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FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING: A BRIEF HISTORY

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FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING: A BRIEF HISTORY

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More than any other discipline in the educational field, foreign language teaching has been subject to continuous change throughout history until coming into its own as a profession in the twentieth century. At no time in history has language teaching stood still, but it has been constantly varying in accordance with the historical context within which it was set. In other words, each historical period was characterized by particular demands and needs in such a way that the driving force behind language learning in the 1900s differs largely from the current one, and so does therefore the type of learner. Consequently, the discrepancies existing between the different teaching methods can be seen as a response to the changing demands and needs of the students.

That being said, the earliest documented language teaching method is the Grammar-Translation Method; inspired by the way dead language such as Greek or Latin were taught, this teaching method aimed to help students translate literary works in the target language through the continuous study of its grammatical rules. Delving further into this method, it was characterized by lists of translated vocabulary items, the memorization of grammatical rules, and the use of the native language as the medium of instruction by following a deductive approach.

In the mid-19th century, the need for pedagogical changes led to the "Reform Movement," laying the groundwork for applied linguistics and the development of new language teaching methods such as the Natural Approach and the Direct Method. Both methods emphasized students learning the language through direct use in the classroom, prioritizing oral language practice and avoiding the need for translation. This Natural approach aimed to imitate the way we acquire a first language and, along with the Direct method, it emphasized the use of everyday language in the classroom. Maximilian D. Berlitz and Wilhelm Viëtor are the two main representatives associated with these methods.

Subsequently, based on structuralist and behaviourist theories, the Audio-Lingual Method emerged in the 1930s. Lasting until the 1980s, this method viewed language as a process of habit formation, presenting linguistic units as structures to be repeated and practiced until automated. These repetition exercises are known as "pattern drills" in the form of dialogues, and they could be subject to word substitution, completion activities, etc.

From the 1970s onwards, a number of alternative methods in response to mainstream FLT emerged, namely: The Silent Way, Total Physical Response, and Suggestopedia. Fisrtly, Gattegno's Silent Way consisted of student-centred lessons characterized by extensive use of silence on the part of the teacher with a view to fostering learners’ autonomy, emphasized the importance of the learner’s responsibility for their own learning process. As for Total Physical Response, this method is built around the coordination of speech and action in that it attempts to teach language through motor activity. Finally, in the same line as Caleb Gattegno’s Silent Way, Georgi Lozanov’s Suggestopedia (1978) revolves around the idea that language learning can occur at a far higher speed than it normally does. In other words, this method is based on the idea that students naturally face psychological barriers to language learning which keep them from exploiting their full mental potential. In this regard, the role of the teacher in Suggestopedia is to get students to dessugest any false, limiting conceptions about themselves so as to make the most of their mental capacities.

Nowadays, the continuous development of globalization has brought about a revolutionary effect on the world to such an extent that communication has become the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching. For this purpose, in line with the action-oriented approach to foreign language teaching proposed by the CEFR, which does not prescribe the specific use of particular methodologies, current foreign language teaching focuses primarily on an active, eclectic and integrative approach grounded on communicative language teaching (CLT) as the core method. In other words, despite embracing communicative language teaching as the cornerstone of contemporary language teaching practice, elements and strategies from other teaching methods are also implemented with a view to building a comprehensive and flexible learning experience for language learners. These methods can all be regarded as active as they foster the development of the student's autonomy and independence, and some examples are: Task-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Flipped Classroom, Community Language Learning, etc.

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CURRENT LEGISLATION ON THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM 

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CURRENT LEGISLATION ON THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM 

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The current legal background that lays the foundation for English as a foreign language teaching in Spain can be divided into three blocks or levels depending on its scope, namely:

-At a European level, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) provides a common basis for the explicit description of objectives, content and methods in foreign language education. In other words, it plays a key role in influencing the approach, leveling and definition of the different elements within the curriculum.

-At a national level, we can distinguish the following legal documents:

❖ Organic Law 3/2020, of December 29, which modifies the Organic Law 2/2006, of May 3, on education (LOMLOE).

❖ Royal Decree 217/2022, of March 29, which sets the organization and minimum teachings of Compulsory Secondary Education.

❖ Royal Decree 243/2022, of April 5, which sets the organization and minimum teachings of Baccalaureate.

❖ Order EFP/279/2022, of April 4, which regulates the assessment and promotion in Primary Education, as well as the assessment, promotion, and qualification in Compulsory Secondary Education, Baccalaureate, and Vocational Training within the scope of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training.

-At a regional level, the legislation on the English curriculum that caters for the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha can be summarized as follows:

❖ Decree 82/2022, of July 12, which establishes and regulates the curriculum of Compulsory Secondary Education in Castilla-La Mancha.

❖ Decree 83/2022, of July 12, which establishes and regulates the curriculum of Baccalaureate in Castilla-La Mancha.

❖ Decree 85/2018, of November 20, which regulates the educational inclusion of students in Castilla-La Mancha.

❖ Decree 89/2018, of November 29, which establishes the organization of language teaching and the corresponding curricula for Basic A2, Intermediate B1, Intermediate B2, Advanced C1, and Advanced C2 levels in the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha

❖ Order 186/2022, of September 27, organizing the evaluation of Compulsory Secondary Education in Castilla-La Mancha.

❖ Order 187/2022, of September 27, organizing the evaluation of Baccalaureate in Castilla-La Mancha.

❖ Variety of orders establishing the curriculum of Vocational Training in Castilla-La Mancha.

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EDUCATIONAL LEGISLATION ON THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM

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LEARNING SITUATIONS: GETTING READY FOR REAL WORLD CHALLENGES

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LEARNING SITUATIONS: GETTING READY FOR REAL WORLD CHALLENGES

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The current Spanish Education System, overseen by the Organic Law 3/2020, of December 29, commonly referred to as LOMLOE, is built upon a competence-based curriculum, a practice widely observed in the contemporary global educational scenario. This competence-based nature of the curriculum entails the design of well-contextualized, meaningful, inclusive, and interdisciplinary tasks in the form of learning situations. These learning scenarios, inherent to the concept of teaching, are grounded on the idea that learning extends beyond the confines of the classroom and it is shaped by other social, cultural, and emotional aspects that surround students’ daily environment.

Delving further into the concept of learning situation, they are multi-stage tasks and activities, created with a clear objective, in which students work collaboratively to resolve real-life issues in a creative and innovative way. In this respect, the motivational impact of these learning situations lies in the fact that students are exposed to real-life contexts to learn the language in, fostering accidental language acquisition and providing a meaningful, engaging, and relevant purpose for foreign language learning.

All in all, the length of each of the units of work foreseen in a course syllabus is explicitly defined by the number of learning situations that comprise it. In other words, the whole course needs to be programmed based on the multiple learning situations that students will be asked to carry out, ensuring in this way the acquisition and application of the different key and specific competences in real-world contexts, one of the ultimate goals of compulsory secondary education

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Mapa Conceptual Doodle A mano Multicolor

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Transcript: Hello everybody, my name is Félix Martínez and in this entry I am going to explain the difference between the terms collaborative and cooperative learning. So, despite being sometimes used interchangeably in the educational context, there is a slight difference between them: whereas collaboration requires teamwork, critical thinking and active participation to achieve a certain goal, cooperation, on the other hand, involves interdependence, that is, working with others to help them achieve their individual goals. To put it simply, it can be stated that cooperation goes one step further than collaboration in that it brings with it a strong sense of accountability. Through cooperative learning, each student from the group is assigned a specific task and, those students who have the same role or responsibility within their own groups are grouped together so that they can take advantage of each other’s ideas for the completion of that specific task before proceeding to share it back to their respective groups.

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WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TEACHING APPROACH, METHOD, STRATEGY, AND TECHNIQUE?

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WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TEACHING APPROACH, METHOD, STRATEGY, AND TECHNIQUE?

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The terms teaching approach, method, strategy, and technique are all interconnected in that they comprise different levels of instructional design. In this regard, as portrayed in the picture above, these four concepts can be organized in a sort of hierarchical order spanning from the educational philosophy and theoretical foundations to the methods and specific actions resulting from them which are adopted in the classroom.

Delving further into the definition of each concept, a teaching approach can be placed into the foundational level and it is regarded as a set of beliefs, principles, or ideas about the nature of learning, that is, the philosophical basis that lays the groundwork for the methods. A method, on the other hand, belongs to the organizational level and it is an organized, orderly, systematic, and well-planned procedure intended to facilitate and enhance students’ learning. It is undertaken according to some rule, which is usually philosophical in nature (approach). Finally, the terms strategy and technique are pretty similar as they both belong to the implementation level, but there is still a slight difference in their meanings: whereas a strategy refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a specific goal (a set of techniques), a technique encompasses the personal style of the teacher in carrying out specific steps of the teaching process, as exemplified in the picture above.

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UNIT OF WORK AND LS_FELIX MARTINEZ SANCHEZ

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Infografía Fases del Proyecto Scrapbook Beige (2)

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When talking about resources, a distinction needs to be made between methodological and evaluation resources depending on their purpose.

On the one hand, as for methodological resources, these are intended to increase the quality of both the learning process and the teaching practice, and they can be classified into: digital devices, software tools, and real-life materials.

On the other hand, evaluation resources are the specific instruments and evidence used to collect data during the assessment process. In the educational context, despite sharing a common application, there is a subtle difference between the terms “tool” and “resource” in terms of usage which needs to be noticed. On the one hand, assessment tools refer to the instruments used for data collection, that is, the items or means that teachers use to collect, record, and analyze evidence of learning, namely: rubric, checklist, direct observation, portfolio, etc. On the other hand, a resource can be regarded as a broader term as it encompasses both the tools as well as the pieces of evidence from which we check students’ understanding. These pieces of evidence are therefore assessment instruments based on students’ productions, that is, the tangible outputs from which we test students’ performance. They also serve to gather information, but through student oral, written, or graphical productions, such as: exams, written compositions, posters, videos, role-play, oral presentations, mockups, blogposts, travel plan, debate, podcast, etc.

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UNIT OF WORK AND LS_FELIX MARTINEZ SANCHEZ (1)

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Assessment takes nowadays center stage in the educational field by providing students and teachers with valuable insight into their respective performances and, consequently, allowing them to make decisions aimed at improving both the teaching and learning processes. In this respect, different types of evaluation can be distinguished depending on the following criteria: firstly, the part of the course when it is carried out; secondly, the goal it pursues (its nature); thirdly, its level of formality; and fourthly, the number of participants involved in it.

To start with, depending on the part of the course when it will take place, three sorts of evaluation can be differentiated:

❖ Initial evaluation (a.k.a. diagnostic evaluation), which aims at checking prior knowledge and meeting students at their ability level, allowing to make any necessary adjustments (both at an individual or group level) of the curriculum based on the characteristics, traits, and needs of our students, as well as to tailor measures for attention to diversity starting from its detection.

❖ Process or ongoing evaluation, which makes reference to the different continuous evaluations, both formative and summative, carried out during the course.

❖ Final evaluation, which determines the degree of achievement of the established objectives.

Then, according to the purpose it fulfills, the evaluation process can be split into two main categories:

➢ Formative: under the name of assessment for learning, it implies evaluating students in the process of forming their competences and skills with the aim of helping them to continue such growth process (i.e. placement tests, diagnostic tests, impromptu students’ responses, whole class open-ended discussions, etc.).

➢ Summative: also called assessment of learning, it usually occurs at the end of a course or learning activity to determine a student’s level of achievement. It involves assigning a qualification based on acquired competencies, knowledge, skills, or abilities, and it is reflected in exams, grades, and certifications (i.e. final essays, periodic achievement tests, portfolio, etc.)

Similarly, depending on of its level of formality, the assessment can be regarded as:

▪ Formal: it is measured, and students know beforehand that their responses are going to be measured and evaluated; some examples are: exams, portfolios, oral presentations, etc.

▪ Informal: it can take a number of forms, whether it be incidental, unplanned comments and responses, coaching and other feedback to the students such as: there you go!, good job!, pop quiz, etc.

Finally, paying attention to the number of participants involved in the assessment process, three types of evaluation can be discerned:

-Self-evaluation: the objective is for students to be aware of their own learning process and take responsibility for it.

-Peer-evaluation or coevaluation: when students assess each other.

-Heteroevaluation: it is the process whereby an individual’s knowledge or performance is assessed by an agent with a different status from his/her own. It encompasses both teacher-student and student-teacher evaluations.

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❖ Think-Pair-share: it is a collaborative technique whereby students are encouraged to solve a problem or answer a question by reflecting on it on their own first, before proceeding to discuss in pairs/groups about it. It is one of the most comprehensive strategies from a constructivist perspective, as it fosters: critical thinking, interaction, independent learning, motivation, participation, collaboration, formative assessment, etc.

❖ Guided Discovery: it is a sort of inductive technique whereby a teacher provides examples of a language item and guides the pupils to find the rules by themselves. This technique is specially suitable for the explanation of the different grammatical tenses.

❖ Scaffolding (anchoring or brainstorming, chunking, repackaging): It consists in meeting students at their ability level and guide them progressively into greater understanding and, consequently, greater independence during their learning process. It entails the application of a number of strategies, namely: brainstorming or anchoring into students’ previous knowledge; chunking, which refers to breaking down the materials into “digestible bites”; and repackaging, which is about manipulating the content so that it results easier for students to grasp it.

❖ Drilling: Despite being often associated with repetitive and passive exercises, in a constructivist context, it can be adapted to the modeling of some speech patterns on meaningful, well-contextualized scenarios.

❖ Feedback: it revolves around redirecting or refocusing the learner's actions to achieve a goal, and it must take center stage in our lessons.

As for the learning activities, they need to be varied in order to cater for the different specific and key competences, encompassing the different language skills established by the CEFR. Within the learning situation context, the different activities should be designed according to their practical application, or rather, to their degree of contribution to the performance of the final task through the different “enabling sessions”. Delving further into the design of the different activities, it is worth mentioning that there should be some connection between them in such a way that students can apply the knowledge acquired through the completion of one activity to do the next one (i.e. pre-while-post pattern). As for grammatical exercises and activities, they need to be organized in a scaffolded way according to their level of difficulty in such a way that more controlled activities should precede semi-controlled ones before moving on to the productive part of the lesson (present, practice, and produce).

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COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE (CEFR)

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COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE (CEFR)

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The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is an internationally recognized standard used to describe foreign language proficiency across Europe and, increasingly, at a global level. Despite being especially designed for all European languages, this reference framework is not specifically tied to any language in question (it follows a language-neutral format), hence it can be perfectly used for any language in the world. It lays the basis for assessing language ability at various levels, providing cohesion, unity, common action, and mutual recognition of qualifications among the different European countries. On top of that, it provides a common basis for the explicit description of objectives, content and methods in foreign language education. In this regard, it plays a key role in influencing the approach, leveling and definition of the different elements within the foreign language curriculum.

Delving further into the usefulness of the CEFR, the following advantages can be distinguished:

-It plays a key role in terms of curriculum orientation.

-It facilitates the design of teaching materials.

-It provides cohesion for language learning assessment worldwide.

-It fosters autonomous learning.

-It is a highly valuable tool for language program design.

-It lays the basis for the creation and functioning of international certification systems.

-It provides teachers with methodological guidance.

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To conclude, this final entry is intended to briefly describe the different activities the teacher has conducted with us in class. These activities were highly varied and they included ingenious and original ways to start EFL lessons, or even examples of learning situations based on traditional festivities such as the one we did about Thanksgiving. All in all, one of the main objectives of these activities was to provide practical examples of how the different teaching techniques (guided discovery, think-pair-share, the present-practice-produce pattern, brainstorming, etc.) could be implemented in a real lesson.

Some examples of these activities are:

1. The guessing game we did at the beginning of a lesson whereby we had to figure out the content saved inside a container by the teacher. This sort of icebreaker activity allowed us to acknowledge how students can be easily engaged in a lesson by merely starting it with such a hook. Through this guessing game, students are requested to ask questions in groups (one question per group) so as to discover the object hidden inside it, getting them to practice the language and having fun at the same time (incidental language acquisition: students need and use the foreign language for a purpose).

2. The second activity we did that I would like to highlight is the one about Thanksgiving Day. In this activity, the teacher provided us with some insight into how to take advantage of a cultural holiday to organize a learning situation based on the topic in question. For example, taking Thanksgiving as a reference, we can easily bring a costume (Mayflower pilgrim) and some other clues (turkey, native Indian weapons or tools, displaying pictures of the American landscape at that time, etc.) to class linked to the historical background of such celebration, and try to make students discover and reflect on the cultural origins of this particular celebration, that is, the reason behind the national holiday they're enjoying. At the end of the day, you cannot understand the present without having first found out about the past, and this sort of activities can be regarded as a great opportunity to do that. Similarly, throughout this session, the teacher implemented and tested some of the different aforementioned teaching techniques with us, allowing us to become active recipients of their benefits as teachers-to-be.

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Classroom management encompasses a variety of skills and techniques that teachers can use to create a high-performing learning environment. Have a look at the ones described below!

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White Colorful Modern Timeline Design Process Infographic