A Joint Effort

I was looking for information on The Net related to learner’s autonomy and learner training and I came across a webpage which dealt with these issues, it was addressed to parents, though. It gives them tips to help their teens grow more independent individuals. I found this page particularly interesting because I discovered many points connected to what we read about learner autonomy in Hedge, so I thought: After all, teachers and parents ultimately want the same thing: for children to become successful adults. In my mindmap below, I will present the 10 tips given to parents and I will develop a bit more those tips which can be applied to help teens develop their learning autonomy. Hope you like it! :)

Source: http://www.collegeboard.com/parents/apply/sending-kids-college/50006.html

The More the Merrier

The following reasons are often given for using pairwork and groupwork in the communicative classroom:

1. It increases opportunities for practising the language: I think that when sts are asked to work in pairs or in groups more true-to-life situations are presented so more skills are required to carry them out. Students need to develop different competences such as discourse competence (cope with authentic texts, use cohesive devices) strategic competence(turn taking) fluency (to deal with information gap), etc. These strategies would note be seen as a necessity from the sts´point of view were them to be working alone. The main point here, is that as we are teaching a language, and a language is meant to be used for communication mainly, we should practise it through interacting with others.
2. It enables students to take risks with the language and to see if they can negotiate meaning: Of course, it does! Working with their pairs usually gives students more confidence as they are not the centre of attention to the teacher. They feel more free and relaxed.Thus, they are more concerned with getting their message across through negotiation of meaning than with them making mistakes.

Some of the disadvantages to this approach could be that students are prone to divert their attention from the main aim of the exercise and in turn this is a more time-consuming task. Another disadvantage may be that monitoring individual performance becomes more difficult with a large number of students.

A Happy Place

This drawing (tries to) represent an adolescent’s motivation to learn English outside the classroom. I imagined the teacher had helped him see how useful and fun learning can be; and that making it so only depends on himself not on somebody else. What does depend on the teacher is the teaching environment inside the school. I thought of a perfect atmosphere that welcomes each student to the classroom and makes them feel proud of their own production for instance by exposing their own work on the walls. The perfect place could be represented in a thousand different ways because we all have different learning styles, ways of processing the intake, learning strategies, etc. But the important thing is for a teacher to acknowledge these differences and try to use them as tools to plan their lessons, for example asking sts to practise different skills and appeal to a variety of intelligences.

I believe that motivation and a welcoming environment are two key elements to encourage students to learn a foreign language. We teachers are in charge of guiding them on how to get enthusiastic about English and of creating a nice atmosphere for them to learn.

Expectations

Well, here we are again sharing a new year, new mates and a new blog! And together with all these new things I began this year with new expectations for our Methods course.

First of all, I will like to say that I´ve never worked with teens before so all I have are vague ideas and prejudices about what it is like dealing with them. But little by little I think ideas will become clearer and prejudices will be dispelled.

As regards adults, I feel better about teaching them because they seem to be more responsible and interested in learning than adolescents, but as everything in life, there are always bad and goods sides to all things, all we need to do is to find the best way to take advantage from the good points and not get crazy about the bad ones.

All in all, I would like to learn different strategies to deal with both adults and teens , and to make to most to make them feel comfortable and happy about learning English.

Hugs,

Lucía