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We are almost done with this TKT preparation course. Four weeks have passed! (And here it comes my only free week before going back to class).  I’m really glad we could take this course in JUST FOUR WEEKS!

My ideas or thoughts about teaching are not so different from those I got after my Methods course at ITM. Thanks God some schools are realizing education has changed too much and, at least at the Methods course, ITM has been one of those. So, I’ve been exposed to many new and different ideas since a year ago, and all that process has been amazing! I mean, even if I learned through the traditional method and “it worked”, it did it just with learning but not with management.  Nowadays we care a little bit more about students’ needs and teachers are more conscious of their role and that they are not gods or superheroes… but guides! But it has been good coming to this TKT preparation course; it is kind of little bit more focused on students’ needs.

I’m not really sure how I am going to get updated since I’m not pretty sure of having enough time, but probably I’m going to take two groups at ITM on Saturdays (if medicine schedules don’t get crossed) and apply this new knowledge and applications I’ve been getting since this last year. I’ll try to get updated through the “easy ways”, I mean, through the net or something that would not involve too much time or commitment, since my priority is medicine, at least at this moment.

Now, I can make so much emphasis on applying knowledge. I mean, I’ve realized there are many teachers know too much about learning theories, but in front of a class they just don’t apply what they’ve learned (or should I say “what they’ve SEEN during courses”???). Even if teachers try to get a students centered class, teacher’s attitude can be wrong, hostile or trying to show superiority in a “soft way”. I know we all say the same, but I’ll try not to make the same mistakes when being in front of a class.

Probably I’m not going to keep learning that much with so little practice I’m going to have, but I’ll try to do my best!

The last English classes I had, was on 4^th semester of “preparatoria”. And, as I shared in class, teacher was not that really good teacher! Of course I remember it! I would have preferred to be at the beginners’ class! We used to do NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

 Surprisingly, I’ve liked all the strict teachers I’d had, yes, those who are hated by all the students. I mean, I love teachers in control (even if I’m the student and I have to take the complaining role).

Those ten questions remind me of many teachers I’ve had. I’ve always hated to be that passive especially in language classes. I really used to hate when having to listen all the classmates to read something! I’ve gotten used to decisions being made by someone else, as it has been always in schools (and since I’m the youngest at home!), so I guess this has not been a big deal, but I do think it is a really bad thing considering real life after and out the school, I mean, we all have to take decisions everywhere, anytime!

Well, I’ve always known that yelling at somebody in front of others is not the best way for doing things, but more than what it can cause to student, it says too much about the one who does it.

The sixth one was something we talking about with a classmate from this course, we both hate when teachers recognize some students publicly for something well done without considering the other well done homework. We got to the conclusion that it’s something that teachers probably will never change even having knowledge about it or years of experience, but he would continue doing it just because he likes it!!!

Eating, drinking, going out from the classroom, standing up and all that things were always controlled in all my daily schools, and almost all my English courses. So, again, it’s not a big deal.

Being a good teacher is not that easy, I’m really conscious about that, but since I’ve disagreed with so many language teachers, I’ve always been interested on the topic, reading about it is something I’ve been doing since I remember! I cannot say I’m a great teacher, since I’m not, but I can say I really like how I did it with my childrens’ practice! I liked it and all the comments they made were that possitive! So, I guess I did a nice job! (Thanks God! I had always thought I would have to pay my behavior on language classes when teaching).

Talking about classroom management, I’ve heard and read many things about it and every time a do it, I get to the conclusion that it’s not just about classroom management, but about personal or self management. I mean, is not the way you behave in a classroom, but the way you go through life. I’ve always thought that “patience” is the key word.  Since we are all human beings and we have not a manual to behave, we have to be patients and opened-mind to accept and deal with all different situations and persons. Kids, especially kids or teenagers are such a big thing! They are just proving everybody, anytime, everywhere! They just want to know where they can get, how far they are allowed to go… but again, working with them is just about patience. I mean, we need just to remember how we used to be, what we used to want, how we used to behave (if we can call it like that), and if we just don’t remember, well patience is needed to observe and find out the best ways to deal all this thing. This is just something like the readings talk about: calm, being calmed is always better.

But another thing we have to consider is that we have to stop thinking as teachers, as adults and getting into the students minds, what they want, how they react, and again, this happens through observation and, therefore, patience.

I could be writing and writing for many hours on this topic, since I like it very much and I’ve always found it really interesting, but I won’t go that far.

I just want to say something: I don’t remember when the last time I saw a student back talking in the classroom was, but I remember I’ve been always a “problematic student” in language courses (yes, I said in LANGUAGE COURSES, just that), and that has made me think it has to do too much with the discipline the school gets, not just the teacher, because I cannot find any other reason. I mean, even if a teacher has many good ideas, really good rules or great knowledge, if students –because of the school discipline- are not used to be that disciplined, teachers is just not going to reach that high level he expects!

This big thing about discipline has to do with many many things! But I must say I really agree with Fred Jones about the importance of knowing the body language, considering the importance of being calmed, etc…

Really nice topic!

Images:

Sometimes when we plan to test students we are not really evaluating if they had learnt something but if they have memorized it. As students, how many times haven’t we done that? Memorize and get a great grade on a test! That’s it. And probably we are proud of ourselves, but how much did we really learn? I mean, memorizing is important, but are we really able to use that “new knowledge”?

http://juliaec.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/blooms_taxonomy.jpg

Learning something is not just about hearing it, but it’s a process with different stages. That’s what Bloom’s taxonomy is about: the levels where we take knowledge. And I’m almost sure we all have listened at least once in our life about “Fulanito” knowing about something but not being able to apply it to real life. That’s it, taking knowledge to different levels. Memorizing is just the first step we give. How could we learn something without memorizing it? But how useful would it be just to remember it? Of course we learn things to apply them. But where would we be by just learning and applying things we’ve learnt? We would be just at the same point where they were when people had discovered what they had… but fortunately we are not. That’s just because people have taken knowledge to upper levels: analyze it and create new things with that knowledge. Of course this has occurred going through the whole process: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating.

I think it’s important to encourage students not just to memorize things but to learn them to be able to create new things with the knowledge. Of course we all are different and we get interested on many different things, and we also have to be conscious that there is going to be always something that we are going just to memorize in order to pass an exam, but we are all a genius in some field, so we have to encourage students to learn to create something at least in the field they like.

I thought of an activity by watching a movie: “The Beaver”

• Remembering: Write when Walter began using “The Beaver” puppet.
• Understanding: Write why Walter began using “The Beaver” puppet. Why did he hide behind a puppet? What was his problem?
• Applying: Write some other ways which people use to hide behind.
• Analyzing: How was Walter’s life with and without using the puppet? Was it really useful? Did it worth it?
• Evaluating: What would you do if you were Walter, if you were under such big depression? Would you use a puppet? How would you fight it?
• Creating: Think about another solution Walter could have taken to fight his depression, how would that be? Now you are the film director, rewrite the movie. How would Walter’s life would have been with that new solution?

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSn8IJPkJ_DnK851AgRRkhNJnMOCqvMz3uOdsb66n28QgQe11g3QQ

UNIT 15 answersUNIT 16

Hello everybody!

Here you have the answers to the crosswords.

Get ready for next monday.

Good luck everybody =D

First of all I must say I was wrong, I was sure I was visual-auditory but not, today I discovered I’m visual-kinesthetic… I’m not pretty sure if I agree or not, because sincerely, I’ve thought my whole life I was born with four feet instead of two and two hands… I never get to do handicrafts; I’m not really a “hands-on person”. Anyway I must learn what I must.

But I must also say that I agree absolutely with the results from the multiple intelligences test: I’ve always known I’m an intrapersonal and logical person.

I hope you enjoy my blogster.

http://gabyangorva.glogster.com/my-personal-learning-philosophy/

PS. These are the links where I got my images from the collage =D

http://n-imagecache.aldenhosting.com/~n1studyg//images/eyewa.jpg

http://www.thevisualleap.com/art/visualthinkingimproves.jpg

http://graphorg4.wikispaces.com/file/view/Phonics.gif/156026483/Phonics.gif

https://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au/lsu/content/1_StudySkills/study_tuts/learning%20styles/graphics/visual.gif

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_l6CjaTxPgiU/TAq0GMlOkCI/AAAAAAAAABU/uIDRED5fFdk/s1600/writer-thumb.gif

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__Tnw22Dk2n0/R90vkc2YJtI/AAAAAAAAAKA/KrhQ6_b0Kjo/s400/intrapersonal.jpg

This site is really interesting Ian James\’ blogpost aboug online speaking activities. The activities, the sites and the suggestions he makes are all interesting.  I find it especially useful because when there’s someone shy in the classroom, the biggest problem he/she can find is to speak. So, we have to find out the way to motivate him/her or, if we don’t get it, just to find the way to make him/her talk.

I tried the voxopop application. When I first knew what it was about I knew it was the one I would use. And so it was. It’s really helpful because of the fact that student’s don’t have to worry about the others listening at him/her (at least not “live”). Simple as this, not having that direct eye contact makes you feel more comfortable.

First of all I must say I had never been in a literacy group before.  Well, I had a teacher who used to suggest us to study anatomy that way but I must say that it didn’t work. So, it’s just like if I had never been in one. These past two days I really enjoyed the activities with literacy groups. We were feeling a little bit pressed because of the time, but that was exactly what made it work. I mean, we all knew that we had just some minutes to do our job but, that was not the worst thing but that we had to share it with our classmates which hadn’t had the opportunity to check it. So, it was just our personal (and at the same time, team) responsibility to let them know the important things about what we had read. It was exciting!

I found it really useful since we don’t have to spend as long as if we were reading the whole text! It was amazing because we got the best we could maximizing the reading sub skills: we were scanning to find out what the main ideas were and we were focused in specific themes or parts of our texts since we were working on teams.

I really found useful because it’s a way to take the biggest advantage from the reading sub skills and working on teams.

Sincerely, I find it something cultural. I mean, my only experienced I’d ever had just didn’t work. But it was because we didn’t really care about the other, about how mucho I would affect the other if I did or not what I had to. But well, that was in a university level. So that’s the point. We have to begin working on great activities like this one so students can get used to them, to work on teams, to improve their reading skills, to spend less time studying, to be more responsible with their job, etc…

http://mrsjensen1.wikispaces.com/file/view/reading-teacher-color.gif/165836899/reading-teacher-color.gif

Why use a graphic organizer when working reading with students?

As Ellen told us (our teacher) students use to feel less pressure to make a reading report using graphic organizers. Even if they are adults, I think they can find it less “serious” on a graphic than writing just a text as a formal report for gaining a competition. At least that’s what I can remember from my basic education. But before we can ask them to give in a “reading report” we can teach them how to make it easier with these graphic organizers.

Sometimes teachers use to ask homework or, specially, reading reports in a really serious format. But what are they really grading? Is it really that important the format that teacher is going to make student focus more in the format than the content? Sometimes that happens. That’s why I find really useful the graphic organizers. We can get there the principal ideas from the text, we can focus just in a character from the story, we can ask to compare situations, etc… it just depend on what and how we want to evaluate.

Fortunately we can find many different kinds of graphic organizers: we can find those for reading reports focused on the entire story or those based on the characters; those to compare different or similar situations; those to express cycles; those to make list of different things (situations, characters, etc) and describe them, etc…

But I’m not going to explain all of them. There’s too much information about them really easy to find, so I don’t feel the necessity to write about them. But I’m just going to show you some examples of graphic organizers that I would use in a classroom.

I would use this first graphic especially with beginners (or kids even if they were intermediate) to begin seeing how to get the main idea from a paragraph or a short text. I say that I would use it with them because I find it a useful way to make reading comprehension. It is really easy to use it since we just have to focus on the main idea, one or two details and the way to well finish a paragraph (or short text).

http://www.getworksheets.com/samples/worksheets/graphorg/langorg3.gif

As the title says, this second graphic would be used as a reading report from a history. Instead of asking students to write and write pages and pages from what they have read (where they can copy and paste from the summary on the net) I would prefer to see if they have understood how the story was developed. By checking the main and supporting characters, problems and solutions, I think I would really be able to know if they had well read and understood the story.

http://ral-321-genre-project-spring-2010.wikispaces.com/file/view/story_map.jpg/130888613/story_map.jpg

The third would be to compare different characters from a story or, could be different readings. At first sight, a table like this could seem boring or tedious, but it doesn’t have to be that difficult, it could be just about answering yes or no statements.

http://www.herbal-life-products.com/pics/new-comparative-table-fert.gif

A big advantage of graphic organizers is that almost everybody like them, at least is something different from the ordinary, of course besides the simplicity they give us to get to the principal idea of something. That’s thinking on students, they like them, it’s a “different activity”, they learn an easier way to get to the point. But thinking as teachers it can be less tired to check a book report by asking it on a graphic organizer and we can find it everywhere on the net or, why not, make them ourselves, it’s really easy and could be fun.

What do these acronyms mean?

• CEFR: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, and Assessment.
• ALTE: Association of Language Testers in Europe.
• TESOL: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

Yeah, sure! But… why should we care about them?

Learning English is not just about learning to communicate in English, which would be probably enough if we learned English just as a touristic objective, but since we, almost everybody, need to prove our level of English for our school, job or other things, we have to know how or where we can certificate it.

CEFR, ALTE and Cambridge ESOL, all three are organizations who can certificate our level of English. They were both created with the objective of evaluating, standardizing and certificating the level of a foreign language learned.

ALTE has created the “Can Do” Statements, which show what a person with a specific level is supposed to be able to do or know. ALTE and CEFR are both similar and both of them are interested in grading the four skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening) in a communicative sense. In the table below we can see the “Can Do” Statements and the equivalent at CEFR levels (both of them have six levels).

Cambridge ESOL has 5 different levels to grade according to the level or proficiency at English language, from beginner to advance. In a short way they will be shown below:

• Level 1 ~ KET (Key English Test)

Contains reading, writing, listening & speaking components

Two pass grades: ‘Pass with Merit’ and ‘Pass’

• Level 2 ~ PET (Preliminary English Test)

Contains reading, writing, listening & speaking components

Two pass grades: ‘Pass with Merit’ and ‘Pass’

Recognized by some employers and universities

• Level 3 ~ FCE (First Certificate in English)

Contains five sections: reading, writing, listening, speaking, & use of English

Widely recognized by employers and universities

Five grades: (A to E). A to C required for a Pass

• Level 4 ~ CAE (Certificate in Advanced English)

Shows students are capable of following a university course and/or can function in a range of business contexts

Five grades: (A to E). A to C required for a Pass

• Level 5 ~ CPE (Certificate of Proficiency in English)

Shows students have the ability to function effectively in almost every English speaking context.

A requirement for non-native speakers who wish to train as English teachers

It usually takes three years of study after attaining an FCE to reach this level.

Five grades: (A to E). A to C required for a Pass

I find all this information really interesting to know how we can be certified, what is supposed to be known at certain levels, which are the institutions/associations, etc.

[1],[2],[3],[4]

[2] http://www.englishclub.com/esl-exams/levels-alte.htm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages

[4] http://www.alte.org/about/index.php

I chose these words because they are the ones that remember me how “easy” word can be created but at the same time how complicated a word can be. Today I’ve remembered how I used to learn vocabulary and most of times I did it by memorizing them. But I also remembered I used to hate it and later I began understanding how complex a word was… it’s not just about memorizing the meaning but to know how to use it. For me, these words I’ve put on my “Wordle”, they are the most significant.