Course assigment

Final assigment

A study case

This is about two students i helped for 3 months to improve their grades at school, they were brothers a boy and a girl they were studding at the same school but at different levels, she was at 2^dn year and he was at 4^th year, they had different personalities of course, first the girl was the kind of “I don’t have time to this” she was well mannered but she always wanted a result as soon as possible so she gets stressed all the time, the boy on the other hand was “the cool guy” just to call it somehow, I don’t mean that he doesn’t care about his grades or studies but he was the kind of student we will always have “I’m not going to use this before I graduate from school” that was his mantra,  what they share or what they have in common besides they are brothers  is the fact that their affective filter is too high, as I said, she was stressed because she wanted to produce the language at the very moment she gets some new content, and he did not care about the uses of the language outside the classroom, because of their schedule I took different sessions with tem along the week so I’m going to divide this in two cases.

                First the girl, I had to find a way to make her to take it easy when putting into practice new knowledge, it was great that she tried to produce anything when requested, the problem was that every time she made a mistake because she pushing it, she got mad about it, I had to let her know that learning is a process and she had to take it step by step, that they way to learn and apply is trough trial and error, the key is to practice as much as possible, that was a kind of motivational talking we had during a session, I gave her a bunch of verbs and vocabulary to learn just to start, then when she came with homework from school I used all that vocabulary to explain the topics she was studding,  she learned really quick to write sentences,  then paragraphs and some pronunciation too, so I can say I teach her not only the language but to be patient.

                Then I had the boy, he was not a challenge at all actually, the thing was his lack of interest on learning English, he was a young man so he liked sports, cars, music, girls and also he wanted to go to a military school, so I took those aspects to make relationship between his interests and the language, so I did, I basically used the communicative approach in every single activity he brought and it worked all the time specially with music and sports related topics or when I was able to use them as examples so he came to realize that ok, English is not only a subject to pass and that’s it which is what I always say, and I told him please if you are going to become a soldier don’t forget to be well mannered, don’t forget your culture, don’t be a man with a gun who receives orders, after a time his mom told me that he graduated with a good record and he applied  to the navy academy at Pto Fijo.

2nd record of work

Greetings to my readers, this is the 2nd record of work in this course, this time I'm going to start describing the audience I had to perform the activity, they were Irina's students from her personal academy "Little big students" which ages goes from 5 to 12 years old so they are kind of hard to keep under control, although they are pleased to participate and help in any activity their teacher set for them which was a nice help, the activity took place at a class room decorated with posters, pictures, a withe board and some other stuff, as long as most the students are children  kinesthetic-type students I used those poster to develop one of the activities already done at CAPEIEM classroom, it was "guess who I am" the game in which one student is sitting backwards the rest of the group, then the teacher stick to the student a piece of paper with the name of a profession or an animal, then by making some questions they will try to guess what is his/her profession or animal, to do that, first I used the posters on the walls to explain some of the professions and animals, then play the game, the activity went well the students had fun and learned some new vocabulary which was the main focus of the activity, the language used in the classroom was like 60% Spanish 40% English, because of their level, even though Irina and I tried to use as more the target language as possible, the students questions were more in Spanish than in English but we managed to help them to use some expressions in English, and of course sounds, what went not so well was try to keep the control of the students even though there were a few of students they had pretty much energy, that was not a real problem because there were actually kids so it was expected, leaving that the students were pleased to the activity.

Here I present some pictures taken that day.

Thanks to Irina and her students for the help.

First Assigment

About the topics already studied for me as a teacher in training as long as I’m not working as a teacher yet I could say that this course so far has been a re-discover experience, in fact I have picked up some nice points to take into account when teaching English in teaching practice, first: students have many different ways of learning and there are so many ways to teach taking into account your learners proficiency level, in my last teaching experience I came to realize that I had students that already knew the language and I was boring them treating them like if there were beginners, at that time I did not do anything about it now I know that if I have students with an English base I can work on that, adapting my activities so they are not going to get bored and their partners will get the topic information, for instance leaving out repetition drills and involve them into a more useful language, it will be a nice experience for the ones who have already know the language and a good way to make the ones who are beginners realize that English is a useful tool in any communicative situation, another fact from the topic “how learners learn language” was about their ages, for me I managed that part pretty nice taking into account my students ages and so.

Talking about lesson planning I came to realize how useful a plan class is, giving me the opportunity to predict my student’s errors so I can think on how to solve them, also that was the most important part for me about that topic, falling into students mistakes we got the grammar part, this is a very interesting topic for me and I would love to share it with my students, in order to do this some improvements should be applied, first: stop teaching grammar by explaining the forms and rules then make the students repeat what is on the board, that is not useful because the students are able to produce correct sentences in exercises and test but hardly in communicative contexts, what I would do is to apply more the communicative approach in order to give a real and a useful context to the given topic, of course make the students be aware that you are teaching them a new grammar context but in situations that are actually real, the same would happen when teaching vocabulary, always trying to use new words every class, that is something I was not aware of and I will apply when the time comes.