Teaching English in a Secondary School !

Two years ago some language teachers, most of them from the English language, joined a course on “Practica reflexiva”, Action Research Metodology, in Figueres…

It was in January 2006 when some of my mates and I began this course, by then there were three English teachers in our secondary school, two of us enrolled in this course together with the only French teacher in the school and another teacher from the Catalan department.

See our school and our Foreign Language Classroom,

All our projects had to be related to improving our students Speaking skill:

My project was due to achieve that my third of ESO students spoke English in the “desdoblament” classes.

My partner’s project consisted on getting from the oldest students a better oral production by making them produce their own speeches in front of the class.

I soon realised that my objective was very difficult to achieve. I remember very well another English teacher from another secondary school who was much more used to work this skill with her students: she had already run a long distance before us, she had always tested her students’ oral competence, not like us that we had never done it either. However, these students didn’t use English to communicate inside the class…

After reading several internet articles on speaking from BBC /British Council Teaching English web page : Find the Gap – increasing speaking in class, What is speaking in the elementary level classroom, Getting teenagers talking… and, of course SCOTT THORNSBURY’s book How to Teach Speaking and TEELE and GRAY’s book How to Use the Internet in ELT both from Longman editions.

My partner and I prepared several different didactic units in order to get our students speaking; some of them were oral presentations, treasure hunts, songs, surveys…[1] We observed each other’s classes, registered some sessions, had our own diaries… And we also tried to make our students aware of their learning process by using self-evaluating sheets or simply asking their opinion on the different speaking activities.

We evaluated most of our students positively, as we thought that a positive feedback in these kind of activities is essential, especially at the beginning to motivate and encourage our students to carry on practicing English as much as they could.

The students response was also very positive, they had more interest in working on this aspect of the English language than in the rest, they found more attractive working in groups to prepare, for example, a journey than doing grammar exercises or writings. They also declared they were quite satisfied with their results, and wanted to go on doing these kind of activities. Apart from that they really appreciated this change in our routine.

Some of their positive comments…	Some of the negative comments…
“Aquests treballs et permeten parlar més en anglès, mes que amb el llibre, perquè nosaltres ens havíem d’espavilar”“Es bo parlar en públic o davant d’una càmera encara que sigui en anglès”“La gent s’implica més”“..- aprens més divertint-te amb els companys”	“… sempre hi ha algun graciós que parla massa i distorsiona la classe…”“… al veure la càmera la gent fa l’imbècil”“… vaig passar molta vergonya per la pressió de parlar en una llengua diferent i davant d’una càmera”

Only a few couldn’t feel confident enough and had to read their final works, however we also considered it as a positive result, because we had already observed that they had had great difficulties to learn this language, and we valued their effort.

As far as our opinion was concerned we also had very good sensations when working on these activities in the end we considered that it had been hard work but we had spent a very good time with our students. In addition we learnt to use teacher portfolios ( at that time it was paper written) to reflect on and assess our teaching; to explore and test new ideas, methods, and materials; to assess how effective the new approaches were; to share feedback with other team members; and to make decisions about which new approaches to include in the team’s curriculum, instruction, and assessment plans. This approach is called collaborative inquiry by H Altrichter, P Poch, B Somekh in Teachers Investigate their Work, An Introduction to the Method of Action Research.

We arrived to the conclusion that Action Research was a very useful method to use whenever we wanted to seriously research to improve the quality of our organization and its performance.