End of semester reflection

During this semester in our course Approaches to ELE we have analysed the relationship between the approaches that have been used along the history of English Language Education. We saw the main approaches that were used in the past and at the end we saw the communicative approach, which is the most accepted in the present. I think we achieved this first objective, but maybe for me it would have been easier if I had a clearer conductive thread.
We also saw some of the current approaches to ELE and we compare their main features. I think we also achieved this objective to a certain point. I also think that we could have had a clearer structure to do this. Maybe it would have been easier to follow the course if there had been a clearer structure.
Another goal of the course was to analyse different approaches and if they would work in different contexts with different characteristics. To do this we had an oral presentation about our teaching contexts in which each one of us had to analyse the different characteristics of the schools were we teach. Each one of us had the chance to figure out what the most suitable approach for our teaching context was. We also saw that there are different approaches that are more suitable for certain contexts and some of them are not. In each teaching situation a different approach to ELE can be applied.
In general I think that we learned a lot about the different approaches to ELE. But, for me at least, it would have been much easier to follow the course and the contents with a conductive thread. At some point I felt a little bit lost about the contents and about what we were asked to do. I think that we learned a lot about the different approaches to English Teaching. And in the end, we achieved most of the objectives of the course.  

Noticing

I have never heard the concept of noticing before with regard to language teaching. Noticing is the process by which the learner pays attention consciously to the input that he receives. The result of this process is that the learner learns grammar because he put lots of attention to the input provided. The input which is internalized and learned by the learner is the intake. And when the learner does this process consciously, we called it noticing.
Noticing involves paying attention to meaning as well as to form when learning a language.
I think that during my years at school, when I learned English we used to pay more attention to form than to meaning. The teachers who taught English to me thought that the most important part of the language was grammar and not meaning. We focused mainly on form and we did not pay much attention to the content and to the communicative component of language. We were asked to practice a lot, to do lots of drills and to practice structures in our textbooks. We never gave much importance to meaning, which I think is very important.

A communicative teacher according to Medgyes

 


          It is difficult to be a communicative teacher according to what Medgyes says that communicative teachers have to be and do. A communicative teacher has to fulfill so many requirements and has to have so many qualities that it sounds overwhelming. In the first place, according to Medgyes's article the communicative teacher has to know about everything and to be able to adjust to any situation, she has to be versatile. She has to be s technology expert and also a great psychologist. She has to have multiple skills in order to be able to do everything that she is asked to do. She has to be creative but at the same time "down-to-earth". These are all the things that we should "be" as communicative teachers. But there are also many tasks that a communicative teacher has to perform. She has to focus on the specific needs of each students but at the same time focus in the whole group; she has to listen and pay attention to students needs and expectations; she has to focus on meaning and on form when teaching.
          I think we would all like to "be" all these things and be able to "do" all these things. But it is very clear that all of this great and ideal theory was proposed by theoreticians that have never been in our place and have never even been inside a real classroom. I agree completely with the ironic tone of the author in this text. It is very easy to say and think about all the things that every communicative teacher "has to be" and "has to do", but it is quite different and much more difficult to put them in practice inside a real classroom in a real school environment.    

The communicative teacher

This is a great article and I think that it trully reflects waht a teacher micht feel whe trying to apply the Communicative Approach in her teaching. There is a huge difference between believing in the theory and applying that theory in our daily teaching practice.
In the first place I think that every language teacher aims to be learner-centered. It sounds beautiful, but in real life this is hard to apply and to make it true. We try to teach using a learner-centered approach, but we aslo have to deal with a whole group which is composed by twenty or more students and most of the times we consider the class as a whole rather than considering each student by himself in teaching situations. A learner-centered approach is the ideal methodology for every single language teacher. But I think that it really takes to be superheroes to really accomplish this goal in every single lesson or learning situation.
Another difficult task for Communicative teachers is to focus o meaning and on form simultaneously. Every teacher should at least try to pay attention to this two very different and almost opposed aspects of language. This is the theory, but it takes a lot of time and dedication to achieve this in real teaching situations.
The third point that Peter Medgyes talks about in his article is the fact that a real communicative teacher should provide her students with real communicative situations. I think that we all try to do this, because it is the way in which our students get to learn meaningfully. To create and desing real communicative situations also takes a lot of time and dedication, because it is much easier to follow a text book and make our students drill. This makes me think about another point mentioned in the article that is very interesting: The text book. It is obviously easier for a non-native teacher who teaches in a non-native speaking country to follow a text book instead of designing her own activities. But if we want to expose our students to real communicative situations in which real information exchange is needed, we should not be using a text book by itself. I think that text books should be used as a supportive material. The text book certainly offers great material to practice language, but we should try not to turn it into some kind of teacher's manual.
As you all see, there are many points to reflect on in this article. Very interesting since it deals with real life situations for teachers.  

The importance of creativity in education

I think that creativity is a really important part of the learning process. It is important for the students to develope their creative capacity. Teachers have an extremely important role in this process of developing creativity, because we have to encourage our students to learn, to think and to express ideas in their own original ways. Creativity is as important as literacy is, I definitely agree. I think that literacy helps the students to develop their creativity and improves their imagination. Therefore, to encourage the creativity in our students we should encourage them to read and to become involved with literacy.
Our goal is to lead our students to learn in a meaningful way. The most meaningful way to learn is to do it in one's own learning style and using one's own capacities. Therefore, we are suppose to encourage each one of our students to use his own capacities, learning style and imagination in his learning process.

Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching ans testing (Canale and Swain)

1. Background
1.1 Grammatical and communicative approaches
 Differences between grammatical approaches and communicatives approaches. Third approach: Situational Syllabus.
1.2 Competenca and performance
Analysis of the concepts of competence and performance. Competence: knowledge/ Performance: use. Components of communicative competence and different views.

2. Some theories of communicative competence
Different theories of communicative competence.
2.1 Theories of basic communication skills
Different views of communicative approaches and principles underlying those approaches.
Communicative approaches are effective in developing grammatical and communicative competence.
2.2 Sociolinguistic perspectives on communicative competence
Assuptions and components.
Hymes: sociocultural competence and constitutive components of speech.
Halliday: sociosemantic aspects of language.
2.3 Integrative theories of communicative competence
Different theories and models f communicative competence.
Munby's model of communicative competence.
Communicative syllabuses overemphasize communicative functions.
2.4 General comments
Comments and criticizm to the three theories of communicative competence.
     - Comments on Theories of basic communication skills
     - Comments on Sociolinguistic perspectives of communicative competence
     - Comments on Integrative theories of communicative competence.

3. Toward and adequate theory of communicative competence
3.1 Guiding principles for a communicative approach
Five principles for a communicative approach:
     1- Minimal compononents of communicative competence
     2- Respond to learner's needs
     3- Meaningful interaction
     4- Early stages
     5- Main objective: information, practice and experience.
3.2 A proposed theoretical framework for communicative competence
Theoretical foundations for communicative competence.
General assumptions.
Components of communicative competence: - Grammatical competence
                                                                   - Sociolinguistic competence
                                                                   - Strategic competence.
3.3 Implications for a communicative approach to teaching
Implications on: - Syllabus design
                        - Teaching methodologies
                        - Teacher training
                        - Material development.
3.4 Implications for a communicative testing programme
Two important general implications:
     1- Testing the learner's ability to demonstrate what he knows (performance)
     2- Test types: Integrative tests and discrete points tests.

4. Directions for research
Points for further research. 9 points for further research.
Five issues considering the strenghts of adopting a communicative approach.

Your Approach Indicator: An Informal Questionnaire

                The first point from the questionnaire that I will analyze is Point 1. I think that a language class should focus more on meaning than on grammar. In my case, my students are very young. They are in Kinder and they are just learning the basic words in English. So they are able to communicate and express their ideas, but they are not very accurate with regard to grammar. If I wanted them to speak English using a perfectly correct grammar, I would be correcting them all the time and that would be very discouraging for them. My main objective for my class is for them to speak English as much as they can and for that I have to encourage them to speak, no matter if they speak grammatically correctly or not.

                The second point to analyze is point 4, which I think is strongly related to point 5. Language learners need a long-term reward, which is what is going to get them to be intrinsically motivated. The long term reward should be that fact that they are learning and that they are becoming able to communicate in the target language. They should be motivated and think that their greatest reward is the fact that they are going to be able to speak another language. Therefore, as teachers we should always encourage intrinsic motivation. But, at least with smaller kids, to get to intrinsic motivation and to make them appreciate the value of long-term rewards, first you have to use immediate rewards and extrinsic motivation. So I think that one things leads to the other. Immediate rewards and extrinsic motivation come first and then come long-term rewards and intrinsic motivation.

                Point 6 is also one of the points that I want to analyze. I think that the teacher definitely needs to be gentle and empathetic with her students. This does not mean that she is not going to demand anything to the students. I think that being demanding with our students and asking them to achieve higher goals every time is a very important part of being a good and caring teacher. A good teacher needs to be demanding but in a gentle and empathetic way.

                The last point to analyze is the one about mistakes, point 12. I think that a good teacher should always take advantage of her students’ mistakes and turn them into a learning opportunity. Mistakes are informative for the students and for the teacher. Students can learn from their mistakes as long as the teacher makes them realize their mistakes in the correct way and not making them feel ridiculous for them. And the teacher can also learn from the students’ mistakes. Mistakes need to be seen by the teacher as a chance to redirect the teaching-learning process in order to take the best out of our students.  

Some approaches to ELE

Audio Lingual Method:

                It is based on the linguistic and psychological tradition. It was founded in conditioning theories and habit formation. This method has a great deal of oral practice, grammar drills and conversation. There have been many adaptations of this method.

Community Language Learning:

                This method is based on the affective and social nature of language learning. The group has a great importance in the learning process, the interaction among its members makes learning easier and more supportive as a process. This diminishes the learning context anxiety. The distribution of the group is seated in a circle and the role of the teacher is to supervise the conversation, support the learners and if necessary to direct and teach some language rules. At some point the learner becomes independent and able to talk without the correction and guidance of the teacher.

Suggestopedia:

                In this method, comfortable situations and relaxed environments are fundamental. The learners are encouraged to act as children, to be relaxed and not to take authority too seriously.

The Silent Way:

                It is more based on the cognitive aspects than on the affective ones. The foundation of this approach to learning is problem solving. The learner is encouraged to discover learning rather than memorize things and repeat. Physical objects have a fundamental role in this approach; specifically rods of different lengths and colors.

Total Physical Response:

                This approach gives a great deal of importance to the listening stage as a previous stage for speaking, in the language learning process. The learners are asked to respond physically to what they listen, so they have to act out different commands. By listening and performing different actions, students will begin to feel comfortable with language and will start to produce verbal responses.

The Natural Approach:

                This approach proposes that speech has to emerge naturally, when the learner feels prepared to speak. The amount and quality of input are very important to language acquisition. The teacher has to provide her students with lots of comprehensible input so students become comfortable with the language and hopefully start speaking it at some point, whenever he feels prepared to do it. Three stages are identified in the language learning process: the pre-production stage (listening), the early production stage and the extending production stage.

Language Teaching Methods

As teachers we need to be informed of the theories and ideas which inspire the way we teach language. The beliefs about the nature of language and what we know about learning have effects on our teaching practice every day. Therefore it is very important to be aware and to know them.

There are two approaches to Language Teaching which come from the psychological tradition. These are Audio-lingualism and Cognitive Code Learning. 

Audio-lingualism derives from behaviorist psychology (Skinner) and from structural linguistics. Audio-lingualism emphasizes on the consequences of the stimulus or stimuli and not on the stimulus itself. Rules are not given much importance in this approach because the important thing is to teach the language and not to talk about the language. There is no meta-language in this approach. Learning a language is developing a set of habits, therefore we can learn the L2 in the same way we learn the L1. In the process of learning a language, repetition and language input are the most important things.

Cognitive Code Learning is another approach which comes from the psychological tradition. It has two sources: cognitive psychology and transformational grammar (Chomsky and Ausubel). It proposes that there are certain rules that have to be applied in order to learn a language, but there is also a certain amount of creativity that the learner has to apply. Also, prior knowledge is very important and should always be connected with the new one. Learning is an active process; therefore mistakes are very important for the learner. He learn from his mistakes.

My strengths and weaknesses in English

It is very difficult for me to say which one is my strongest and which one is my weakest ability in English. All of them are difficult for me. But if I had to identify one of them as the weakest and the most difficult for me,  I would say that speaking is the language ability in which I have more difficulty in English. I am able to understand everything when I read and when I hear other people speaking English. And writing is not specially difficult for me. I read and correct a hundred times everything I write, but I can express myself accuratley by writing. However many times I do not get to express what I want to say when speaking. Many times I tend to get confused and I help myself with movements and expressions.  This happens to me because sometimes I still try to translate from Spanish to English when speaking. There are some expressions that we have in Spanish that don't exist in English, but sometimes when I speak English I try to find the exact words that are used in Spanish and that is when I get confused and start to get nervious and stutter. I have realized that English is much simpler than Spanish regarding structures and grammar.
The best way to improve this weakness would be to be always aware that there are many different ways to express the same idea and that there is no need to use exactly the same words that would be used in Spanish. I think though, that I have improved my speaking a lot by practicing, so I have to keep on speaking and practicing to improve this ability.  

My experience as an English learner

When I think about my experience as an English learner, I could say that there have been three stages in my learning process. First of all, there was the school stage, where English was a subject and it wasn't really motivating or fun to learn English. At school I had a lot of grammar drills and repetition. We used to spend a lot of time doing exercises from a book and then we used to check them with the teacher. I wouldn't say that I learned lots of English in my school stage. But it helped me to realize that learning languages was not very difficult for me. I realized that I had a good ear for languages, at least for English. Then , the university stage came. I got to the university having a base in English, but not really knowing how to express myself in English. I wasn't really able to write or speak English very well or very accuratetly. In this stage I learned a lot of English and I improved a lot my writing and speaking, which were the most difficult areas for me. Also in this stage I did my internship in a bilingual school, where I learned a lot from all the teachers. The third stage began after I got out of the university and I began to work. I started working in a non bilingual school, but I had to speak everything in English to my students. Therefore, I maintained my English, but certainly not at the same level, because the English thta I used at work with small girls was much more basic than the one I used to speak at the University with my teachers and classmates. That is, in part, why I decided to get into this masters program, to maintain my level of English and avoid losing what I learned at university. 
I think that the most difficult areas for me are speaking and writing in English, so I am always focusing in improving those two areas. I hope I am able to do it during this masters program and I also hope to improve my teaching methodologies and strategies. I want to teach English in a fun way, not in the same way I was taught when I was a child.