Learning Contexts!

Something I found appealing from Describing learning contexts was schools and class size. I personally relate one to each other. I have not had the experience of teaching in a public school.  Public school tend to have really large classes where focusing on the needs of the students is practically impossible. 

In our society, public schools have lack of resources such as good chairs, new facilities, cutting edge technology resources and so on.  On this particular environment, from my point of view, teaching becomes a real challenge.  On the other hand comes the background of students and it is not secret that most of them come from hearths where social problems are an everyday matter. When having a class of 30 or even 50 students coming from many different social strata is hard to keep the interest on the class extremely difficult. 

On my personal opinion the teacher is not only the teacher but also the friend, the guide, even the psychologist because one must be prepared for any kind of situation that arises in the classroom.  The teacher has not only one but several roles on this particular case.   

Classes like this big demands a lot from the teacher. A teacher in this situation must have a great number of techniques to maintain order and the flow of the class in its right course.

Harmer presents a list of key elements to take into account when teaching large classes and my favorites are maximize group/pair work and use students for example as monitors of the groups. In this way the teaching and instructing is minimized and teachers become more guides rather than the person always in front of the students giving a “boring” lecture.

Learners everywhere!

Learners!

A belief of mine that was confirmed is that English teachers at languages institutes (including me) have to face different types of learners every month and there are different facts that affect the language teaching environment. Age, for example, is one of those.  Usually (and I personally think it is a bad conception) people who are starting his/her teaching career are given young children as their very first students.  Young children and also adolescents are in my personal opinion the most difficult groups one can face in an English language teaching career.  Young children demand a lot from the teacher and their peers.   They are like little sponges that you have to maintain moist in order to keep the class flow with no difficulty at all.  The variety of activities that one must prepare is endless. Time controlling, classroom management are not easy things to achieve in a classroom of 15 or 20 children between 9 and 11 years old.  Adolescents on the other hand, are groups I find difficult to manage due to all those changes they face through this stage.  Finding the right social group, the right style, the appropriate trend in fashion are issues that interfere on the classroom.  Nowadays, teenagers are more worried about who they follow on twitter, what to post on Facebook, etc.  Because of all this things teachers must think on motivation and needs of students.  What makes them feel good and what one as a teacher can find to try to trigger all those capacities they have and use them at full range.

I want to talk specifically of one concept Harmer names on the reading.  The Motivation Angel.  On the motivation angel Harmer describes key concepts that I want to summarize in only two:  Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  On the intrinsic part we find the affect and the attitude. How you feel and what position you have towards learning affects primarily the learning process. 

On the other hand extrinsic motivation deals with the goals students can achieve and the kind of activities used to reach those goals.  With the correct internal and external motivation the learning process can be successful and both parts (students and teachers) will benefit from it. 

Three simple tips to take into account when designing a test

There exists one task that teachers seem to fear designing tests. It seems quite hard to test everything both fairly and in a way that is easy to administer and mark. Below are three tips to set you on the right track.

Some teachers probably make their entire exam from scratch, or most of us take existing “end of unit” tests and join together bits and pieces to make our own class tests. There is nothing wrong with this particular method. However, there are some things left behind that you need to be aware of when doing this.

Probably the most prevalent is not being critical enough of the published materials we have access to for making our tests. Simply because it is published material does not mean that it’s good. Or that it’s a valid testing instrument.

There are 3 simple things to consider when designing a test.

Make sure the task actually tests what you want it to

This one may seem obvious, but there is more beyond the naked eye.

You have to look carefully at the task and ask these two critical questions:

What do the students have to do?
What do the students have to be able to do?

  

Don’t ask for more than is absolutely necessary to test what you want to test

Keep the response or required action to the simplest possible level you can. Don’t, for example, ask students to write their answer in words if circling a picture will suffice and don’t mark an answer wrong simply because the spelling is incorrect. If you want to test spelling then design a test on it!

Is the answer too obvious?

One may think of distractors but are the totally necessary? Probably on advanced levels matching words or sentences can be similar but always there must be a clear and concise answer. 

Bilinguism ready?

Thanks to an article from two teachers from Universidad de Nariño most specifically from the very title of this text I started to wonder and try to reflect on a very sensitive issue (at least it is for me and some of my colleagues). The title of this publication is:  Is Colombia Ready for “Bilingualism”?

Is it? Is this country ready to adapt a framework and standards which work on different parts of the globe, and I quote the author “similarities between that context and the Colombian one are basically non-existent, and that the Common European Framework (CEF) was created under different circumstances and with different purposes” (Sánchez, Obando 2009)

That context the author mentions is Europe and our society and theirs are completely opposite poles.  Starting by the socio-economic situation a student can have, these two sides of a coin differ on many different aspects.   An underprivileged student in Colombia who does not have access to all the technology and resources (by technology I mean at least a TV set and by resources I mean at least a book on which he or she can work); how can this subject learn the language?

“Because Colombian standards for foreign language teaching are barely structured, attention has been given to foreign models. In general, standards have been obtained by importing the ones that were developed in other places, under different circumstances and contexts. Although those standards are valid and reliable for foreign academic communities, it does not mean that they would fit the particularities of our institutions, language learners and so on”. Ayala & Álvarez (2005, p.12)

Another issue and I think it is of the most important ones is the time students are exposed to the language. According to the CEF the students must take a total of 720 hours divided into 8 years of study taking from 5 to 9 hours per week.  In Colombia only 270 hours are devoted to English. Why is that occurring if the standards adapted say something different and the only exposure to the language is that given at school (in the cases where no resources are available for the student) and being Colombia a monolingual country? Is not this contradictory?

The only idea that comes to my mind is mediocrity, adaptations made randomly and without any thorough consideration.

Based on this little piece of information (the author also considers and discusses aspects such as methodology, approach and assessment but that will need a very deep analysis) I dare to say that the standards imposed by the government to achieve goals to compete to Nations whose societies are ahead from ours need to be changed taking into account that WE ARE COLOMBIANS we are not an easy society to deal with and our way of living and thinking cannot be measured by standards created by others but from ourselves.

Using portfolios

http://youtu.be/moomu5XBf8s

Evaluation

Evaluation seems to be more complicated than being just a four-syllable word.

Evaluation comes to the minds of many people as taking a pencil, getting a piece of paper with some random words or questions or whatever the "teacher" wants to write in order to screw them up. 

I used to think evaluation as passing or failing.  "People, you have a final exam and from this depends if you go to fifth grade or not." The teacher used to say.  For my it was also getting a great christmas present or having my dad kicking my butt.

Every time I had an evaluation coming I started thinking on the consecuences: getting a reward or an undesirable slap on my face. this idea must change on every human being. Evaluation should be an instrument to show all the potential people have on the fields they feel comfortable at and have special qualifications and attitudes towars this specific areas.  So what if a person is not good at math. Should this person flunk his or her educational process because the system feels  he or she doesnt have all the potential needed? What if this person is a future Da Vinci or Beethoven. Just because the system demands this type of evaluation this person must feel restricted and deprived to show potential in other subjects or areas?

Think of these questions and try to inquire a little more if this is the kind of education our children need to improve this society.