WEEK 9 AT EOI ELX

 Hello, my readers!

Monday 3rd, April

Room 3. C1 with Klara Seheult. Class management: her class furniture was organised as a horseshoe, the same I observed in Ramón's classroom (15). They always start the day with several monologues on a specific topic provided by the teacher a couple of days before, and prepared by ss. in advance at home. Then, they perform it in front of their fellows. At advanced level, ss. use different textbooks from different publishing houses. Remember that the whole school employed Oxford's New English File, while C1 is using Speak Out Advanced (Pearson), and C2 is following Keynote Proficient (CENGAGE Learning).

Peer-review. My master's mate, Begoña Lavale was teaching today. Her challenge was introducing unit 4 to ss. which deals with justice and crimes. First, she used two questions form the text book (p. 44) as a warming-up that they had to debate in pairs. Second, she sent homework (reading and questions). Finally, she used a TED Talks video in order to develop her lesson plan. The video was played twice and ss. were given a worksheet containing 5 listening comprehension activities (collocations, gaps, questions, definitions, proposed composition). All together they went through the worksheet. 

After she had finished her teaching, Klara continued as a class guide with some exercises about future tenses they had begun last week. Their finishing routing is being rearranged in small groups and answer the questions projected on the screen (Klara prepares a PPT presentation and uploades it to Edmodo) about the series they are watching: "The Night Manager".

 

At the very end of the session, ss. left and Klara and I gave some positive feedback to Begoña and discussed about C1 level advantages and disavantages.

PC ROOM & Doubts. Asking Inés for the PGA document (Programación General Anual) so to include information about it in my Practicum II. Of course, she told me I was not able to keep a copy but only having a look at it meanwhile I was at school. Also today, I was talking to Klara and María Tarí (Didactic Coordinator) at the English Department because I needed to clarify their roles within the dept. 

Tuesday 4th, April

I was working at the PC ROOM upstairs.

Wednesday 5th, April

Peer-review. Room 10. I attended a B2.2 level group tutored by Inés, in which my masters colleague Rocío Soriano was teaching. Her teaching unit was being developed during this week and she knew about the students before because she had been observing Inés' teaching for several weeks so far. 

Rocío started the session with a fashionable game, Kahoot! And the six questions ss. were requiered to answer dealt with a grammar point she had previoously explained on Monday: gerunds and infinitives. After this warming-up, ss. were arranged in pairs in order to prepare a four-minutes monologue and perform it. When they finished, they had to give some feedback to their couples, at the same time that Inés, Rocío, and myself were walking around to monitor their speaking and pronunciation errors.  To conclude, ss. worked the textbook (pages 76 & 77): listenings about health related to infographies, similes (animals), and phonetics /ə /. 

Afterwards, Inés gave some  feedback to Rocío. I also had a brief meeting with my tutor, Roge, and I went to the PC ROOM so to continue updating the blog, sharing interesting articles on my professional Twitter account and also, writing on my Practicum II (internship report).

Thursday 6th, April

I have been working on didactic resources, surfing the EOI website, and so on during the whole morning.

Friday 7th, April

Today was the last day at EOI in Elx, and we had a special staff meeting called in Spanish CLAUSTRO, which joined the whole school, that is to say all the teachers from every single language department. It was held at the school library, where I could discover some time ago a huge variety of books.

Nowadays, there are six languages taught at this school, therefore six different departments: Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, and Valencian. The current management team is shaped by six members, and the headmaster (Ramón Antón) was the responsible for setting the agenda and guiding the meeting.

• Approval of the previous minutes /
  
  Aprobación del acta anterior
• Facilities: Damages and Investments / 
  Daños y arreglos de infraestructuras
• Collaboration Agreement with UMH / 
  Colaboración Practicum UMH (Universidad Miguel Hernández)
• Plan Integral de Aprendizaje de Lenguas para el Profesorado
• PGA Monitoring and Assessment /
  Valoración del seguimiento de la PGA (Programación General Anual)
• Motions and queries / 
  Ruegos, preguntas, propuestas, etc.

Miss Bacaicoa

WEEK 7 AT EOI ELX

Hello, my readers!

Monday 20th, March

On Monday I was busy upstairs preparing my lesson plan and so on.

Tuesday 21st, March

Group 09B (B2.2):
Room 15. This is the only group that Ramón Antón, EOI headmaster, teaches during this academic year. I was observing this class for my very first time and here is what it happened. My master's colleague Begoña Lavale is mentored by Ramón and so, part of today's teaching was carried out by her.

Group 11B: 

My lesson plan (16/24 SS.) / DAY 1 (2h) / Pages 98-

First of all, I had planned several warming-up questions to ask to my ss. about their sports habits. For instance: 

• Do you do any sport?
• How do you feel afterwards?
• How many times a week?
• Do you prefer to do it indoors or outdoors?

As they had already met me, we connected pretty much and a nice speaking time was shared about their experiencies beyond the classroom. Also, to contrast their personal opinions to someone else's, I asked for a volunteer to read the quotation by Stuart Heritage, a British journalist (p. 98):

"Runners run because they like running, joggers jog because they like cake." 

I wanted to lead them to a brief debate on motivation and activate their previous knowledge.

Then, I guided them to focus on the lesson's title: "A good sport" and we discussed together about its meaning (a person who is cheerful and pleasant, especially in a difficult situation). 

Taking into account only the headlines of the text "Battle of Workouts", we could practise pronunciation of the most fashionable sports nowadays: circuits, pilates, spinning, squash, step, tennis, weights, and yoga.

Without reading, just looking at the pictures and ss. tried to guess whether the statements from activity b) on page 99 were true or false. The results were highly positive in general terms.

The second part of my session was dedicated to grammar. As I decided to approach to it deductively, I told my ss. to explain what they alredy knew about relative clauses in English and complete the exercise a) on page 100. After 5 minutes of individual thinking and a couple of them more of pair "cheating" (comparison in couples), we checked it aloud and I taught them further. The following aspects had never been introduce at B2.2 level, so they were complete new for them:

• WHICH to refer to a whole preceding clause, adding more information.
• Quantifiers, numbers, superlatives + OF + Which / whom / whose [NON-DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSES]4
• WHAT used as a relative pronoun to mean 'the thing' or 'things which'.

We read together the examples on page 159 and activities a) and b) were mandatory homework for next day with me. 

The closing activity was aimed at improving their writing, patience, and promote their creativity. In order to have everything prepared in advance, I went to the classroom much earlier than ss. and moved the tables in groups of four. Furthermore, I had printed six famous paintings the day before and I left them in the middle of each team with a post-it on them with two relative pronouns. 

Ss. had to make up a story about the painting and introduce it to the audience as if they were guides in a museum. I took us between 15 and 20 minutes and they created really good stories.  

These were the pictures I gave them, all of them taken from Creative Commons:

  

 

To conclude, I let 5 minutes left for doubts.

Thursday 23rd, March

After greeting my ss., we started the session correcting the exercises they had as homework about relative clauses and completing the article (a) on the worksheet I photocopied and handed in as an extra practice paper (p. 181 from the Teacher's book). 

On the one hand, we worked on word building: adjectives - nouns - verbs related to sports and health on page 99, activities a, b, and c.

On the second hand, ss. were requiered to read the information box about homographs on page 100 and match the suitable pronunciation to their corresponding definition at the exercise below (a).

When we were about to finish, Roge suggested that they watch or read the news during the weekend and then, next Tuesday retell the others an interesting or shocking piece of news.

Miss Bacaicoa

Writing expression and interaction: A DIARY

“A man’s mistakes are his portals of discovery.” James Joyce

Hello, my readers!

Welcome to a new post dedicated to enhance your students' writing skills. As the TU "Lost in the States" is focused on a trip to America, and sometimes when travelling plan do not occur as expected (though you had checked the map, asked the locals, etc.), I thought that writing a diary can be a good manner of keeping record of their "daily adventures and feelings". This will be explained also in class. 

This task contains three core sections: 

• Include the full date, how’s the weather like, and your exact geographical location (state and village/city) every day on top of your diary page.
• Describe how your day has been or would have been using the 3rd Conditional as much as possible.
• Draw a box containing a new idiom and two phrasal verbs learnt each day. You must explain the idiom meaning in your own words, and include the PhVbs within two logical sentences. 

In order to introduce idioms in the ESL classroom, I have designed a dynamic short presentation using the powerful resource called PowToon.

PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE,
THIS IS JUST SCREENSHOT 

Should you need any further clarification, you could watch a PechaKucha video I have recorded myself. It is available on my YouTube Channel, you can access from my blog following these instructions: Click on the page VIDEOS, and then on the IMAGE you will find there. 

Also, I would be glad to answer your comments or e-mails.

Have a wonderful day you all!


Mrs Bacaicoa

Culture, history and traditions: THANKSGIVING

Hello, my readers!

On my contribution today, I would like to make you wonder about culture and all its implications within the SL classroom. From now on, I will refer both to high school and adult learners of English. It is cold this winter, please take a coffee and seat before meditating...

Are HISTORY and TRADITIONS important when TESL? What do we understand for CULTURE? Does it apply for one and only single COUNTRY? If so, WHERE should we choose it from?

So to calm down my readers after these universal questions, I have delicately done some reasearch and chosen the paper so called "Teaching culture in the 21st century language classroom". It was published by University of Nebraska and defends that:

"Research on teaching culture has shown that language and culture are closely related and are best acquired together. [...] The acquisition of a second language […] is also the acquisition of a second culture.” 

This being so, trying to avoid culture in our ESL would be a catastrophe that will damage our students' perception of the world and enhance their rejection towards other countries. 

Undoubtedly, teaching beyond language structures seems for me a engaging opportunity to "open wide" their mind scopes and appreciate different cultures whenever you have the opportunity, as a teacher, to keep your students in contact to foreign institutions or schools (English speakers, it does not really matter if you decide to communicate with students in Colombia who learn ESL or native English speakers from Scotland). 

Good real examples I have experimented myself in the ESL classroom are:

•  a videoconference session using the platform Skype to discuss about Hallowe'en differences between America and Europe; 
• sending e-mails / letters  to ask for recommendations for planning a trip or a recipe for preparing a British national meal.

Focusing on the "Lost in the States", I have created with the tool WordClouds a highly visual word map containing some of the essential vocabulary to be employed at the end of your Thanksgiving lesson in order to retell the historical events. However, this idea can be applied for several purposes such as: 

• a table of contents for introducing the involved characters and locations, you can establish a concrete order, in our case I did not choose it on purpose;
• a study helper;
• a tool for brainstorming during debates, showing the guide lines to follow;
• an opportunity to come upon synonyms and antonyms on online dictionaries as Theasaurus;
• teach them to generate their own "word clouds" easily not just with the previous tool mentioned (WordCloud) but also with the ones I have considered the best to handle by beginners: Wordle, and WordItOut.
• There are plenty of objectives that could be achieved from them, do not hesitate to contact me or comment this post if you can name some more!

CREATED BY SANDRA BACAICOA

References

• Dema, Oxana and Moeller, Aleidine Kramer, "Teaching culture in the 21st century language classroom" (2012). Faculty Publications: Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education. Paper 181. 

My best New Year's wishes to you all!

Miss Bacaicoa