Teaching English in a Secondary School !

Well, we are in september beginning a new school year.

I’m the only person left in the department, EVERY BODY IS NEW.

Some of my previous colleges have moved to other schools, another has health problems…

There have also been an important change, as a new Management Board has recently entered in our school.

So things will slow down again… :

But this summer I came across with some interesting articles on getting teenagers speaking in secondary schools. I recomend them to anyone interested in ELT!!!

They are from a web  called Teaching English from the British Council

Getting teenagers to talk

Increasing student interation

Teaching Speaking Skills 2- Overcoming classroom problems

Speaking and elementary learners

Evaluating speaking

Evaluating speaking-part 2

This is my department final report for this school year, it is a kind of memorandum, a revision on what has been done during the school year, the things achieved and the things to achive…

However, the most important question for me as head of the  English department is to make our school leaders aware of how our English classes have improved  since one of the three classes given to each group every week one is done with half of  the group.

Now,  we hope to improve our working conditions for next year to improve in the same way the quality of our English classes.

We’ll see next  school year…

Here you have the complete document,

Valoració :

Valorem molt POSITIVAMENT els agrupament del tipus HORES B que s’han portat a terme durant aquest any, amb ells assolim la tan necessària reducció de la ratio; hem constatat que aquest tipus d’agrupament és molt més efectiu i beneficiós per els nostres alumnes molt més que les hores de desdoblament quinzenals que haviem fet es cursos passats i que encara s’han portat a terme al 1r de batxiller .

Les hores B suposen que un mateix professor té un mateix grup quatre hores a la setmana, 2 hores normals i dues amb mig grup, mentre que a l’hora quinzenal un professor té 3 hores de classe amb el grup, una d’elles és amb mig grup i l’altre mig grup està amb un altre porf. d’anglès, això suposava un gran nombre d’inconvenients, els més importants són:

– Que es requereix un alt grau de coordinació entre els professor d’un mateix nivell, que en alguns cassos són dos o tres profs per un mateix nivell.

– Quan hi ha un dia de festa els continguts s’allarguen molt en el tems i els alumnes perden el fil.

– Els alumnes no recorden que van fer quinze dies enrere. Moltes altres vegades no recorden quin o quina professora els toca aquella setmana.

Soms conscients que el Centre ha fet un gran esforç per aconseguir LES HORES B a TOTS ELS NIVELLS d’ESO i el departament valora POSITIVAMENT aquest tipus d’organització.

aquest any hem celebrat el 1r ENGLISH DAY a l’institut el dia

30 de Gener, relacionat amb el Dia de la Pau . I a continiació en fem el resum la valoració de l’activitat.

Incentivar valors com la tolerància, la no violència i la solidaritat tot practicant una llengua estrangera ha estat el motiu principal per el qual el passat divendres 30 de gener es va celebrar el primer “English Day” al IES Olivar Gran de Figueres. Tots els alumnes del centre, gairebé 500, van celebrar el dia de la PAU durant les cinc hores de classe fent activitats en anglès relacionades amb la Pau.

Durant les tres primeres hores de classe tots els alumnes de primer i segon de batxiller van incorporar-se a les classes d’ESO per jugar en un entorn col·laboratiu amb els alumnes d’ESO a jocs diversos com “Pass the Word, Riddles, Board Games, Catergories, Hangman…” tots ells basats, principalment, en treball del vocabulari relacionat amb la pau en anglès però, també consolidant els seus coneixements de geografia, música, plàstica, tecnologia … i altres temes tan actuals com els conflictes armats o com treballa l’ONU per assolir la pau al mon i millorar les vides dels desafavorits.

Mes tard, i també en grups, els alumnes van realitzar pòsters sobre alguns personatges rellevants que han treballat activament en favor de la pau Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Madela, Mare Teresa de Calcuta, Kofi Annan, Rigoberta Menchú entre d’altres.

Després de l’esbarjo es va fer la cerimònia de lliurament dels premis convocats amb motiu d’aquesta celebració: els alumnes del centre, en grups de tres o quatre, i voluntàriament havien de prestar un vídeo de pocs minuts de duració en anglès on es treballessin temes com la no-violència, els vuit objectius de mil·lenni proclamats per la ONU o la pau en general. Dels més de 30 vídeos presentats els guanyadors van ser:

Estel Ñíguez de segon de batxiller i Alex Génova de 3er d’ESO com a vídeo més artístic.

Eva Martí, Zaida Peinado i Raquel Carmona al 1er cicle d’ESO.

Marta Casanovas, Marta Moreno,i Raquel Valentín , Elisabet de Haro, Cristina Bartrina, Camila Reyes i Marta Arolas, a segon cicle d’ESO.

Lidia March, Tamara Robles, Maria Aguilar Carles Llorca, Brian Juan, Pere Ballart i Adrià Ramos de 1r de Batxiller.

Tots ells van rebre un diploma d’excel·lència i un petit obsequi.

Per últim i com a fi de festa es va fer una cantada per cursos de cançons relacionades amb el tema .

Donada la bona acollida per part de l’alumnat i professorat del centre, l’equip directiu i l’equip organitzador ja estan pensant en el proper tema del que tractarà l’English day del curs vinent.

Per més informació tenim el bloc següent:

http://englishdayolivargran.blogspot.com/

It is true that it is easy to be impressed by the technology to the point of forgetting that perhaps a more traditional approach might work better. Technology in itself does not ensure quality either.

Teachers have realized that new technologies can help our students’ learning process a lot, they are…

· motivating

· offer a great amount of input

· develop learner’s autonomy

· give a lot of opportunities for practicing the language

Trying to be effective in our work is a hard work and it very tiring. However, we have the feeling that the teachers do not get burnt-out so much by the teaching job itself, they feel disappointed when they detect that their learners are not interested in what they are doing. We think that the more we give to our students, in terms of preparing our class sessions, the more they receive from them and the learners are motivated, enjoy their lessons and succeed in learning English.

Scott Thornbury in his book How to Teach Speaking explains that teachers must find ways of raising the learner’s awareness about some special features of the speaking, for example by…

· Re-performing an original task, attempting to incorporate their own targeted features.

· Focusing in vocabulary and speaking grammar…

· Observing more skilled practitioners.

This new-found knowledge must be gradually integrated into the learners’ already existing speaking competence. That is, the knowledge needs to be appropriated. Activities aimed at appropriation provide learners with a supportive framework in which they can practice, some are:

• · Drilling

• · Reading aloud

• · Making some writing task which allows longer processing time than does any other speaking task…

The support needs to be gradually reduced so as to encourage a degree of independence, which in turn requires a degree of appropriation, we can do it by reducing the planning time, withdrawing our teaching support, performing a task in public…

These are two stages of the three-stage model of this skill development. The third final step is: autonomy. Learners can achieve greater autonomy in speaking and even a capacity for self-development with activities such as:

· Giving presentations and talks

· Telling stories, anecdotes

· Performing drama activities, discussions, debates…

Feedback on such activities need to be handled sensitively so as to respect the learners’ need to experience autonomy, but at the same time, to provide a useful feedback loop for the improvement. Some ways of learners can take responsibility for developing their speaking skills outside the classroom include:

· Taped dialogues, or podcasting.

· Computer-mediated communication.

· Reflective journals or portfolios…

Having our own experience and the opinion of the experts into account, we see that good language teaching, and especially speaking, as a slow process: it is important to get students involved in activities which develop their speaking confidence and it can require a lot of patience, especially at early stages, but when the students finally overcome their limitations they are able to express themselves quite confidently

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.

Well it’s time to “take the bull by the horns”, today I have definetely made up my mind to write my project on SPEAKING and to use this blog as portfolio.

My name is Rosa Saló and I’ve been teaching English for 18 years. The main reason for choosing this topic to work on is that speaking is the skill in which I have worked less throughout my teaching career. It was just two years ago when I became more aware of it. Since I began working on it, in a serious way, a lot of things have changed but a lot more are still to change.

Teachers sometimes are not aware of our students’ needs, we should adapt our teaching and the materials we use accordingly. Why isn’t speaking more important than reading or writing?

Students, especially beginners, easily get frustrated because they want to express sophisticated thoughts and find themselves reduced to “childlike” state when they have to speak in English.

It these two years I have seen that is important to have a relaxing and supportive atmosphere in the class, it should be fun but also positive and, of course, business-like without forgetting to praise, encourage and motivate most of the students we have in front of us.

For that reason many opportunities must be given to the students to practise speaking and, in all those cases, the teacher will evaluate fluency more than accuracy.

I have decided to use a teacher Portfolio[1] because it is a tool for lifelong learning and professional development. It is a very useful when you are thinking, writing and talking about your teaching past, present or future. With this portfolio I will keep a record of my own and my department achievements and reflect on our teaching practice and experiences, especially those related to improving our students’ oral competence.

[1] You can read Olga Esteve’s article: El portafoli en la formació de professorat un intrument de servei i reflexió

or Philippa Butle’s Review of the Literature on Portfolios and Eletronic Portfolio (especially page 5) ePortfolio Project Reserch Report