ENGLISH TEACHING k515k

Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching. In my sixth podcast I must deal with the writing chapter of the book and I have summarized this information: 1. Writing is the process or result of reading spoken language using a system of visual marks on a surface. 2. The order in which the four skills are presented is still a controversial matter and, depending on the methodology used, one or other of the skills is given priority. Although it’s obvious that languages are spoken before they are written, we should try to make our students learn these skills in a diachronic way and without interfere with the learning process of their own language. Only when the skills have been acquired in L1 can we begin the task with L2. Also, any practice in writing should be based on a previous oral activity. In order to develop complete communicative competence, receptive and productive skills should not be dealt with in separate blocks, they should be promoted in a globally way and we must integrate writing with the other skills: - With reading because is a source of input and model for written language. - With speaking because when we write we pronounce the sentences internally. - With listening because it’s better first to hear the word before writing it down. Besides, there are specific sub-skills involved in writing a text, which are: Graphic or visual skills (which includes abilities like spelling, punctuation and layout), grammatical skills, expressive or stylistic, rhetorical and organisational skills. 3. There are three types of writing: - Personal writing: Like shopping lists, reminders or diaries. These texts are normally written to be read for ourselves and to entertain us or helping us with something. - Personal and public writing: Like summaries, essays or stories. They can be written for personal satisfaction or shared with a third person. The purpose could be to help ourselves to solve a problem or to communicate with other people. - Public or institutional writing: Like curriculums, emails or articles. This type of text has an specific purpose and it depends on the text, the audience or the context. In my opinion, a blog is personal and public at the same time as you can choose if you want to show it or not. Despite this, they are normally written in order to express our thoughts or knowledge to the rest of the world. We can make a blog with tutorials, films reviews, storytelling, etc. 4. There are four phases for the teaching of writing and the difference between each of them lies in the level of autonomy and free participation of the learner when undertaking each task. The four phases are: - Familiarisation with written texts: Writing words and simple phrases, doing crosswords, copying or tracing, etc before pupils can produce their first written sentences. - Controlled Writing: The teacher offers guidelines to be followed by the students in order to reduce the chances of failure. It usually consists of repetitive and mechanical exercises whose function is to let learners gain confidence before writing a full text. - Guided Writing: In this case students have more freedom than in the previous phase. Although the ideas or content may be provided by others, the pupil has to decide how to express them. - Free Writing: The students can express themselves writing about a particular topic although they are subject to a series of rules imposed by the teacher or the textbook. 5. For the fifth question I have made a table that you can find in my tumblr blog. 6. When I was at school my writing activities were usually about answering some questions related to a certain text or, sometimes, I did dictation. I produced written texts once or twice and they were about describing my best friend or my Christmas holidays, so I didn’t practice a more creative writing. The teacher always used the same methodology, she just corrected the exercises and didn’t help us with some or suggesting ways to improve, we only received a number mark.

Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching. In my fifth podcast I have to answer some questions about the reading process, which are: - Question one: What is reading? It is a written receptive skill which activates a chain of cognitive processes like, for instance, drawing inferences and construct interpretations, that allow us to make sense of the text. - Question two: Choose ten genres normally “consumed” by children and explain their reasons for reading. Bus schedule and train timetables in order to get to school, public signs and web sites to get information, ments and Internet to satisfy curiosity about a topic, chat messages to talk with their friends, jokes and plays to have fun, videogames subtitles to understand the story of the game, comics and short stories for just enjoyment and academic books to the exams and do the activities. - Question three: What types of knowledge are required to read a text? The types of knowledge required to read a text are: syntactic knowledge, morphological knowledge, general world knowledge, sociocultural knowledge, topic knowledge and genre knowledge. - Question four: Explain bottom-up and top-down processes providing examples of each process. · Bottom-up process: The readers start decoding the most specific levels of the language and they organise them in order to form the most general ones. So, the reader first recognises individual letters which, when articulated together, form words, then form phrases, clauses, sentences, texts… And all of this before making sense of the text. One example of a bottom-up activity can be making words by letter combinations or discriminating minimal pair sounds which can help him/her to have a good phonological memory. · Top-down process: The readers don’t need to decode every single word in the text to figure out the general meaning. In this case, the readers start from the higher level of processing (inferring, hypothesising, contrasting…) and they combines what they already know with the new information from the text to achieve a personal interpretation. An activity to develop top-down strategies can be deducing from context since the context of the text may provide enough clues to guess the meaning of a lexical item. · What does the “interactive process” mean?: In an interactive process, the readers, depending on their purposes, the type of text, etc., activates different strategies which shift from bottom-up to top-down and viceversa. - Question five: In the fifth question I propose two activities: · The first one is an intensive reading of a short text which has to be scanned, searching information like names, dates or key concepts with the objective of gaining a full understanding of the meaning of the linguistic text. · The second one is an aloud extensive reading of a book’s chapter only for the purpose of enjoyment although it also helps to improve the reading competence. - Question six: Design a reading session in which before, during and after reading tasks are included: · Pre-reading task: Trying to figure out the topic, the story and which characters may the book includes just looking the cover, the title and the style of it. · While reading task: Trying to understand figurative language and unknown lexical items using the context of the text. · Post-reading task: Making up new endings for the book.

Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching. In my fourth podcast I will expose the main ideas about oral communication and interaction, which are written in my digital poster made with genial.ly.

Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching. Well, in my third podcast I have to explain a lot of things so I’m going to try to summarize them as much as possible because I don’t want it to be very extensive. ? I’m going to start with Section 1, where I have to tell the difference between curriculum and syllabus. On the one hand, curriculum is the name given to any educational programme which includes the purpose and objectives, the planning and implementation of learning experiences and the evaluation. On the other hand, syllabus is a more restricted concept and focuses on the selection of the contents and the order in which they are to be taught. In Section 3, I’m establishing the curricular stages we must consider, which are: Curriculum planning: It is concerned with national language policies and their aims to satisfy national and local educational needs. Determining aims: Which are the general and the specific objectives included in the schools’ curricular projects. Programme preparation: This involves the preparation and the development of teaching and learning units and the methodology and materials we are going to use. Classroom implementation: Which means put into practice all we said before, and it depends on the interpretation made by teachers of the official curriculum and students’ interests and motivations. Evaluation: In the evaluation side we analyze the curricular process and the results obtained. In Section 4 and 5, I will do a distinction between product and process-oriented curriculum: Product-oriented curriculum: It is organized around education goals so the most important thing about it is to plan the objectives. Also, lessons are teacher-directed because teachers are conceived as models to be imitated. The student’s performance is measured by tests that provide information on the final product. Examples of product-oriented programmes are the structural-grammatical and the notional-functional syllabuses. Process-oriented curriculum: It concentrates on the learning tasks and activities that students perform. Furthermore, it focuses on the process of instruction, the development of skills and the levels of motivation, instead of focusing on the final product, unlike the product-oriented curriculum. Moreover, special attention is given to students’ feelings and emotions. In Section 6: On the one hand I have to explain the Common European Framework for Languages, which describes the strategies that language learners have to acquire in order to develop language competences that allow them to communicate effectively in a big range of different situations. The Common European Framework for Languages establishes six levels of proficiency: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. On the other hand, I have to make a list of key in Spanish legislation concerning FLT, which are: Instrument of communication, approach, communicative competences (which are grammatical, pragmatic, sociocultural, discourse and strategic competence), mother language as a resource, contextualization, learner-centred, meaningful, autonomous and cooperative learning, collaborative working habits, concepts, procedures and attitudes and cross-curricular activities. In Section 8, I’m going to define the pluridimensional syllabus, which is a syllabus that includes several (sub)syllabuses needed due to the plurality of competences our learners have to improve in order to communicate properly. This pluridimensional syllabus includes syllabuses about grammar, lexical, phonetic, pragmatic, cross-curricular, attitudes, procedures and “learning to learn” syllabus. So, a pluridimensional syllabus focuses on four general areas: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, existencial competence and learning to learn (study skills). These components should be integrated as much as possible in each unit. When it comes to lesson planning, we have to consider learners’ age, the topic, the duration and all the activities we are going to do to improve the competences we mentioned before: linguistic competence, discourse competence, oral and written communication competence, existencial competence, etc. About Section 11, I’m going to give you some extra guidelines for the classroom implementation of the lesson plan: One of them is about the use of TICS, which I consider very important because we live in an age where technologies is one of the main instruments we use to communicate each other. Another guideline is about cooperative work, we need our students to be more collaborative, so I will do activities where they will have to help their classroom mates. Also, we can work with people whom mother language is English, for instance, doing skype interviews. Materials are important too, so we need to use a large range of resources like board games, films, music, books… And that’s all, thanks for listening!

Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching. In this chapter I will speak about CBI, which are the initials for Content-Based Instruction. CBI consist in the integration between the second language teaching and the rest of school subjects. There are a lot of CBI models: one of them is “immersion”, where students receive most of their teaching in the second language. Another one CBI model is the “content-enriched foreign language” which tries to link the standard school curriculum with second language teaching. For example, if the Sciences teacher is giving lessons about animals, students will study the same in the second language subject, in this way both subjects will develop hand to hand. If the students are studying plants on Sciences they will do activities about the same topic in the second language class. ?One of the advantages is that allows both teachers to work in team and that will help in order to satisfy students learning needs. Another advantage is that students will learn standard contents and a second language at the same time, giving them the opportunity to get their communicative competence. In the other hand we have the disadvantage that there are not a lot of materials because commercial texts don’t reach the level that CBI models require. But that doesn’t have to be a disadvantage, new technologies offer us a lot of tools and materials and both teachers will have to be able to colaborate in order to elaborate good quality materials that will help to reach their goals. And that’s all, see you in my next podcast!

Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching. So, in my first podcast, I’ll start talking about some education concepts like input or output activities, learning, acquisition and communicative competence. Acquisition is the act of obtaining something and learning is the act of acquiring knowledge or skills and make them yours. One way to reach this knowledge is doing input and output activities. An input activity is, for example, a reading or listening exercise. You dont produce anything, you just receive information. In an output activity you can use the things you learned and make your own creations. Like we did in our last class, when we listened an Ed Sheeran song with a cloze test and then we had to compose a poem using words from the lyrics of the song. With this kind of activities people will be able to get a communicative competence that will allow them to understand and communicate with others using any language. And that’s all, thanks for listening! see you in my next podcast!