Teaching English in a Secondary School !

Today I have received the first registered dialogue from my 2nd of Batxiller students, and our forum on moral dilemmas is working pretty well. See my edublog.

The personal portfolios of my 1st ESO students are great and they are very motivated in writing in them, next step adding their own recordings, some of the best are:

http://kamelia-girl.blogspot.com/

http://noeliaseoane.blogspot.com/

It has been difficult to start but using blogs in class for young students and as homework for batxiller students seems it’s going to be a great hit.

What can we do to make our students speak? Is it possible or should we just give up as a lost cause? Why don’t they? Where is the problem?…

As I said at the beginning of the project:

The teacher Portfolio is a tool for lifelong learning and professional development. It is a very useful tool when you are thinking, writing and talking about your teaching past, present or future.

We have learnt from Thornbury the three stages of a general approach to this skill development: awareness-rising, appropriation and autonomy. We have also studied and practised some ways of integrating speaking into the language curriculum. And finally we have reflected on its assessment.

But there is still a lot of research to do and a lot of different experiences to take, speaking represents a real challenge, it needs to be very much developed and practised.

We have just began working with videos downloaded from the internet, also with blogs, forums, wikis… but there are other ICT possibilities to explore, such as podcasting, karaoking, broadcasting videos, using tools such as “hot potatoes”, “Widows Media Player”, “Audacity”…and anything related to what is called m-learning.

As far other interesting theoretical aspects we still have to deal with some further reading are: Assessing Secondary School Students’ Oral Interaction: Opening Paths for Better Learning APAC Monograph n. 4; or Ron Carter’s article Spoken Grammar, Written Grammars: from Corpus to Classroom. APAC magazine n. 60….

Anyone can see the possibilities to work on and to study are endless. In that sense we are claiming to have more “hores B”, ideally for every grupclass in the school, we are also going to ask for an “auxiliar de conversa” next year and invest some money to have, at least, three more computers in the foreign languages classroom.

Finally, we also think that it is not difficult to use ICT in or for our English classes; they can help us to add to our classes the “spice” that we might need to get from our student the extra degree of motivation that can frequently make a difference between a successful or unsuccessful class.

The evaluation of the success or failure of our work is similar to the evaluation of the conversation performance of our students; both are a difficult job.

Everyone knows that in a conversation there is a variety of factors which include: the speaker’s accent, the control of the grammar and vocabulary, an overall fluency…and all of them contribute to have a good oral production.

Having obtained a sample of a learner’s speaking, there are two ways of assessing it: we can either give a holistic score that’s to say based on an overall impression or give a different score for different aspects of the task, the analytic score. The first case is quicker and adequate for informal testing progress. The analytic scoring takes longer, teachers have to take into account a variety of factors like the ones mentioned before, this way of testing seems fairer and more reliable but it has the disadvantage of having too many factors into account we can lose the sight of the overall picture.

On the other hand, it is also very important to give our students a feedback so that they get the information they need to improve in their performance. It needs to be staged and selective as to avoid demoralizing the students. To achieve this we think that we must to decide on which areas of the communicative performance we and the students need to focus on, from our point of view some of the most important could be:

– Appropriate use of vocabulary or “chunks” phrases.

– Fluency, turn-taking skill… that’s to say communication strategies.

– Pronunciation.

– And to a certain extent the grammatical correctness.

For this reason we chose to use an analytic method to test our students’ production, but not to mark the oral activities done in class, we find quite difficult to correct mistakes made during every speaking activity. It is not the same correcting either a drill aimed to improve pronunciation or a passionate discussion about a hot topic…on some other activities we give our students an assessment sheet in which we tell them beforehand the most relevant aspects we are going to have into account.

It has been particularly interesting to see how our point of view is also shared by other teachers (even other languages teachers) when asked in a forum about this hot topic: Click on top of the page iF you want to read it.