WEBINAR: Teaching Towards The Young Learners. (Macmillan)

Teaching Towards The Young Learners

By Katie Foufouti

This webinar was devoted to teaching Young learners (about 7-12 years old). She gave a variety of strategies and activities to implement with Young learners groups no matter the places where we work. She talked about how to teach students towards the exams and how important is to test them during preparation. We should test them without imitating the official exam all the time. We should do this testing through games so they can have fun in the classroom while learning at the same time.

  During the webinar, she presented several questions about how we would prepare students for exams. We had to choose a suitable option for us.

  Then, she talked about the assessment and the different ways of collecting information about a learner´s progress and achievement. We should do it every lesson and not only at the end of a unit or at the end of the term. It has a big influence on learners when we make sure that we are giving a positive feedback. We have to be careful of the words we use every time we asses students. All young students should have a feeling of achievement. We should use students´ results to plan the following lessons according to what they need to improve.

  In the last part of the webinar, she presented a set of activities that are commonly used to prepare young learners to sit for the exams (such as Cambridge exams).

  I liked this seminar because it was really interactive and it talked about the importance of assessing students permanently. Although not all of our students may sit for exams, the activities she proposed can be adapted for any classroom context and they seem to be very effective.  

SEMINAR: "Reaching and teaching students effectively"

Reaching and teaching students effectively.

By Professor James Duncan

This seminar was in charge of Professor James Duncan who is specialized on the study of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).  His lecture is based on this approach. I could remember some concepts of NLP but I wanted to have a clearer view of it. According to NLP, our mind and body are interconnected and we are responsible for the models of the world that we create. In language teaching, NLP is concerned with the study of how we communicate with others and how we communicate with ourselves.

If we trained ourselves in NLP, we would learn how to get rapport with anybody, we would know how to become flexible in our communication, in fact we would be able to use language effectively.

Jamie said that NLP can help any person who wants to improve the way in which they live and develop an understanding of how to maximize their potential.

  Then we made a quiz to see what kind of teaching practice we carried out and how NLP could help us.  

Jamie also talked about the different ways in which our students may perceive the world through their senses. That is why within the same class we may have students that are visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. Each of them has a physical location in the brain where the experience is sent, processed, and stored. Our assimilation of this input can transform the information into something different from the original. What we later recall is a representation or model of that what our sensory organs transmitted to us.

  We saw the possible ways in which visual, auditory and kinaesthetic students learn. We had to think of suitable activities for those learners´ needs.

   I found this workshop highly interested and I learnt many new things about NLP. It was such a dynamique seminar. I think it is useful for teachers because we need to know what happens in our students´ brains every time we are in front of the classroom. We need to encourage students to become aware of what their own learning style is so as to have a better learning experience when studying a language.

Share Convention Certificate.

SHARE CONVENTION: "Off the Beaten Track: Unconventional Tasks for the 21st Century Classroom"

Off the Beaten Track: Unconventional Tasks for the 21st Century Classroom

By Mariano Quinterno

        This workshop was in charge of Mariano Quinterno. The main purpose of his workshop was to reflect about the activities that we use in the classroom and to see if they are really suitable for students of the 21^st century. Mariano began by saying: “There is no 21st century classroom, but 21st century classrooms”. That means that although the educational system has not changed so much throughout time, students´ interest and needs have really changed in the last decades.

  Descriptions of the 21st century classroom are overgeneralizations which do not take into account the huge number of educational contexts around the world. We as language teachers have to keep in mind that classrooms are not neutral territories.

   It does not matter what teaching method or approach we decide to use, it will not be effective if we design our lessons for an atemporal and decontextualized learner. He also said that each classroom and what happens inside has an impact beyond that particular context.

  Mariano mentioned the importance of using unconventional tasks since Why use unconventional tasks. It is really positive for our students because according to recent research in the field of neuroscience, novelty aids memory and contributes to meaningful learning. When educators use similar strategies too often, the classroom becomes a predictable environment and, as a result, learners´ motivation decreases easily. Besides, a region in the midbrain, which is responsible for regulating our motivation and reward-processing, responds better to novelty than to what is familiar.

Every time we decide to think of unconventional task, we need to keep in mind that these features have to be present in those tasks:

v  They must have both linguistic and educational value.

v  They must be divergent (i.e. they must encourage a range of possible responses).

v  They must be context-specific.

v  They must include an element of novelty.

v  They must encourage problem posing rather than problem solving.

    Finally, he showed us very practical examples of different unconventional tasks.

   I liked this workshop and I found it very interesting. I also liked the way in which the speaker presented the topic. He made me think that it is high time to start changing the conventional tasks, which normally appear on the course books we follow, because they are not suitable to students of the 21^st century. It seems that we do not take into account the reality they experience.  We should stop teaching about the Big Ben or the Tower of London because they are not meaningful to our students.

SHARE CONVENTION: "Teaching English through Educational Drama"

Teaching English through Educational Drama

By Susan Hillyard

This workshop was in charge of Susan Hillyar. I had already attended one of her seminar but on this occasion she made a presentation with other women that belong to the group “English in action”. They explained what the purposes of the group are and they also showed us the way in which they normally work.

  They presented a “Human PowerPoint” of an original idea based on The Talking Statues of Rome. The programme English in action was designed to teach English through Educational Drama in twenty Special Schools under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, in Buenos Aires. It also emphasizes the use of stories and Action Sacks(bags full of different objects to tell a story, sing a song ,etc.) as a motivational force in the teaching of values in English to students with some form of challenge. They explained both the theory and the practice of the approach they use.

 They work mainly with children who need special education but their ideas can be applied to any classroom context. They defined Special Education as a variety of educational establishments such as special schools which deal with students with learning difficulties, from emotional disorders to ADHD students to selective mutes and they also work in hospital schools with students who are waiting for transplants, or who are suffering from medical conditions which keep them absent from school for long periods of time.

  They consider drama as the best way of teaching English to those students because it is an extension of childhood play which uses the whole body and mind, the heart , the soul and the emotions in a social context so that students can collaborate with each other and learn the social skills necessary for effective learning. Drama as Education is considered to be a holistic discipline covering all the processes of education, often summarized in the word SPICE. The five developmental processes are:

·         Social

·         Physical

·         Intellectual (cognitive)

·         Creative

·         Emotional

   Finally they mentioned the advantages of drama for all students:

 

·         Drama for transformation

·         Drama as empowerment

·         Drama for fluency ( speaking)

·         Drama as culture (play and storytelling)

·         Drama for thinking ( all types)

·         Drama for literacy (reading and writing)

    In my opinion, this workshop was very useful to see language teaching from a different perspective. The work that the English in Action group carries out is really admirable and their ideas are really creative. I think that we should not highlight the differences among students every time we have a student with special need, we should integrate them. Some of the activities presented by Susan seem to be really effective and motivating. Sometimes we are limited by the curriculum to cover a lot of contents within the year. However, we should try to implement some of those techniques to reach students in different ways.

SHARE CONVENTION: "Development of Communicative Skills"

Development of Communicative Skills

By Alejandra Ottolina

This workshop was to talk about what really matters in the development of communicative skills. It is a difficult task at the time of asking students for their own production. Productive skills are essential because they help students to integrate everything they have learnt. The results motivate students and there is room for developing creativity. It also requires life skills such as thinking, relating with others, caring or working.  Most teachers find it difficult to develop these skills because of the unsuitable materials, lack of time or some traumatic experience with language that they may have had.

  According to the speaker, our main aim should be get students to use language to its full effect in the context of the XXI century. In practice, this means promoting active listening and reading, turn-taking among students is also important. We should give students the possibility of learning about their own abilities and difficulties. Finally developing learners’ creativity is another key feature of communicative learning.

  Finally, he gave us some examples of reading comprehension exercises taken from Macmillan books. The book limited the teacher to just playing the cd to listen to the story. However, it is our tasks to propose creative and meaningful tasks out of those texts.

  I really liked this seminar because we could express our opinions and I totally agree with the idea that effective teaching only takes place when the teacher helps students see relevance to their learning, when they are able to draw conclusions about how their learning relates to the world around them. The main purpose of teaching English is to give learners the chance of using it as a tool in their own reality. 

SHARE CONVENTION: "When our students could talk in English."

When our students could talk in English

By Omar Villarreal

This seminar was delivered by Omar Villarreal. According to his lecture, sometimes we should try to go back to those old times when students could really talk in English. Although the methods of the past were inefficient in many aspects, some of them allowed students to speak in English. Then he started talking about the evolution of language teaching throughout the different methods that have been developed. He started with the grammar translation method.  He showed us pictures of exercises that belonged to that method. He said that the common belief in those times was that practice made perfect and there was no room for innovation and creativity so it seemed easier to teach English in the past.

  Omar went on talking about the different methods up to the communicative revolution. He said that with the communicative approaches students feel much freer to talk although they may not pay so much attention to grammar. It seems that the primary goal is to communicate at the expense of grammar.  He particularly mentioned Task-based learning’s disadvantages. Sometimes it seems impossible to implement it in the classroom because students do not have enough vocabulary to do it. They need to know the language very well to have real access to it.  He also talked about CLIL (Content and Language integrated method), which has become quite popular. However, it seems not to be so effective for students outside the classroom.

Finally, he talked about the importance of using grammar and how to teach it properly. He gave us some activities as examples that we could include in our lessons.

  I liked the seminar but I did not find it very useful. I could remember the most relevant features of the methods. I do not agree with the idea that language teaching used to be better in the past because it was an unsatisfactory experience for learners. In fact, I think that it has improved throughout time and we still need to go on looking for innovative ways of teaching so as to reach all students.