WEEK 2 AT EOI ELX

Hello, my readers!

On Monday 6th I had an important company meeting and that was reason why I began my second week at EOI on Tuesday, 7th February.

As you can imagine, the first group in the morning was 9B (level A2.1). They are going to develop a LIBRARY PROJECT in which volunteers will buy a buy a book adapted to this level (it costs around 6 or 6.5 euros) and then on summer holidays, they will be able to swap them are keep reading new books.

Because of the importance of wh- questions and establishing word order in the English language, the teacher started the session with some activities included in the GRAMMAR BANK (at the end of the textbook) to reinforced what they had already studied. They also practised common verb phrases on page 41.

Today's plan for the SPEAKING section was to reorganise tables from their original classroom (17), but as we had to move to a different room (1) due to technological problems, it was impossible to do so.

In order to conclude the session, ss. were encouraged to participate first, using some questions about free time on page 83 as samples for breaking the ice, and then answering them down so to ask their partners afterwards.

#FOODFORTHOUGHT 💭

Today, I have reflected by observing on the use of L1 in the SL teaching. For example, my tutor always gives instructions to beginners in their L1 (normally Spanish or Valencian), and then he repeats the same prompts in the SL/FL several. 

This fact, made me think of a dear UA professor who taught me Linguistics some years ago, Dr. Mar Galindo, and who was such an expert researcher on this topic. If you do not know her studies, you can find some of them online, but also in her doctoral thesis, named La Lengua Materna en el Aula de ELE applied to teaching Spanish as a FL.

Group 11B:

On the one hand, about 15 or 20 minutes were dedicated to discuss about the series The Five, recommended to ss. last week by Roge. On the other hand, the most relevant textbook issues they were dealing with today were: 

- GRAMMAR: unreal uses of past tenses (on page 49), making hypotheses by using expressions such as “You’d better…” “I’d rather…” “It’s (about/high) time to…” “I wish..." "If only..."

- VOCABULARY: idioms about money (on page 50).

What do they love and give them cultural backgrounds? PROVERBS! Roge knows this group eagerness for achieving more fluency and therefore, from time to time he is adding sayings to their repertoires. And I am learning a lot of them as well!

Wednesday, 8th February 

1ST YEAR A2 LEVEL (Group 9A) - From 9 am to 10:53 am

1ST YEAR A2 LEVEL (Group 11A) - From 11:10 am to 1 pm

Group 9A & Group 11A: 

We were back to Room 17 and today's both sessions were started by Roge who was in charge of explaining object pronouns. He drew a table on the whiteboard in order to review subject pronouns firstly. Then, ss. listened to him and repeated all together as a choir. Ss. did not have to copy anything because the contents were included in their books. As homework, they had a photocopy about object pronouns. 

For the next hour and half, my fellow Alba Díaz was teaching several topics: months, ordinal numbers, and dates (on pages 44 and 45). 

I was the responsible of giving the same lesson plan in the second group (11A), however our teaching lines were different because we were free to decide our methods, procedures, and materials to do so. I had experienced teaching a large beginner group of adults before so, it was a gratifying and relax time for me.

Thursday, 9th February 

Group 9B:
Today, the classroom changed again because, my colleague Rocío Soriano was teaching (the same points as Alba and I did on Wednesday) and she had decided to follow the textbook listening exercises and videos.

Group 11B:

Roge started by checking grammar homework (unreal uses of past tenses), and ss. learnt the differences between “I’ve gone” and “I’ve been”.

SPEAKING time: the topic was relaxation (on page 53). Firstly, ss. looked at the pictures and tried to guess by inventing (there were five photos of different people from which the only available information was name, age, and nationality: Who is the most stress? Why?) Then, they watched a video (the five candidates were interview in the street about their chilling habits) once, and then looked at the scripts on page 133. As a consequent step connected to the video, we practised some colloquial English phrases such as: drown out, kind of, stressing me out a bit, or so. 

Mrs Bacaicoa