About my future students

What I want to know about my future students is:

1.- The level of english they have.
2.- The expectations that they have in relation to the class.
3.- How the ways they best learn english are.
4.-What I can do for them in order to make the class motivating.
5.- What the appreciation that they have of english as a useful language is.
6.- What their interests are.
7.-What the appreciation of the worst teacher of English is
8.-Which the techniques they use when studying English are.
9.-If there is any activity they would like to develop during the english lessons.
10.- What the issues they would like to know about during their english lessons.

Gina's homework

This is for Gina to learn a little bit more of Spanish.

What you have to do is:

1.- Try to identify what the song talks about (main idea)
2.-Try to catch a word that appears more than three times on the video.
3.-Look at the dictionary the meaning of that word, and see if that word has any relation to the main idea you said in question number 1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TH7KJc9yrU

No more run-ons!!!

Influence on Academic Performance

When talking about the several factors that may influence our English Language Learners' academic performance, we can think on a large amount of them. In Freeman & Freeman's book (2001), through a series of case studies, we can appreciate a great variety of factors that may influence academic performance upon English Learners, either inside a school environment or outside of the school. It is very important to have an exhautive knowledge of several case studies in order to get a right understanding of the research and theories about second language acquisiton and culture. Taking that knowledge into account will help us when teaching in our future lessons .

Detailed Description of Students:

School: Liceo “José Tomás de Urmeneta García” “This is a public secondary school which imparts technical education at middle level. Most of the students who come here come from a middle or low socioeconomic status. In what concerns to the their descent, inspite some of the students' last names are indigenous, nobody has declared to be one, so there is no evidence of indigenous descent. The school has more than a thousand students which attends specialized classes, classes are of 40 to 45 students. There is not immigrants in the school. The level of motivation is very low, principally because there is no chances of better resourses in the school for us to give to ours students. Besides, teachers are also dismotivated because students misbehave, and do not want to success. The relationship among parents, school, and students is very little, almost nothing. Most of them come from families in which parents are separated and so they do not have enough time to come to the school to see and know how are doing their children at school.

My Good Language Learner My good student is called David. He is a very organised boy. Although he does not come from a very good family (because his older brother was in prision, and his father does not have a fulltime job) he is a very smart guy. He is very engaged in what happen in classes. He asks everytime he does not understand anything, he puts all his effort in trying to understand the language. That is why he has succeded in that way. Besides, his mother is always giving him all the support he needs to get a high self-steem.

"Teaching through content", "Teaching through social Interaction", and "Having higher expectations"

My personal understanding of “Teaching through content”, “Teaching through social interaction”, and “Having higher expectations” is that in every single class we teach, we should try to incorporate these 3 stretegies for getting a better class environment and a better students' learning process.

Teaching through content is a great way to get students involved and also engaged in what we are teaching them. If we, teachers of English, consider what the subjects that our students are studying are, and if we try to incorpotare them into the learning of their second or foreign language, then the learning process will be really meaningful, and the students will conserve it forever.

The idea of pair or group work is a useful tool for teaching a language, of course, it is a useful and complete way of learning a language. Always that interaction is present, there is learning. Interaction is a very complicated concept because it does not just mean that ther are two o more people working together but it means that those peolpe are working for a common purpose.

It is also necessary to mention that our students are always aware of everything that happens inside and also outside the classroom, and they absorve all the possible expectations we, as teachers, have to them. So, it is extremelly important to have faith in them, thus, they unconciously will expand their potential, and consequently, improve their level of English.

How would you incorporate them in your classses?

I would try to use them all the most I could, I would try to make projects in which the students could apply real, interesting, and relevant content that are useful for them and of course useful for the purpose of our class. These projects would have to be carried out in groups and with a very clear and specific purpose. besides, these projects would have to consider the level of proficiency of my students when using the language. In this way I could evaluate what is challenging for them and something that they can get with a feeling of satisfaction.

Activity number 4

How could you know if a classroom you were observing REALLY contained social interaction?

List of Factors that we can look for when we visit classes

• The class should have purposeful activities, ideally written down on the board.

• The class should link English with other interesting subjects for students.

• The teacher should engage students in simulation and replication activities, or at least in one of them.

• The class should not be focussed just on grammatical competence (usage) but also on the correct "use" of the language.

• The students must be able to apply the knowledge they acquire in the class when negotiating meaning in real and authentic situations.

• The teacher should give the students a chance of having some minutes of the class for talking freely about their previous day, and then the teacher could assess their students by asking them a report of what they talked.

Letter to Alanis Morissette

Dear Alanis Morissette,

I like a lot your songs, I always read very carefully the lyrics and enjoy them all, but yesterday I paid special attention to one of your most famous hit songs (“Ironic”). I realized that the concept that you have of irony is very different from the concept I have. Let me explain it to you. I Know three types of Irony (verbal, dramatic, and situational), each one represent a very different kind of Irony. Verbal Irony has to do with a difference between what the speaker says and what the speaker means. Dramatic Irony is a difference between what a character in a story knows and what the reader or ausience knows, as in “Romeo and Juliet”. And finally, Situational Irony has relation to a difference between what someone meant to happen and what actually happened as a result of her actions. After that short explanation I would like to say that I just found one concrete example of Irony in your whole song, that fact does not mean that your song is bad or something like that, all the way around, it is great!! But, anyway it is wrong, and makes the people who is studying discourse misunderstand the real concept of what Irony means.

Oh! I forgot giving you the only one example of Irony I found in your song, this is in the third stanza:

“Well isn't this nice...”

This is a clear example of “verbal Irony” because this phrase is being used in a real moment, and when it should not be said. (His plane has crashed down!) A great example of Irony.

Alanis, I hope you do not get angry with me for being so sincere but I had to explain to you this.

I look forward to hearing from you...

Abbie.

Language through content

Activity Plan

-Coursebook: Test Bank for understanding and using English Grammar. 3rd Edition. Mark Wade Lieu.

-Content: Review of verb tenses.

-Grade: 12th grade


Activities

-Ask students to work in pairs with their coursebook.
-Ask them to build an interesting interview to apply it to an important member of the School Staff, using the cuestions in Chapter 1, page 1.
-Then, ask the students to apply the intervieew they made to an important membre of the School Staff.
-When they are done, ask them to notice which verb times the interviewed used to describe what they answered.
-Finally, ask the students to make a short report of what they learnt.


What does Language through content mean to you?

Language through content means to me the best way to teach a language, it is useful because with this way of teaching students can understand the real purpose of what they are doing. Besides, students can apply what the are learning in the classroom rightly outside it.

Am I smarter than any book?

Of course!! Although books have great ideas to teach, sometime they do not consider the context in which the students are immerse. Is there, when I can leave my imagination fly and be creative, it is that the time to get closer my students and consider their real interests and learning styles.

EFL/ESL Teaching

This is an Example of an Audiolingual method lesson, where most of the time is spent on repeating dialogues or doing drills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5sR5W5h5qI