Share your thoughts on the wall! by Marina

How can we write on the wall?

MarinaElosegi — 2014-09-26 08:14:40 UTC

Easy! Just double click on the green wall and remember to write your name first. Then keep on writing your ideas and reflections.

When you finish click outside the writing box.

Enjoy the learning!

Marina

IMANOL PEREZ: Sharing my thoughts

2014-10-10 10:47:36 UTC

My first contact with English was at the age of 6. It was in my first course of Primary school. To say the truth I do not remember my feelings at that age. But I guess they were positive feelings because the teaching ways were very funny. For example songs, videos, games…

When I got into Secondary school my feelings changed. In fact, the methodology focused on a grammar book which made things harder. So, English became a difficult and boring language for me. That’s why I didn’t like it anymore. After that I went to university where I started recovering good feelings about English. I was decided I was going on Erasmus scholarship, so I started studying English on my own. One year later I got my goal and I received a scholarship for Hungary, where I was for five months. Therefore, there I learned all English I know.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience teaching Fl but is something I am very interested in. So, in the future I would like to be English teacher.

As far as I know, I feel that there is a big difference between introducing English in a monolingual or bilingual context. In fact children who are studying two languages at the same time have more abilities to learn another new language. That is because they have learnt some strategies to learn that languages and those can be used to make connections with other language. So, for bilingual students learning another language is easier than for the monolingual students.

To finish I am going to explain elements to promote speaking skills in Primary school. I think that it is necessary to look for some strategies for the kids to talk about their feelings and opinions. That can be done through games or different easy questions. Anyway, it is really important for us to make children feel comfortable so they can be protagonist.

Kattalin Legarda. `English & I´.

2014-10-15 16:01:41 UTC

I´ve been studing English since I was 3 years old, when I started infant school.
I remember my first contact with this foreign language utterly positive due to the fact that my first English teacher was Mikel Urdangarin, the famous Basque musician and composer. I don´t really remember everything we used to carry out during English lesson, but I will always bear in mind how we get in contact with English taking advantage of music. Mainly, those lesson were based on speaking and trying to use English more than learning grammatics or being sitting down listening to the teacher.

After that, when I started primary school, I developed my language skills attending to school English lessons and also to an academy. Actually, nowadays I keep on ameliorating my English level in the same academy. However, I strongly believe that taking into account my situation, the best option is to go abroad and develop my speaking competence learning everyday used expressions, idioms and so on.

Concerning learning and teaching processes in FL lessons, I agree with experts such as Pili Sagasta (2009) and the importance of understanding learning as a scaffolding process. Nonetheless, I would like to highlight that teaching FL in a bilingual context is completely different since children who has already develop communicative and writting skills in two languages are able to transfer knowledge from one language to another. Therefore, that ability to make connections between Spanish, Basque and English gave not only students, but also teachers a fantastic oportunity to work on L3 in a more meaningful way.

To sum up, taking into account everything mentioned before, I daresay teachers must consider above all , on the one hand, to work on speaking to achieve children feel confortable making use of FL. On the other hand, listenning to FL is indispensable to habituate pupils to phonetics and finally, carrying out same writing activities they have already work on in Basque and Spanish lesson.