Final Blog Post

1. Useful/ not useful

I think it was very useful to read about the different approaches and see the connections they have. It is important to recognize the most important aspects of each one and mix all of them to create a good approach that can fit to your reality and the interests and needs of your students.

It wasn't useful to read too much about the approaches and their authors.Although it is important to recognize one name with each one , reading about too many different authors is confusing.

2. Enjoyed/ didn`t enjoy

I liked writing reviews and paraphrasing.I learned to connect my ideas with some authors' ideas. I learned to read about one topic but according to different authors.

I didn`t enjoy to complete tasks without understanding completely the final goal.I think that we need the guidelines from the beginning with some checklists to follow instructions and improve our presentations.

3. improved...
I wish we had more teacher's presentations about how to present a situation in context, more examples about critical reviews.We can prepare a topic and participate in a group discussion trying to  learn how to be critical.Sometimes the articles were long and it was difficult to remember the specific ideas. The questionnaires to check understanding were very useful for me.

Developing our professional Competence

I usually tend to review the activities I did with my students during the schoolyear and I decide to change some aspects mainly in the methodology I used with them. We read so many articles at the University  and in all of them the most important factor is the learner. One of the most important aspects for me inside the schools are the students. I normally respect the dates my school gives us for the different grades but in some cases I can adapt the evaluation according to the student´s learning styles and needs. In  general, my resolutions tend to be more learner- oriented than school 's calendar- oriented if I can say that.

Sometimes it is not easy to keep my resolutions because I teach in seven different grades and there is so many things to do that sometimes I feel overloaded with tests, readers, presentations etc. In general , I plan my week in advance taking into account parts of my resolutions.
For next year , I would like to have more time to plan  the activities. I  would like to plan a whole year and include innovative ideas to teach English in a different way.

Finally, I think that the article tries to explain the importance of taking into account the natural evolution of the teachers.A commited teacher works not only with knowledge but also with principles and skills that have been evolving during the whole schoolyear.

Noticing

I totally agree with the idea of improving upon tradition.Each method, each technique that has been used to teach foreign languages have had ideas of noticing grammatical meanings or form and meaning connections. It is important to find the right balance between both aspects. In my opinion, noticing both of them is very important.

Questions

1. Do adults and children learn an L2 in the same way? What if any are the differences?

In my opinion children and adults don't learn L2 in the same way. Children have the capacity to learn many things at the same time and they are not afraid of making mistakes. If children  play with a foreign child they normally find the way to speak with him, thay use words or simple sentences or just gestures at the beginning. Later they can exchange longer sentences and express their opinions. Most of the adults wouldn't dare to speak a word.

2. Can we teach a language or do people learn a language? What if any is the difference?
I think that people learn the language through good teaching practices. If you happen to be a teacher who likes teaching about the language , the children are going to learn about the language. Children need to learn L2 as a communicative tool which is inserted in a communicative situation.

3. How is language to be learned and sequenced in your current teaching context or place of work?
In my school  we have textbooks and we follow the topics according to the units. Each unit has a sequence and each year the students have a different number of book according to the name of the book.

4. What if anything can we learn from looking at past methodologies?
Past methodologies resembled the events and studies they had at that time. I think that they were not wrong to teach languages the way they did. Teaching and learning  foreign languages without being able to use the words in real  situations is the most difficult part of the learning process.Nowadays, teachers use different approaches and I think that we take some details from each of them.

A communicative teacher

There is a group of selected teachers who can work with a small number of  clever students.These teachers can accept the challenge to incorporate the commmunicative approach in their daily routines. They don't need to worry about time because they normally have fewer lessons and they don't struggle with lack of knowledge or motivation because they usually work with a selected , motivated group of students. Furthermore, they are giving a green light to this approach because they feel that they are in a position to experiment with this new concept.

On the other hand, there is another group of teachers who has to deal with different groups of students who ignore the reasons or goals of their learning process. They are learning English but they don't know why. English in this case is a school subject and the new approach with a communicative teacher needs to motivate and create artificial situations to learn the language in a real context.The amount of responsibilty a communicative teacher has is bigger than the one a traditional teacher has and he has multiple functions in the classroom apart from being a language teacher, such as controller, assessor, and organizer among others.

Communicative teacher

When we think of a group of learners we usually think of school children. But we can also find different groups whose main goal is to learn English for communicative purposes. They know what they need and they surely have some expectations.Textbooks take into account their ages and interests and the activities you can find inside will vary depending on the main beliefs of different authors. They usually publish one book that must fit people from many different cultures and countries so I think that teachers need to develop important communicative skills to maintain the students´interests and not only follow the authors´opinions of language teaching.

Sir Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson presented a topic that has been debated by many people in different ways.Chilean Education hasn´t changed its fundamental structures for many years. We are still teaching our students in the same way we were taught many years ago. Our talents at that time were not taken into account because we were supposed to go only to university. Talents are not taken into account now either, because we tend to think that all of us need to know Language, Maths and sciences. Fortunately, many students today  are developing their skills more than we did in the past. If they like singing, they sing, if they like arts they paint and if they like the circus they go to some parks and practise some difficult exercises. Most talented Chilean people are able to become well-known only because they were creative and they weren´t concerned if they commited mistakes or not.