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For our first assessment, we were asked to reflect on  what we thought would be our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in relation to this course.

STRENGTHS

WEAKNESSES

OPPORTUNITIES

THREATS

In my case, the perceptions I had, concerning my weaknesses and strengths, turned out to be quite accurate. Though maybe my concept of creativity was quite unrelated to classroom activity creativity, It is astonishing the amount of variables one has to consider to be creative. The choice of materials on the one hand, how to change the fossilized concept of teaching and learning on the other, how to make the best of resources at hand, how to engage and motivate students, how to make language alive and not concentrate only on structures, words, and forms,  how to take advantage of students background knowledge, how to integrate different skills ... it is a never ending challlenging task. My weaknesses, were constantly present, but having expressed them at the begining of the semester helped me  try and tackle them somehow or at least be aware that there they were.
The opportunities were much more than I expected. This is the first and only subject of my career in which I have been explicitly presented with a variety of  activities and materials, all of them engaging and different to what I was used to. It makes one realize the diversity that exists and the amount of opportunities there are to change ceratin concepts on how to teach. I especially enjoyed, and will deffinitely use them over and over again, the tea-party activity, the group work, the cooperative dictogloss, suggestopedia, storytelling and the chance of differnt classroom settings. All these opportunities of learning new ways to teach were given to us, externally, their foundations on the teacher. So once again, somethig I learnt during the semester becomes visible, the importance of the teacher as a resource.
The threats were also constantly present, not having enough time,and not being a profficient technology user. But all in all, I learnt, maybe slower than others, but still, with the chance to discover, use apply and reflect on different and new methods.
I would like to end my last entry by saying that, in my opinion, there should be more of this type of lessons, guided, hands on, concrete, real, experienced, analyzed, applied and with the opportunity to reflect on.

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This stage will be divided into two activities:

pair activity, a fortune-teller game

group activity, write and present a  horoscope

1. Students pair up. Teacher hands out 10 cards to each pair of students. They will play to be fortune tellers. Student A isthe fortune teller and asks student B to pick three cards. Student B picks the cards. Student A turns them over and according on what appears on them predicts students B's future. Ex. You will be obscenly rich and live in a castle. You will  marry an old woman or live with your mum. You will be encountered by a shark on a surfing holiday.  You will be sent to a nunery. When they have finished reading  the first three fortune cards students swop roles  and it's student B's turn to be the fortune teller while student A picks three cards.
2. Teacher asks students: "Who was born between 21st of Feb and 21st of  March?" All the  students born between those dates form the group piscis. Then teacher moves on to April. Once all the horoscope groups are formed ( it doesn't matter that in some groups there are more students then in others, actually it would be interesting to observe which ones work better) they are given a different zodiac sign to work on. Groups have to write a short horoscope using will and won't to predict that signs future. Once ready teacher randomely names a student, the student tells her his/her  zodiac sign and the group that was in charge of that signshoroscope reads it out loud.

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Language Function: to make predictions using  will/won't

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Language Function: to make predictions using  will/won't

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Teacher hands each group an envelope with strips of paper in them. Students will put them together so as to reconstruct the text. The texts are the following entries of Adrian Mole's Diary. Once reconstructed Students read them out loud

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Teacher will write  unknown or confusing vocabulary and  expressions on the white-board and explain them to students.

Teacher now explains the dictogloss. Teacher will read the text one time while Ss listen carefully. Teacher will read the text a second time and now Ss take notes. Teacher reads the text a third time so Ss can complete their notes.

Teacher divides the class into groups of four. Groups are asked to collaboratively reconstruct the text as close to the original as possible. When ready they are asked to read them out loud.

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As a warm-up and so as to introduce students to Adrian Mole,  the teacher will read the first entry of  Adrian's diary,  Thursday January 1st. This will help to engage students and to contextualize the dictogloss,

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Personally I love Adrian Mole. I think he's so funny the way he describes so many things teenagers go through, like trying to find out who they really are, falling in love and  thinking grown ups are so bizarre. Also, the fact that it's a diary makes the reading light and enjoyable. I believe it's the perfect material for a dictogloss,  Adrian's entries are short and witty so it should engage students. These are some of the reasons why I will design my dictogloss (and most likely other activities) using  the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend.

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This activity was also fun. We were divided into big groups and had to stand in line. The first student in line had to run to the front of the room read the first sentence of a text, try to memorize it and write it down. Then the next in line had to read what was copied on the paper, run to the front, memorize what followed and write it down, and so on until one of the groups completed the text.  The text was the lyrics of a song, but as the the song was being played at the same time, having to read and write with the background music going on, was a bit confusing. As a suggestion the song could be played once the dictogloss is over,  as a listening activity for students to edit their texts. Another suggestion is that maybe the groups were a bit to large.  There was a lot of waiting for your turn so perhaps groups should be of maximum four?

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Honestly, it’s the first time that I enjoy a dictation, though of course it is a new version of the old concept but very refreshing in contrast to the traditional classroom activity. To work collaboratively in the reconstruction of the original text was great, because 10 ears hear better than 2, and five brains have a better memory. Also, working in groups increased student participation,  it was less threatening regarding the result and reduced competitiveness because Ss were  working towards the same goal.  Furthermore, we were constantly negotiating, comparing   and discussing  if  what we had heard, or thought to have   heard, made any sense. So we were using and reflecting on language. This particular activity, Adrian Mole, integrated the skills of:

·         Listening, the teacher reads the story out loud, two times.

Note: this stage, depending on the text being read, could be very useful for the teacher to become an input resource for prosodic features of speech, such as intentional pausing, stress, pitch and intonation,  thus making the text rich and alive, musical.

·         Writing, first by note-taking and then by writing the text as close as possible to the original one.

·         Speaking, through comparing and discussing with group-mates.

·         Reading, when reading the reconstructed text out loud.

I believe this activity  is a great opportunity  for the teacher to use  for formative assessment, it serves as input for the teacher to see and analyze students outcome (error analysis), and helps to provide feedback  and practice the aspects that may still be weak.

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This platform turned out to be a great tool. It is extremely useful for engaging students with listening tasks. It gives you the chance to work with video content for the classroom by giving an easy way to edit video clips, add voice overs, and embed quizzes. Teachers can assign a video to a set of students and apparently track students viewing history and quiz results. So it's a sort of  “flipped”  classroom by giving students videos  that they can watch on their own to then answer some questions.
The ability to embed questions into the video is really effective and helps to assess what concepts were trickier than others. To conclude, EDpuzzle is also very user-friendly, as much for the teacher as for the students.

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https://edpuzzle.com/assignments/5851ee5223db2d4526d3094d/watch

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Listening Comprehension: Bolt, Funny Cats

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Listening Comprehension: Bolt, Funny Cats

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This is a really good video for a listening comprehension task. In my opinion it is engaging and motivating, and so an excelent material for the classroom. The language is natural, and though maybe a bit fast, it is real and alive. It introduces students to dialogues, turn taking, interruptions, chunks and real-life expressions. It also gets them acquainted to accents, intonations, rythm and stress. This is an important aspect to consider when choosing a listening material. Language has to be alive and engaging for students to want to listen. If they are motivated their affective filter will be lowered and so, whilst listening, the new language and expressions will have a higher chance of  being acquired. Plus, if we consider that the input is colloquial language, with short sentences, expresions and funny sounds it is much more fun and students will be more willing to try and use it. And this should be the goal for teachers, to get students to USE the language and to help them to be willing to communicate in it.

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Bolt The Dog And two Cats In Studio RV Scene Credits Goes to Yify you can download movies here 720p http://www.yify-torrents.com/home

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Students will watch three videos of famous people being interviwed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeGBQKdKcZ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apBfY8h3fno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkn9F0WWf20
Whole class activity:
The first activity will be a short genre analyze, so as to provide students with explicit and relevant information for them to be able to produce an amazing  interview.
We will analyze:

rhetorical situation

register

rhetorical organization (moves or stages)

suprasegmental features

semiotic modes

Group activity:
Students will work in groups of six, and come up with typical questions and expressions used in interviews, in the different stages. These will be shared with the class and the entonation and pronunciation will be performed by the teacher and repeated by students. As a class they will decide on the interview setting and organize themselves to bring the elements requiered to stage it.
Pair activity:
Students will pair up and decide on a famous actor, singer or football player they would like to interview. For homework they will do research on their celebrity so as to be able to answer the interviewers questions. During the following lesson they will write and practice their script. And the following lesson present their interview.

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Suggestopedia Check-list and Lesson plan

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Suggestopedia Check-list and Lesson plan

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My personal objective for designing and planning the lessons under this approach, is to invite students into a diferent learning environment and experience.
In these three lessons I will work with the four language skills.
First lesson:
The first lesson will be about listening, reading (silently and out loud) and dessugesting possible hinderances. Language focus will be vocabulary and the lesson objectives would be for students to identify, understand, remember and reproduce new vocabulary.
Second lesson:
The second lesson will  focus on the same short story so as to review and recall the vocabulary introduced in the previous lesson. This time the skills will be listening, reading and speaking. The lesson objective woud be for students to remember, identify, act, transfer and produce the learnt vocabulary by enacting the story in different manners.
Third lesson:
During this last lesson we will work on creating a similar but different story. Students will analize and identify the genre, narrator and characters of the story on the one hand, and on the other, identify and distinguish its grammar structures and tenses so as to follow the same line. In groups they will work on re-writing the story but with some sort of change. Variations may be: changing the end, incorporating a new charater or changing the time and place. After writing the new story one of the students will read it out loud and the rest will act it out.

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Suggestopedia is referred to as an affective humanistic approach which, through considering students feelings, tries to lower the psychological barriers set up towards learning.
According to Lozanov, the originator of this method, we do not use our full mental capacity because we believe that we are limited in our ability to learn and that will be unable to perform.
The idea behind this approach is to desuggest the limitations we think we have and help students believe that they can succeed.

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Students are asked to to listen to "The Great Cookie Quest" http://bbc.in/1qPxPF1 at home. It's a video, in which Warwick Davies (Professor Flitwick in Harry Potter) reads out the story.  I would take advantage of the fact that the stories are read out loud by famous English actors for my students to have the opportunity to listen to properly pronounced, and profesional  story-telling.
They will be asked to listen to the story once before accessing the socrative platform. After reading the questions, they are asked to listen to the story a second time and answer the questions. If they have difficulties they are encouraged to read the story.