MY DEFINITION OF CULTURE

The Polish movie director Billy Wilder grew up in a devastated Europe after the First World War and he was fascinated with the jazz music, the Charleston and the actor Douglas Fairbanks. For this passion he has for the American culture he started to work as journalist and then as a movie writer and director.

Taking in account that a type of music, a type of dance and something related with the films are included in the sack of culture, it can be define as the knowledge and the characteristics of a group of people, who can be seen through their habits, their traditions, their cuisine, their religion, the three arts mentioned and anything able to tell us something about this group of people.

Group of people and culture are two terms that cannot be separated; in this world, there are a lot of people, a lot of groups and, therefore, a lot of cultures. Every person received the culture as something established, for example, in Spain there’s a traditional Catholic religion; but, also it’s received a dynamic process that depends on a personal choice, for example I can live in Spain and don’t practice the mentioned religion.

Both sides of the culture co live with other cultures and it makes the world a multicultural place, with multicultural societies which have pluricultural people. So, we live in a big society which has smaller ones. Despite the different cultures, there’s a need that in these societies exists a social cohesion.

A weapon to keep this cohesion can be the language and the education. The nowadays societies need to grow up with tolerance and respect towards other cultures and, the teachers, and more English or any other languages have the power to make that possible.

Wilder was fascinated for the good things that other people from other cultures can do, in his case through art. And this love for a foreigner art made him an expert of explaining things of the American culture and he became one of the most important directors in USA. A good example of the multicultural world we live in and the pluricultural people in it.

                                  

 Billy Wilder between two great actors.

REFELECTION ON MY MOCK IMPLEMENTATION

If I have to speak literally, this is not a mock implementation because I put into practice last Tuesday afternoon with my P4 pupils.
One of the activities was a listening and the other one was a speaking one. The outcomes, in general, were good, but better in the listening task in which a child has to point the picture of the farm animal he listens. The speaking was about saying an expression that we have been working for weeks and it's related to the animals sounds, for example:  "The cow goes muu muu!". I know that this is an English class and it's different to the other classes in which they speak and listen in Catalan or Spanish, but the outcomes of my implementation can make us see that, in general, our pupils are used to listen a lot, but not to speak enough. In the grades of Englishthe basic competences in primary, the oral part it's not as important as the writing, listening or reading and, in my opinion, this is a mistake because the way to speak a language is speaking it, it's the way to make the languages feel alive.
To enhance the language learning process we have ot give the speaking part the place that it deserves, and a lot of school seem that they are open their eyes because the hire a conversation assistant to work harder this skill. In my school, we have started this year with one conversation assistant that come once a week in every group and we work more individually the main expressions or the vocabualry worked in every unit.

The listening and speaking skills are two of a giant list of strategies that we, as the teachers, can put into practice in our groups. The most strategies we know the best for our students, because each child is a world and they have a different learning style  and knowing them we will know what's the better for them.

I think, that during the kindergarten and the first primary years, the work of the teachers it's indispensable to make our students which strategy fits in a better way with them.Giving them resources  gradually, will make them know themselves. As one of the videos says, the final goal of working with strategies is meke our students autonomous. I hope that my students, in the future, will have this autonomy to improve their learning proces.

VIDEO TASK: “Shaping the way we teach English, learning strategies”

At the beginning of this interesting video is said that the good language learners select the strategies according to the task they have to do. They know how to adapt themselves to the learning situation and use the technique they think it will be more helpful. 
Students who have the skill to do this, needed the help of the adult in their early years, but gradually they learnt how to identify their learning strategies. So, the adult in these first years is too valuable.

Although the strategies are important during the language learning process, the protagonist is the student and some of them are good language learners, who, as the video rightly says, are motivated to communicate something, who have no fear to make a mistake and who take risks. They also recognize language and communication patterns, they correct their own speeches and they practice the language every time they can.

After this short theory part, it begins a real case of language learning strategies in a young adult’s class in Africa, where the second language is English. The teacher they have starts explaining that these students have some problems with the fact of thinking in English and so, writing in it. She adds that they lose the meaning of what they are writing and they tend to repeat themselves.

Although this lack in writing, they have some knowledge in the speaking skill. The teacher points that one of the reasons of this lack is due to they have gone to the school in a interrupted way.

It’s not an easy class, but the teacher does a good job because, as she says, she focuses in what they already know; it’s a way to motivate them. Another thing that keeps my attention is that they work some biology in the L2 to support the lessons of this subjects which some of them have problems with.

To motivate them, they use what the students know, but also, she put into practice some strategies as the language skills strategy (reading, writing, speaking, etc) the cognitive and metacognitive (among others, the transfer of knowledge and the refection) and the affective ones (motivation, trusting and confidence atmosphere).

I work as English teacher in the pre-primary years and I can apply some of the strategies the teacher uses with her pupils.

With the boys and girls I work with I apply some specific skills like the listening when we listen each unit story (with the visual support of big flashcards), or we play a game in which they have to point the word they listen. This year I could work more the speaking part because we have, once a week, the help of a conversation assistant and in little groups we practice some simple expressions.

Another strategy I apply is the cognitive one, because the students learn a lot of vocabulary, there’s a transfer of knowledge. The motivation and the confidence are present in my sessions because they have a good time in each one and they know that I trust in their capacities to learn English.

My students are small, so they don’t know which strategies are better for them, but working in the classrooms with different ones and with my help, they will discover it.

Some of the first words listened in the video is that the goal to teach strategies is to make our students autonomous, and there’s no better way to do it than knowing and helping them. That’s what this terrific teacher does and what I try to do every day at my work.

REFLECTION ON CASE STUDIES

Watching all the videos presented with all these teachers, pupils, students and places you can think that there are all the strategies that a teacher could need.

There are shown classes from the kindergarten, passing for primary and until secondary school with teachers who ask more than others, in different centers placed in different zones. Taking in account all these factors, the teachers have to choose the strategies that fill better with their students: strategies by purpose, by skill area, by proficiency levels of the language, by culture, by age, etc.

During the viewing of the videos I have seen teachers that use visual support, that use the repetition, that speak English in a perfect tune and pronunciation for the students, that use the different skills, that use the translation, the co-languaging, the translanguaging, that use the ICT but some of them work with cooperative and collaborative strategies that make the students learn together and with the others’ help.

The video who takes more my attention was the one called “Building community in a Multilanguage classroom” in which is shown a classroom with a lack of proficiency in English in a neighborhood in Los Angeles. The teacher works it making them participate a lot, making that all that they learn has a connection with the students, giving them responsibilities. In conclusion, making them a community of learners, helping each other.

Seeing in action this teacher and the others, you can see that they are experts recognizing the needs of their students and presenting them the strategies they think that help them in a better way. You can see that they try to make their students work together, because they only way to learn a language is speaking it and in each video you can see that they use the language and they make it live. Like the teacher that works in L.A says “Chomsky said that we develop language playing games because we interact with each other”.

REFELECTION ON STRATEGIES (DIAGRAM)

We use the language to communicate something to someone and when we are learning a language, the final goal is to be able to keep a conversation in this L2 or L3.

During that language learning we use strategies that help us to make it easier; they can be divided in two groups: the INPUT in which there are included the learning styles and the learning strategies, and the OUTPUT, where the communication strategies are.

When we are language learners and we want to communicate something, the communication strategies take place. There are the social and psychological strategies, and both help us to express ourselves in the L2 or L3 for example, paraphrasing (air ball instead of balloon) or avoiding a word that we don’t know.

We, the English teachers, always are English learners, and we know how to make use of the communication strategies. In our classrooms, we have students and each one is different and to help them to communicate in a foreign language and use the communication strategies, first, we have to know these differences. Every one of them has a learning style: some will learn better by visual support, by activities with the class mates and some with individual ones.

Knowing the diversity in the classroom and that every student will learn in a different way, the more learning strategies we know the better. It’s a compulsory need to us know them to enhance our help towards them and let the pupils know them too .There are a lot of strategies. They (and we) can learn by function strategies, by purpose, by culture, by language, by skill area etc. Focusing in this last one, we can learn and teach by listening, speaking, reading, writing, learning vocabulary or by translation strategies. It’s important to differentiate the translation from other terms like translanguaging, code-switching, co-languaging and diglossia.

With the translation, there is a language separation, scaffolding and the L1 is mainly used; in the code-switching, the students and the teacher use the two languages and with the co-languaging, the content is worked by different language groups. At last but not least, there are two opposite terms: diglossia with which there is a hierarchy and separation between languages and the translanguaging, where the languages co-exist at the same time and the hierarchy is out.

In conclusion, we, the teachers (and learners) have to know learning strategies, adapting them to each student, who has a different learning style, and we have to help them to discover which strategy they are best in. With this help, they will learn better and the will want to communicate things in their L2 or L3, and here is when the communication strategies appear to enhance their expression. Doing it well, there will be more multilingual classrooms in which the diglossia will disappear and the translanguaging will be welcome.

INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS TO A THE STRATEGY WORD ANS ITS APPLIACTION TO THE LANGIUAGE LEARNING PROCESS.

A strategy is a PLAN to direct something like, for example, a process. These PLANNING ACTIONS (the strategy) will help us to take decisions or to have better results on whatever we apply the strategy.

Everyone has used a strategy sometime, because, as I mentioned before, it helps people in different processes, and one of them could be the learning process. The word GOAL is an important one here, due to every planning action has one.

The learning process has as a goal be able to learn something; because of our subject is about language learning, I’m going to talk about some planning actions that I have put on practice, and I still do, to learn a foreign language, in this case English.

Firstly, I use my attention (metacognitive strategy) during the English lessons or while I’m watching a good movie or listening a song to catch the most I can of what’s been said. 

Also I try to use my English when I’m with friends or people able to speak it (social strategy). During my high years, I remember that the memory (memory strategy) was a good ally for the language learning because in every unit, we had to study a lot of vocabulary.

A communication strategy makes us see that through the communication a problem or problems can be solved. The communication exists because we use different kinds of it to keep communicate with others; one of them is using a language. So, as the learning strategies, the communication strategy helps us to achieve our goal, in this case, be able to communicate something to someone.

                   

In my opinion, the learning strategies (mentioned above) and the communication ones, are similar, because when I have communication with someone I use my attention to listen the other, I use my social skills because you need another person and I use my memory because I (we) always use things that I (we) remember when we have communication with somebody.

In the conclusion, I want to use another word that needs capital letters: INTENTION. In all kinds of strategies we need a good planning to achieve a goal, and in these planning actions there’s always an intention, the intention to improve something like the processes that I’ve been talking about in these short, but I hope, helpful letters.

WEBGRAPHY USED:

http://www.significados.com/estrategia/

http://www.bloguismo.com/13-claves-de-una-estrategia-de-comunicacion-2-0-para-el-pequeno-comercio/
dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/1958134.pdf

TELL IT AGAIN! The Storytelling Handbook for Primary English Language Teachers

Summary (Power Point)

CHAPTER 4: Developing language-learning skills.

CHAPTER 5: Classroom management.

 
 

Putting on practice the theory adapting it to P5 level: "What's your favourite animal?"

         

https://prezi.com/jtmkmgiw8_5b/edit/?auth_key=h84fr5e&follow=oxihrz47c7kh

READING AND LEARNING ENGLISH: online resources and one recommendation.

Hello everyone,

I checked all the links in the list and, despite they all are good ones for whoever likes reading and being informed about the last books published, I want to focus in three of them.

The first one is the Guardian section. It's a well-structured site in which you can find different topics related to children's books: top ten books, interviews, audios, videos and some extras. Also, it presents you interesting books for different ages: children's books, ages seven and under, from eight to twelve....

Although it keeps you inform, one of the things that draws my attention were two sections: the first is “Start a reading club”,   in which the people can share opinions or book reviews; the second one is “Poetry quiz: finish the line”, where the children can practice poetry while they are playing a game.

MY FAVOURITE SECTION: "Finish the line"

 

Edward Lear wrote: "The owl and the pussycat went to sea..."

1. "in a strange yellow boat"
2. "in a beautiful pea-green boat"
3. "in a horrible purple boat"
4. "in a terrible holey boat"

Another section that I have enjoyed is the one which belongs to the website called NO TIME FOR FLASHCARDS: “21 Picture Book Biographies”. I consider that there are a lot of people who made important things in the past and made our world a little bit better and it’s important that children know them. The books that appear in the section have terrific drawings, and they will keep the attention of them. As the site says “they are incredible tools to teach children about history, about innovation, and empathy”

 I'm glad to see that some kid will know who was Ella Fitzgerald, one of my favourite singers.

At last but not least, I like the website “Little bird tales”, because with it, the children can put into practice their creativity making their own stories. It’s a good way to make the reading time funny. Also it’s a complete site in which educators, students and families can find some help for their learning and teaching process.

Working with children creativity   

MORE RESOURCES

“SOMNINS”

http://www.somnins.com/es/nuestros-libros/

A few months ago, a cousin of mine recommended me a publishing house called “Somnins”. I checked the website and, instantly, I fell in love with their books. They have a good variety and in different languages (Spanish, Catalan, English and French) and topics (illustrated albums, calendars, knowledge books, etc.), but they all have something in common: they work the values.

 

"SOMNINS": Big variety of books to work values with children

They also have an interesting blog with their last works or activities:

http://www.somnins.com/es/blog/

I hope you enjoy the reading!

TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH THROUGH THE MAGIC WORLD OF THE PRINTED LETTERS.

As a learner I remember at primary school that at the beginning of each unit we had a little comic story and first we heard a cassette tape. Once it was done, the teacher made us to read it, repeating it until all of us had read it. I think that it was not a good way to make us understand the global meaning of the story, because there was a lot of new vocabulary that we didn't know. In my opinion, the teacher had to work before the new words and expressions and then, start with the reading.
At high school we started to read short story books. They were interesting, but not related to what we did during the lessons. I think that it can be a good methodology to work the autonomy of the students, though this it's only possible if they have some level and some of us hadn’t got it.

Despite those bad reading practices during my education, I learned a lot because I love reading and when the teachers sent us little stories or short books I enjoyed a lot with a dictionary by my side. Doing this I acquired a lot of lexicon.

 My first English book at school.

So, the connected words of other people, during my school and high school years, helped me to enhance my English, but if I have to be sincere the way that I learned (and I’m still learning these days)  the most is reading the lyrics of the songs. It all started with a small notebook in which I write the words of the song I liked. I finished two notebooks. I noticed an improvement in my reading and pronunciation and, of course, in my writing skill.

I was growing up and some other lyrics and artists came to me like Springsteen, Carole King and Cohen, but If I have to chose my best English teacher, he would be who, in my opinion, is the best lyricist: Bob Dylan. With a big book with all his lyrics that I got and a good dictionary I can be sure that I will have my best English lessons.

My best English teacher.

Learning a language is always a challenge, but to make meaningful the learning process I think that one of the most important things is to find it useful. I found (I find) this utility in understand the lyrics of my favourite artists.

I work as an English teacher in pre-primary. My main goal for them related with the reading is make them love the story telling, the story time during the classes. 
As I said, when I studied at school some of my classmates had not a good time due to they don't understand the texts, so I never start a new unit telling them the story, because in these years (kindergarten), they have to feel security while their are learning. Normally, we start with the story in the third day when the main words and expressions are familiar to them.

With all the levels (P3, P4 and P5) I worked with big flash cards of the pictures of the story and with a video of the same story; one week we watch video and the other we listen the story with the flashcards.

In P4 I can include some other extra activities: in the English book they have the pictures of the story and once they cut them, we listen the story with the flashcards and they have to look for the right picture. I give them some time.

In P5, we do the same, but a little bit harder: we listen the story, but without the support of the flashcards, so they have to listen well.

As a teacher and as a learner I know the importance of reading, of making them go into new worlds in which they listen or they read in English: Because of this, we have to give to the reading the place that it deserves.

SUMMARY: “Enseñar en inglés” (Cuadernos de pedagogía)

Despite the practise of using another language to teach a subject is an old one (e.g. the Romans use the slaves to teach their children philosophy in Greek),  it has been with the LOE in 2.006 when the term CLIL has begun to have more relevance due to the democratization of the languages spoken: all the students who demands to work with it, can do it.

Although the fame of CLIL, there are some doubts about it. One good new is that the trend observed in the classrooms is non traditional; even the teachers who in other subjects teach in traditional way, when they are using CLIL, they innovate and make the lessons more clear because they know that there is a barrier called language.

It’s recommended that the students could go to CLIL lessons if they want to: voluntarily and the age is not a problem. The law says that there has to be a non segregated will to teach in other language subjects not taking in account the level in the foreign language. There are several experiences that prove that the language is not an obstacle during the CLIL lessons.

To choose the subjects to be taught in English, normally, the teachers try to select international contents before than local ones; besides, in some schools they are teaching some units of the subject and no the whole one. To be a good CLIL teacher, this one has to know well the subject to teach, he has to have to has a high level in the L2, he has to have good didactic skills, he has to be a good communicator and, finally, he has to be flexible in the way he takes the subject.

In conclusion, having a good CLIL program guided by good teachers, there is no problem in the age of the students or the level that they have in the L2.

The Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a good way to enhance our teaching and the students learning process, making the language more plural.

COMMENT ON JAY WALKER “THE WORLD’S ENGLISH MANIA”

I love letters, I love languages and I would like that the humanities would play a bigger role in the society. The idea with which Jay Walker finishes his short, but intense, lecture gives a chance to that idea “English represents hope for a better future. A future where the world has a common language, to solve its coming problems”.

I like the idea of English giving us better times to come, but I don’t like the way that some people work this idea…

Through the centuries there have been several manias; during the 20^th century for example there have been and there are, nowadays, manias with some musicians like the Beatles, or with the religions or sports, etc. In a certain way, I think that this is because we need to believe in something or someone to make us feel safer, and it doesn’t if it’s in some God, in the lyrics of two young ones who changed the music or in some basketball player.

Manias has been appearing and one that started in the eighties and it’s still increasing is the mania with English. Although it’s not the more spoken language in the world, everybody wants to speak it because with it you can communicate everywhere. This fact makes that the language, that once was used with mastery by Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare, can open you a world of opportunities, among them a better job.

Walker gives a dramatic example talking about the Chinese people wanting desperately learning English. In his words, China is nowadays the country in which more people speak this language.

The intensity of the process to acquire this L2 is beyond imagination; they study 12h every day to prepare an important test in which there is a part of English. And all this“suffering” for what? Why do they study so hard?

During the lecture appear several images of a crowd of Chinese people repeating a leader speaking in English, saying sentences as “I want to change my life”. This is the reason why: OPPORTUNITY to enhance their time in this world.

... the idea of using a language,  only as tool for the future. I know that languages are tools to communicate between ourselves, but they also are culture and learning a language in this way, in my opinion isolates the culture.

The situation in China is extreme, but I think that around the world, this L2 is been treating in the same way  because, in general, students see this language as a subject that they have to pass and is our duty as English teachers to make them see it, to make them feel that it’s  is something more than filling the gaps or studying the annoying irregular verbs. It’s about make them speak English and free them from the fear of using it, it’s the only way to open their minds to a new world of communication, to a new world of culture.