Assessment (part 1)

Hi there!!

Today I’m going to introduce the assessment part of the course I’ve been presenting you these days, which would be related to short stories teaching. In order to carry out the assessment, we have to choose 2 short stories and design some activities by ourselves that can be directed to the pre-, actual or post-teaching part of the task.  

The first short story I’ve chosen is “Tattercoats”, a fairy tale that you can find in the collection English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel. I’m going to present some pre-and post-activities for this story which will be intended to 4^th of ESO students. They will have to make groups of 5 people each one in order to work in a collaborative way through all the pre-teaching part. In this way, they will be able to learn about some English writers, about fairy tales as a literary genre and to get a gist of this short story before reading it. I will try to promote collaborative work within a groupwork; students will have to discuss, comment everything and decide their answers as a group, so they will have to negotiate and come to an agreement.  

After that, I will also present some activities for the post-teaching part. In contrast, these activities will be focused on individual work, in order to increase personal skills and personal responsibility. I will propose the game strategy with the use of an interactive game in which different activities are created around different learning styles, as visual or auditory. For this reason, listening comprehension is also emphasized during the activities, but students will also increase their writing abilities since they will have to write different answers using their own words. What's more, they will learn the different elements of a story in English, and this could be considered as a cross-curricular learning, given that these elements are taught in previous years in mother tongue classes.

On the whole, the PURPOSE is to facilitate learners’ communicative competence in English through the use of literature. They will develop linguistic, communicative, personal and social skills, together with the increase of their digital skills, with the use of digital tools as learning strategies. Other strategies used are searching for information, clarification of terms or guessing information. 

Pre-Activities

1.      “Tattercoats” is an English fairy tale found in several picture books and in various collections, so your task here will be to click on each author and tell us in 2 lines the most important facts about his o her life as an English writer.

-          Margaret Greaves, Tattercoats, 1990

-         Flora Annie Steel, Tattercoats, English Fairy Tales, 1918

-         Joseph Jacobs, Tattercoats, More English Fairy Tales, 1890

2.      Did you know what a fairy tale is? Could you explain it in your own words now?

3.      Do you know the meaning of the short story’s title? This word has become old-fashioned, could you guess the corresponding word we would use nowadays?

      Definition: The term "tattercoats" means more than merely "homeless people", although all beggars are automatically tattercoats (the original meaning of the word was "beggar or habitual lying-in-the-street drunk"). It refers to all "ne'er-do-wells" or undesirables, and it is also a polite way of referring to what a slightly tipsy, and therefore loose-tongued.

4.      Which is the collections’ hardcover for each one? Could you design your own hardcover of this short story? you can use the option "make a picture" in the webpage Kerproof.

5.      Here you have a short overview of the story, could you guess what is going to happen? Could she finally go to the ball?

Ragged Tattercoats lived in the kitchen of her grandfather's castle. She had hardly any friends and no freedom. Although she loved to dance, she was not allowed to go to the ball.

6.      Now that you have already imagined a possible story, you can check if your ideas have been the correct ones with this Tattercoats’ video.

7.      Finally, you will have to create a Glogster using all the information you have already got and it would be like a way of presenting this short story to other people. Here you have an example of Glogster about the English writer Roald Dahl so, be creative and design your own one!!!

Post-Activities

Extension work: Connections with Tattercoats: Ciderella

One of the most well-known stories ever written is Cinderella, a tale that all of you know about. Variations on Cinderella's myth appear in folktales in almost every world culture: she's known as "Yeh-Shen" in China, "The Rough-Face Girl" to the Algonquin Indians of North America, "Chinye" and "Nyasha" to the people of Africa, "Cenerentola" to Rossini and "Tattercoats" in England.

While these versions vary in some degree, the general tale usually centers on a kind, but oppressed character persecuted by the step-family. Typically, the father is either neglectful or absent; consequently, Cinderella must rely on a magical guardian for assistance in achieving her deepest wish.

Therefore, working individually on the English lab, you will establish similarities between these two fairy tales, but at the same time, you will study the different elements of a story, all thanks to this interactive game. The answers about the following Tattercoats' questions will be done in a worksheet.

1.   The first step would be to listen again to the story of Ciderella in case you don’t remember it, by clicking on Cinderella.

2.   After that, you will learn what the setting is in a story, by clicking on setting. Here, you will have to choose Cinderella’s setting and after that you will write what the Tattercoats’ setting is in the provided worksheet.

3.  Now, you will work on the characters. You will have to choose who the characters are in Cinderella’s story, who the hero is, and who the villain is. After that, you will do the same in Tattercoats’ worksheet.

4.    Next, the sequence part comes, in which you will just order Cinderella’s story.

5.   After that, it is presented the exposition. You will have to choose Cinderella’s exposition and create the Tattercoats’ exposition in the worksheet.

6.   The following activity will consist of deciding which Cinderella’s conflict is and to write by your own what you think it is Tattercoat’s conflict.

7.   Then, you will also have to decide which Cinderella’s climax is and write by your own what you think it is Tattercoat’s climax.

8.  In the final part, you will have to choose Cinderella’s resolution and write by yourself Tattercoast’s resolution.

Resources

Kerproof: http://www.kerpoof.com/

Glogster: http://www.glogster.com/

Cinderella around the world: http://www.edenvalleyenterprises.org/blhrc/educational/cindtour/world.html 

Interactives:

http://www.learner.org/interactives/story/index.html

We finish with... Session 4

Hello people!!

In this new post, I’m going to explain an unusual activity we performed in session 4 of the course. I have said unusual because it was new for me and I think for most of my classmates too. This session was called the ‘Library class’, and with it we learnt different methodologies which we can use to teach literature in our English classes. 

We started the class by choosing a book from a variety of them that were placed in a row at the front. The majority of the books were English classics from some famous English authors like Dickens, Poe or Shakespeare, among others, and the level range was also varied. 

Our lecturer gave us the opportunity to choose the one we wanted so, once we all had one in our hands, we had to choose some methodologies from a variety of them that were explained in booklets around the class in order to create some activities related to some aspect of the book, and it could be intended to be done as pre-, actual or post-activity. The provided methodologies were: cooperative learning, collaborative learning, problem-based learning, task-based learning, project-based learning, games, simulation and role-play.

The book I chose was "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and I did the task with one of my classmates. Before choosing the method we took a look to the different suggestions we had, and finally we decided to work with the Problem-based method as it was quite new for us and we wanted to have a try with it, and with the Collaborative method. Both are styles usually used with active learning which follow a student-centered pedagogy. With the use of both methods we wanted our students to work in groups and learn about a subject through the experience of problem solving. Therefore, the goals we could achieve with their use were effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation, so that’s why we found them a very good option to develop.

The creation of the activity supposed a challenge since we had not read the book before, so we had a quick look to it and by taking some ideas from the activities that were proposed at the end, we designed the following post-activity that include information and steps to follow in order to solve the problem:

Problem: Imagine that the animal fingerprints were not found by the police on Camille’s neck. If you were the police, how would you find the murderer?

Brainstorming – Hypothesis: In this step students would be split into discussion groups of 5 people each one, so they have to take a first thought about how to solve the trouble.

Re-structure the problem: Here, the groups would have to throw the irrelevant points away and organize their members to look for possibilities.

Solution of the problem: At this point, students would have reached an agreement so they would have created the alternative or solution.

As a conclusion, I can just say that this session was very positive for me; I learnt lots of methodologies and strategies to use as a teacher, both to teach literature or other language fields, since all of them can be applied to achieve any linguistic point, just the teacher has to be conscious and has to know how to apply them successfully. 

The “library class” strategy can be very appealing for students since it becomes an active way to explore a book or a short story before or after reading it. Unlike the traditional way of reading a book at home, this strategy can engage students into reading, so I think that the use of these active strategies by teachers should increase considerably.

Therefore, the active participation makes students to get involved in the teaching-learning process easily when the teacher is able to encourage them with information related to their interests and daily life, so this fact should be taken into account by all language teachers.

This has been all for now!!! See you on the assessment part!!