School Of Rock-The Ramones-My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down

The article by Joanne Pettis is so true!
Every december (once the students leave the school) and on March (once the students come back) I find myself making new resolutions for this year. It is sort of a self-evaluation moment where I assess what I can improve for next year.

I am quite structured as a person, so it is not like I leave everything for the last day. Therefore, I never have as a resolution not to leave everything till the last moment.

A resolution I make every year is that I am not going to be too flexible with due dates. It has happened to me that I feel sorry for some students, so I give them more time to hand in things. The problem is that I actually give them more time, but in the end everything is a mess as I am running after some students for them to give their projects.

Another resolution I always make is that my classes are not going to be so grammar-oriented, and that my classes will be more student-centered.

Of course it is hard to keep these resolutions because you have to be constantly monitoring yourself. I have improved in keeping the resolution of projects due date. My students know that if they do not hand in something, they will be penalized. Of course, I am flexible with the students that have NEE or if they had a problem with the printer, for example.

The resolution of my classes to be less grammar-oriented is a little more difficult to keep for mainly two reasons. I love grammar myself (I love sentence structure, conditionals, etc), and the school also gives importance to grammar. But I think this year grammar had a more meaningful and explicit purpose than past years.

I believe this article was included in a book of methodology because making resolutions is part of our essence as people. Everybody self-evaluates him/herself after a specific situation, change or process in terms of elements to improve. I consider "resolutions" to be very healthy as they give us a clue on the elements we give more importance to. At the same time, most of our resolutinos will be related to methodology in the sense that we want to change something for our students to learn better.

And by the way, I don´t feel identified with the comic strip at all!!!

Noticing

1. Do adults and children learn an L2 in the same why?
Certainly not. when adults learn an L2, they already know an L1; therefore, they can apply some of the knowledge about the L1 into the L2. For example, they know that there is a formal an informal language, that there are some cues you use to start a conversation or to end a conversation, etc.

2. Can we teach a language or can we learn a language?
Well, I think this question is rooted in Krashen´s belief of learning. I think that a person can acquire an L1, but can learn an L2. the idea would be to acquire an L2 as well, yet the problem is that most of the times the L2 is learned in a non-native environment; consequently, people are not "immersed" in the culture of the language.

3. How is your language to be learned sequenced in your current teaching context or place of work?
English is taught in terms of unit of meaning. I mean, students are taught a unit of reading with focus on some literary elements. After that, grammar is worked explicitly (conditionals, for example), but always linked to the unit of reading. In this sense, the examples given are from the text the students have read. With the little ones, teachers teach them "My body", "My family", etc.

4. What, if anything, can we learn from looking at past methodologies?
I think we can learn a lot from past methodologies. First, we can know what "not to do" in specific contexts. But also, I think we can learn there were multiple methods that fitted specific contexts. In the end, we can see nowadays that there is not such a thing as the "pure" method. Every method has been influenced by other methods which create a kind of "hybrid".

How to be communicative teacher

Medgyes satirizes about the lack of difficulty to apply a Communicative Approach in the classroom. He claims that teachers must be "super heroes" as they must fullfil an indefinite amount of roles in order for the students to feel comfortable, not anxious and motivated enough in order to learn and acquire a language. Some of these roles are: erudite, versatile, instruments, inquiring, down-to-earth, multidimensional, far-sighted, high-tech, confident, judicious, ingenious, technically-skilled, psychologists, controller, assessor, organizer, prompter, participant and resource.

So, it is not an easy task to be a communicative teacher....according to Medgyes there is a dichotomy, a paradox between what is really taught and how teachers really are with the fact that this is not helping teachers to become communicative teachers, and worse for students to become communicative learners.
" By putting an especially heavy linguistic strain on the teacher, the communicative Approach further reduces the time non-native teachers have available for their students" (p.112)

Queries from a Communicative Teacher (P. Medgyes)

What an interesting article!! All the theorists that "build up" the Communicative Approach must read it!!
I completely agree with the author in all the aspects he mentions. Of course it is easy to theorize about something if you are not in the classroom and you are not dealing with the current affairs or struggling with the numerouseos situations teachers struggle with everyday. I believe that if you do a survey, all -or most- of the teachers will answe rthat they have as an ultimate goal to be Communicative teachers. But, concretely, I can assure that only a few actually teach following a Communicative Methodology. This is, in my consideration, the eternal dichotomy between theory and practice.
As the author mentions, being a Communicative teacher requires to have "super- powers"; they must focus in a plethora of aspects, and also with their own defficiency as a non-native language teacher.
The Communicative Approach is the one every teacher and school aspires to. Currently, if you how to communicate menas you "know" a language. Now, does somebody dare to mention the "drawbacks" or struggling situations teachers will go through with this Approach? Well, Peter Medgyes did.

Teaching creativity in our classrooms

I think the video we have just watched is really enlighting for us teachers as it explicitly says how the methodology we are currently using in education is completely vanishing creativity in our children.   

I consider Shakespeare´s example (mentioned in the video) really interesting: How annoying would be to have Shakespeare in your English class? Of course, we want our students to stick to our way of thinking, adn not only that, we teach them that is the correct -and only- way of thinking, so we are harming them as we are not encouraging them to produce something original. The lecturer said "if you are not prepared to be wrong, you´ll never come up with something original". 

Now the question is, how can we motivate, encourage and foster creativity in our classrooms? To what extent is what we consider creative, creative to our students?

Theoretical bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing

Theoretical bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing

Canale & Swain

1. Background (p.2)

1.1 Difference in the syllabus depending on a Grammatical or a Communicative Approach / Situational Syllabus

1.2 Difference in concept between Communicative Competence and Performance (p.3). Definitions by Chomsky (1965) and Campbell and Wales (1970)

2. Some theories of Communicative Competence (p.8)

2.1 Basic Communication Skills Theory (“emphasizes the minimum level of communication skills needed to get along in language situations”) / Disadvantages and drawbacks of this theory (p.10) / Specifications or Principles of this theory  / Conclusion: grammatical competence is not a good predictor of communicative competence.

2.2 Sociolinguistic perspectives on communicative competence (p.15)

      Relation between language and social context

Theories of Hymes (1972), (p.15) and Halliday (1973), (p.17)

2.3 Integrative Theories (p.19)

      Munby´s Model: sociocultural orientation, sociosemantic view of linguistic knowledge and rules     of discourse (p.20)

     Drawbacks of Integrative Theories (p.22)

2.4 Comments of the proposed theories (p.25)

3. Toward an adequate theory of Communicative Competence (p.27)

3.1 Principles that guide a Communicative Competence Approach: it must address the learner´s needs, learner must be involved in producing interaction, provide learner with learning situations, etc.

3.2 Competences required to reach a communicative competence: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. (p.28) / Definition of Communication (p.29)

3.3 Teaching with a Communicative Competence Approach (p.31): focus on Syllabus design, focus on teaching Methodology (p.33), Role of the teacher

3.4 Assessment in Communicative Competence and Communicative Performance (p.34)

4. Further Investigation