TO BEGIN WITH... Session 1

Hi everyone, 

As I said to you before, I'll be publishing all the activities and resources we have been seeing since we began this course 2 months ago.

I'll also propose some reflections and feedback about them, and after that I'll suggest some others to develop in English as a Foreign Language teaching.

These activities are part of a subject I'm attending as part of a master's degree to become a Secondary English teacher, and the name of the course is "Recursos didácticos para la enseñanza de la lengua y la literatura".

Our lecturer is Laura Angelini Doffo, she's a very outgoing and active person, so that makes reference to the way she performs her classes, very lively and enjoyable.

To begin with, I'll start with the description of all the activities we carried out in the first  day of class.

Session 1 

This session could be divided into 2 parts:

The first part was kind of an introductory lesson in which our lecturer started by explaining the way she was going to assess us. After that she did a short explanation about what active learning is, since this method was the one she was going to carry out during the most part of the lessons. 

This methodology implies active teaching, so the teacher must plan and create activities all the time in order to make her students work on everything intended to be learnt by them. I find this fact very important, students need to practise and be in direct contact with the object of learning, so in this way they will be able to acquire it. However, this could be certainly applied to any field of learning, as it is proved that when something catches your attention and feelings is when you learn and gather it.

We also talked about the ICT's as a resource for English classes; we considered the variety of techs and resources in an English class as an essential way to engage students and call their attention through the 5 senses. I definitely agree with a variety of resources in a language class but also think that technology must be one of the most important strategies employed by the teacher. It is a fact that technology is part of the life of our secondary students, they have grown up with it so they are perfect users; because of that, they have changed their way to acquire a language, their learning styles are different, they are more visual, intuitive-random and multi-tasking. Therefore, we as teachers must adapt our teaching strategies so as to fit our students’ needs.

Then, the lecturer did a distinction between groupwork and teamwork. The first one is used when we are talking about collaborative learning, that is, when students are set into different groups where they will carry out an activity or task that will be solved with the aid of everyone. All of them have the same importance and through a discussion or debate, they will find the solution. In contrast, teamwork is used with cooperative learning and it implies different roles within a team; each student has a different responsibility so at the end all parts need to be performed in order to complete the task. This explanation was used for introducing the second part of the session.

In the second part, the lecturer explained the active learning activity we were going to complete. It would consist of a task divided into 3 stations. The 3 stations were built around 2 short stories we had to read (“Lamb to the slaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”, both by Roald Dahl), so all the activities were related to them. We were distributed into different teams, so the task would be performed by the use of the cooperative method. Each member of the team had a different role, which were the leader, the language supervisor, the secretary and the advisor. Groups were presumably of 4 people, but if more, some of the roles could be repeated; it was the case of my group, so we had 2 secretaries. We were Group 1 and the members of my group were:

- Eliseo Martínez, the leader

- Phil Lee, the advisor

- Sara Gozálvez, the language supervisor

- Irene Montalar and I, the secretaries

Furthermore, all the work done throughout the 3 stations was shared in a digital platform called Edmodo and in this way we could also see and comment our classmates’ work.

Station 1

In this section we had to deal with some questions related to both short stories, “Lamb to the slaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”.

We had no problems answering the questions, almost everyone participated in the decisions and we carried out our roles fairly.  The questions 2 and 3 dealt directly with information related to the stories and I found them quite appealing because, with the first one, we related both female protagonists, making us to think about their personalities and their behaviours, so we were able to go beyond the actual events; with the second one, we thought about the ironic symbols and what they symbolize in each story.

What’s more, we could learn to use some digital tools as Edmodo which is a very useful tool to share and comment our work with the rest of the teams and to see our classmates' work and learn from them, or soundcloud and vacaroo tools to record voice online. I have to say that we had some problems when using the voice-recorder tools, but we could fix them by using another alternative to record the voice, so here you have the audio in which one of our team members pretended to be Mrs Malony, excusing herself of the attempted murder. 

On the other hand, we were asked to consider when these tools would be used in a better way throughout the teaching process, that is, in pre-teaching, actual teaching or post-teaching, and I personally found these questions useful since we, as a group, could comment and discuss why use them in the first place or in another.

So, this is the explanation of Station 1, see you soon on the STATION 2!!!