia Patricia Muñoz

Introducction(Didactics of The English Language I-2017

Introduction

In this blog you will find the different activities that the students developed in the subject Didactics of the English Language through the semester I 2017 ; for example, teaching English in the high school they chose to teach and technical English on diffent majors  in the University of El Salvador that were chosen from the teacher.Besides that you will find some of their experiences they got from the semester which made them grow as a future teachers of the English Language.More important you will find the diffents materials they used to reached those projects.


By : Blanca Yohana Bolaños
        Dalia Gabriela Gonzàlez
        Natalia Patricia Muñoz

INTRODUCTION

In this site, you wil find things related with process of teaching and learning. Attending some essential points, we want to show you the beautiful things about teaching little kids. To be more specific, you can find strategies that you can apply at the moment of teaching. In this way, you are going to be able to distinguish between the things you can do and the ones that you cannot because as future teachers we have to keep in mind that teachers have to inspire their students.

I. THE CHANGING WORLD OF ENGLISH.

-Why did English become such an important language?

English became such an important language because first it became a lingua franca that was a language used widely for communications between people who do not share the same first language. So they needed to communicate with someone else.

After developing for almost a millennium on the British Isles, English was taken around the world by the sailors, soldiers, pilgrims, traders and missionaries of the British Empire. By the time anything resembling a language policy was introduced, English had already reached all corners of the globe. For example, English-speaking puritans were not the only Europeans to arrive in North America: Spanish, French, Dutch and German were also widely spoken. All of the languages were reinforced by waves of immigration from Europe in the following centuries in which

But in the process of designing a “United” States, the USA’s founders knew the importance of language for national identity. English was the majority language and had to be encouraged. As recently as the start of the 20^th Century, several states banned the teaching of foreign languages in private schools and homes. The U.S. Supreme Court only struck down restrictions on private language education in 1923.

Some important things to consider in the important of the English language were.

The economics because militaries prowess may account for initial establishment of language, as we have seen, but it is economic power that ensures its survival and growth. A major factor in the growth of English has been the spread of global commerce, pushed on by the dominance of the United States as world economic power.

Information exchange a great deal of academic discourse around the world tales place in English. It is often a lingua franca of conferences, for example, and may journal articles in fields as diverse as astrophysics and zoology have English as a default language.

Travel. Much travel and tourism is carried on, around the world, in English. Of course this is not always the case, as the multilingualism of many tourism workers in different countries demonstrates.

Popular culture. In the western world, at least, English is a dominating language in popular culture. Pop music in English saturates the planets airwaves. Thus many people who are not English speakers can sing words from their favorite’s English-medium songs.

-Why do you consider it continues being so important?

Today’s economy is increasingly globalized, and this means that many of us are interacting across cultures in a way we never did before. In such an economy, the importance of learning English becomes self-evident. Learning English helps you to communicate across cultures and to conduct business in lands you may never have previously considered viable markets. It also helps you to address customers in the language that they understand best and in which they are most comfortable communicating. Additionally, the importance of learning English is emphasized every day when we see the diversity of earth’s cultures and the amazing array of people that make up our global community.

That said, there is another reason supporting the importance of learning English. Scientific studies have shown that learning English improves brain function and stimulates creativity. When you know a new language, you start to see connections you didn’t see before because every language approaches the world in a slightly different way. As a result, you have the opportunity to understand the world from the perspective of another culture and gain a greater appreciation of human society in all its diversity. As a consequence, the importance of learning English is again reinforced. You become not just equipped to communicate across cultures but empowered to understand others’ points of view.

-How do you predict the future of English?

We have noticed that the English is spoken by at least a quarter of the world’s population. It is important, too, to realize that this is not spoken by three quarters of that same population. However, it is clear from the way its use has grown in the last decade that this situation is about to change.

One way of predicting the future is to look back at the past. The global role English plays today as a lingua franca – used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages – has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.

Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian.

Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New “interlanguages” are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations. The English language will take the main language in the whole word to communicate and to share the different opinions that the people have.

What we think is that English grow and native speakers are becoming less and less powerful in the daily use of the language, we will have to adjust the way in which both native and non-native experts have traditionally thought learning and teaching English around the word.

II. LESSON PLAN AS A SUCCESS TOOL FOR TEACHERS.

-How useful is lesson planning for teachers?

Lesson planning is useful because it helps teacher ensure the activities that go on in the classroom. Many times some teachers forget the activity that he has to do where they miss out educational target, so lesson planning has the advantage that remain you each step of the class. But also lesson planning has more advantages that make it useful for teachers, for example:

1-It inspires the teacher to improve the further lessons, and to ask proper and important questions.

2. It helps the teacher in evaluating his or her teaching and in creating the interest of students towards the lesson.

3. It develops self confidence in the teacher.

4.  Proper care is taken on take into consideration, the level and previous knowledge of students.

5. It stimulates the teacher to think in an organized manner.

6. It helps the teacher to understand to objectives properly.

-What are the most useful parts in the lesson plan when teaching very young learners (VYL)?

 It is important to have the learning objectives in mind because those should drive the development and implementation of all activities in the classroom. Teacher must be focus in the objectives because they are the goals that we set ourselves to achieve at the end of the class. But also when teachers teach VYL is important to be focus in the activities, but you will ask why activities are important. Let me tell you that in this age 3-6 years children learn quick, and have so much fun with learning. They are such active learners, processing new experiences, asking questions, trying things out, experimenting, practicing over and over until they master new skills.They find difficult to sit still; that´s why, the teacher must create activities according to the topic. It will help students to learn in a funny way.

Lesson planning at the beginning can be confuse because we only think in the activities we want to develop, but we must think in the objectives. Teacher Natalia did not do it. She got confuse when she would do her first class; fortunately, she had a friend that was a teacher. The friend teacher explained all about lesson planning. This kind of problem occur when someone does not have a guide. But teacher Natalia share her experience with lesson planning saying that always we think that lesson planning is not important because every people have the intelligence to remember every part of the class without lesson planning, that is wrong. The teacher also share that when she was giving the class, she saw how important lesson planning is. The lesson planning was used in every activity, every step of the class something that helps teacher and students. Students learn more when the teacher followed her guide because they got their classes according their level and in chronological way. 

III. COMPARE TRADITIONAL TEACHING AND 21st CENTURY TEACHING.

-Top ten traits of the 21st century ELT practitioner (teacher’s profile)

1.    Adapting

Teachers must know about new technologies, and they should use them in order to make the class better. The knowledge they have about technologies should be used in the classroom with new techniques for the students learning.

2.    Being Visionary

Teachers must have a big imagination in order to use the technologies in the class, and make the students work and learn with this tools.

3.    Collaborating

As teachers we must share, contribute, adapt and invent new ways to teach for making a better class; this must be a priority for us.

4.    Taking Risks

The teacher must take risks with the new technologies and devices, and plan the class integrating these tools knowing that there is so much to learn.

5.    Learning

Teachers expect students to le life-long learners, so teachers must keep learning new things for teaching their students and make them better through the time.

6.    Communicating

Teachers should have a good rapport with their students, but they should keep a good control and management of the class. The good communication among teacher and students should be inside and outside the class.

7.    Modelling Behaviour

This means that teachers must behave and be a role model for their students; we must show them a good way to behave with values and tolerance for making them see a good way to become better people.

8.    Leading

Teachers know how to leader the class using new technologies and making the class even better from before.

9.    “Can Do” Attitude

Practitioners must to believe in what they are doing; they are looking betters ways to teach. 

Also, they are making a good rapport with the students.

10. Effective Communicator

Teachers must be excellent communicators; this mean they have to know how to communicate in either oral or written form.

-The teacher of the 21st century must be able to:

1. Create and edit digital audio. (songs, activities)

2. Exploit some digital images for classroom use.

3. Use video content to engage students.

4. Use social networking sites to connect with colleagues and grow professionally.

5. Create and deliver asynchronous presentations and training sessions.

6. Have knowledge about online security.

7. Create screen capture videos and tutorials.

8.Use and provide students with task management tools to organize their work and plan their learning.

9.Exploit computer games for pedagogical purposes.

10 Use digital assessment tools to create quizzes.

-The salient traits between NESTs and non-NESTs

There are big differences between NESTs and non-NESTs, and the language learning process can be affected by this reason.  NESTs are the teachers that have English as their mother tongue and non-NESTs are the ones that have English as their second language; also, non-NESTs have the advantage of understand and be aware of the mistakes the students can make. NESTs focus more in fluency, but non-NESTs focus more in grammar rules.

Everybody says that native speakers teachers are better than  non native speakers teachers because they were born in a country which they use the mother tongue, and they are the gold standard of spoken and written language, whereas the non nests are inferior educators because they lack this innate linguistic skill.

Non Nests:

-They are perceived as good teachers of grammar. ( its true because they are focus on grammar structures.)

-They are able to help the students on their first language. When is necessary teachers can explain  to the students in the first language.)

-Students find class with them easier.( students have confidence.)

-They don’t take care about pronunciation.

Nests:

-They are the ideal model for language production.(they have the perfect pronunciation.)

-Their speech is held up as the gold standard of grammatical correctness.

-They have the correct pronunciation.

-They are able to share a new culture.(students are expose to learn from them a new culture.)

I have noticed everything I wrote in this page because Students are able to ask the teaches in a good way, but sometimes they pushing you to have a better pronunciation even when they are not native speakers.

IV. THE YOUNG LEARNER.

Teaching to very young learners was an amazing experience that taught us how to deal with little kids. Since we we were teaching to very young learners, we faced some challenging situations that made us understand the world of kindergarten students. Those students we were teaching to were among 4 and 6 years old who are considered to be in the level one or the beginner stage. They have different attention spans because they are not the same, and as it happens with adults and children as well, we have to pay special attention to their special needs.

Let’s talk about the attention span of the children we were teaching to. As explained before, children do not learn all the same. But what does it mean? It means that every child is a complete world that need individual attention. It happened in our experience as kindergarten teachers; we observed while we were teaching and developing different activities that some children seem to learn in an easier way. Something all of us could see, for example, while teaching the colors, is that some students were very good at remembering the new words, and some other could remember but with the teacher help. Some of them used to associate the new words with things that they have seen in television, for example, when a classmate was teaching the colors, a little kid raised his hand and said “ blue teacher?.. Like in the “ Blue’s clues”.”The teacher was fascinated and said that the dog was called Blue because it was indeed blue. Children do not like to share their things, and we all could notice that, for example, when it came to a coloring activity, they used to fight for the color pencils and did not let anybody take them until the task was already finished.

Sometimes we all got frustrated because they did not pay attention to the activities we were developing to them. What we did not know until that moment is that children get bored easily if the activity is not well prepared to their level or if it seems boring to them. They have lots of energy; they like to make a lot of noise that is why some activities that make them lose their energies seemed to work better; however, in some instances, we could not manged well the whole group, for many reasons. But when it came to sing a song related to the topic, we got the attention of all the children in the classroom. It worked better than explaining them word by word in a mechanic way.

They were respectful and good listeners; every day that we arrived to the classroom all of them were expecting what the new topic was going to be about . But that energy did not last much longer if we did not use to develop an activity that could make them feel comfortable and entertained. They used to love warm up activities, that is why we learned that a very suitable warm up activity was really necessary to have their attention during the whole class.

  

The book “Teaching English to Children by Wendy A Scott and Lisbeth H Ytreberg“ categorizes very young learners into two categories: the ones in the level one or beginner stage ( five to 6 years old) and the ones in the level two ( 8 to 10). We were teaching to children in the beginner stage, so we are going to contrast the characteristics the book talks about with the ones we saw in our children:

As the book says “ they can talk about what they are doing”, we could see that; in some cases the students were taking the leader role and used to tell other classmates what the activity was about if they classmates did not understand. Also it says that they can tell you what they have done or heard; it used to happen very often, for example, when playing them a video, they were all talking and telling what they saw in that video, and if it was a fairy tell, told by the teacher, they could retail the story or give some ideas about it.

They can plan activities, argue for something and tell you why they tink what think. These points seemed not to occur in our teaching practicum, but while we were discussing about it, we noticed that it happens indeed, but it is not that much notoriously. For example, some of us faced some students that did not like to participate, and they simply answer that they did not want to do that kind of activity or that they wanted to continue playing and not just coloring pictures and repeating words.

We noticed that they use they logical reasoning. A clear example is like the one that happened to one of our classmates: He gave them some pictures about the body parts in order to color them, but the bodies did not have hands, eyes, mouth, ears and so on; the children did not think twice to draw the missing parts of the body. The teacher was going to explain them that they had to draw the missing parts, but they were almost finishing with the eyes or the mouth.