Teaching English in a Secondary School !

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.