Teaching English in a Secondary School !

Computer recording, Blogging, Podcasting, Videocasting… Wikis…Forums… that’s to say, the 6th skill: Information Technology Competence!!!!!!

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As Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” says:

“…For what it’s worth it was worth all the while
It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right.
I hope you had the time of your life.”

It is very difficult to understand the different basic competences our students have to achieve only having into account the ESO and Batxiller curriculums established by the Catalan Education Board: These curriculums do not take into account the four different skills the English teachers always have in mind: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. The basic competences are presented together for the Spanish, the Catalan and the foreign languages together and this does not help to understand them better beacuse it is obvious that these languages are not learnt at the same pace.

After studying the documents and articles [1][2][3] I personally think that it is easier to rely on the communicative competences established by Common Europen Framework of Reference than those mentioned in the curriculum of ESO and Batxiller. In that sense the Education Board literally says at the introduction of the foreign languages curriculum…

“El Consell de Europa estableix un marc europeu de referència per a l’ensenyamnet de llengües, el el qual proclama la necessitat que els aprenents desembolupin competencies suficients per tal de relacionar-se amb persones de llengua maternal different…”

The Basic competences established in the “Decret 143/2007, de 26 de juny, pel qual s’estableix l’ordenació dels ensenyaments de l’educació secundària obligatòria (ESO). DOGC núm. 4915 – 29/06/2007” are:

1. Communicative and Linguistic Competence.

2. Artistic and Cultural Competence.

3. Information dealing and Digital Competence.

4. Mathematical Competence.

5. Learning to Learn Competence.

6. Autonomy and Personal Initiative Competence.

7. Knowledge and Interaction with the Physical World Competence.

8. Social and Citizen Competence.

Apart from that, and among other things such as transversal competences shared with other subjects, this new curriculum also publishes a set of “SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH AT COMPULSORY SECONDARY EDUCATION (ESO)”

1. Acquire the ability to communicate both orally and in writing efficiently in every day communication situations through specific tasks.

2. Develop communicative skills, both receptive and productive, with the objective of performing information exchanges both in and outside the classroom.

3. Being able to read and understand various kinds of texts autonomously, with the aim of accessing various sources of information and as the means to learn about cultures and ways of life different from our own.

4. Transfer the communication strategies learnt in the acquisition of the mother tongue or in the process of learning other languages to the knowledge of the foreign language in order to carry out interactive tasks in real or simulated situations.

5. Reflect upon the working of the language as an element facilitating learning in the performance of tasks and as a tool for developing autonomy.

6. Use learning strategies and didactic resources (such as dictionaries, books, encyclopaedias, multimedia materials, etc.) to find information and solve learning situations in an autonomous way.

7. Reflect upon one’s own learning process and develop an interest for the incorporation of improvements which may lead to completing the tasks set successfully.

8. Access to knowledge of the foreign language’s culture, developing respect to the language and its speakers in order to achieve a better international understanding.

9. Appreciate the value of the foreign language as a means of communicating with people who belong to a different culture and as an element encouraging social and interpersonal relations.

In conclusion I would say that when comparing the CEFR competences with the recently launched LOE curriculums of ESO and still provisional Batxiller, I find they are much easier to understand, especially the one related to the communicative competence, than those from the LOGSE curriculums. However, they are still not as clear as those stated by the Common European Framework of Reference from above.

Finally the following chart is an attempt to establish some coherence among the different levels in the different studies a person who wants to get an “official” certificate in English can have.

[1] See article: Cambridge ESOL exams and the Comon E. Frameworkn Framework of Refence (CEFR) by Linda Taylor and Neil Jones in annex … and also www.cambridgeesol.org/what-we-do/research/cefr/common-scale-levels.html

[2] http://phobos.xtec.cat/eoiesplugues/ and http://phobos.xtec.cat/eoi/

[3]See the annex 2 from DOGC 4915 29/06/2007and also the new LOE curriculums inhttp://www.xtec.cat/estudis/batxillerat/curriculum_bat_loe.htm http://www.xtec.cat/estudis/eso/nou_curriculum_eso.htm

[4] See my own summary called “ Marc Comú de Referència per a les Lengües, un resum”

After eight years working in bad physical conditions last year me moved from our old barracks to a new big building. But, in my opinion, one the most important changes has been the increase of the number of students and, obviously, teachers as well. There are six English teachers this year.

This has good and bad points; the good point is that we can now offer one or two hours of “desdoblament” in all the courses except in 2^nd year of “batxillerat”.

There are 4 courses of 1^st of ESO of about 25 students in each classroom; the teachers have two classes with all the students and two more with half of them every week. (hora B). The same happens in 4^th of ESO with also four groups.

There are 4 courses of 2^nd of ESO of about 30 students in each class more or less and the teachers have two classes with all the students every week and one more only with half of the students every two weeks. (desdoblament quinzenal). And the same happens in the four groups of 3^rd of ESO and 1^st of Batxiller two groups.

Of the nineteen class-groups we have today only eight of them have what we call “hora b”, and all the rest have “hora de Desdoblament” every two weeks, except one , as 2^nd of Batxiller hasn’t got any. The increase in the numbers of all these “non-conventional classes”, together with the increase of the number of teachers has made the teachers’ coordination quite difficult, in the sense that there are a lot of different teachers teaching at a same level and, in most of the cases there are two teachers teaching a same group class this means a great effort in coordination and most on the times an hour meeting every week is not enough.

This is our new Foreign Languages classroom, we’ve got seven computers and a printer, a laptop that works together with a projector -both portable -, a TV with a DVD and a video player and an overhead projector and we will have three more computers too.

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