Subárea de Comunicación y Lenguaje L3 Inglés - Ciclo de Educación Básica por Madurez
| Recursos complementarios |
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| Serie prácticas educativas: 6. Enseñanza de idiomas adicionales |
DescriptionEditar
Students realize that learning a foreign language could be easy if they engage in meaningful activities that require its use and its components. Throughout each task, learning English should be fun, so students may get an authentic, contextualized and interesting learning process.
Nowadays, English is the international communication language, used in commercial, technical, scientific and academic fields. English is the key to access a globalized world in the 21st century characterized by technological and communication advances.
Students that learn another language develop communication and interpersonal skills to communicate with people from different places and cultures. This cultural exchange helps learners to develop critical thinking when comparing other societies to their own social, cultural, political and economical environment for judgment and reflection. In addition, English speakers have a powerful key to access labor markets, to obtain a better academic preparation to face technological and global challenges. It promotes cultural exchange, as well as information enhancement to improve their performance in the working area that students choose.
Four basic communication skills support their learning process, which should be supported by a strong proficiency in their native language: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
These skills determine their performance level. The approach to English learning must be technical, functional and communicative to assure students competence to use the language system appropriately in any circumstances.
The language practice and skill development activities have been designed to involve students in all aspects of the contents, making them active participants in the learning process. This process is centered on learners to encourage them to express their own reality in English and to help them to maintain a high motivation level.
ComponentsEditar
The Subarea comprises:
1. Oral Expression and Comprehension: Listening and speaking are a must in a successful communication. Students must know how to discriminate phonemes from new language, to distinguish meaning from homophonic words with context keys, use of inflection, clear pronunciation and accent and speech melody according to context and speaker; they also have to use new vocabulary and idioms from the new language properly.
Developing oral skills will allow students to have a conversation or to give a speech, to exchange more and more complex information about many topics. This learning includes knowledge and use of sayings, proverbs, idioms, greetings and other popular language uses.
2. Written Expression and Comprehension: Reading is a complex process to understand and interpret not only words and sentences but signs, icons, pictures and other graphic resources that may appear in a written text. Writing allows students the opportunity to share ideas, information and feelings through the use of tools and processes previously learned.
Since reading and writing are processes that students already learned in their own language, they are upposed to transfer cognitive and metacognitive strategies for reading and writing in a new language. Anyhow, English teachers will also work to facilitate reading comprehension. It is very important to take into consideration that English is a second or third language for students and they, probably, already speak one or two Guatemalan languages.
Reading comprehension involves active and passive voices usage that is why it is treated in a separate component. Needless to say that writing is the more complex learning level in a second or third language; so, English teacher will also help students to improve their skill. This component also includes intellectual and communicative tasks related to the knowledge of grammar and syntactic structures.
3. Vocabulary Development: Having a wide vocabulary and idioms from new language will allow learners to obtain more knowledge and better ways to interact with other people.
Vocabulary mastering is a good learning level indicator. The more accurate, wide and strong vocabulary the student acquires, the more possibilities to communicate his needs or feelings as well as to process and interpret the information he receives. It could take many years to go from one level to another. In a very low level, the learner could easily exchange simple information with a basic vocabulary to understand and to be understood in predictable daily situations and conversations in which he could be producer but mostly recipient of his interlocutor messages. For an advanced level, students could easily and clearly say ideas and opinions about a wide range of topics. They could also understand and exchange information reliably; to proficiently communicate with other people about situations other than academic, commercial, technical, literary and conceptual topics.
4. Culture and Society: Oral and written comprehension plus wide vocabulary and idioms, in the new language, should help students to obtain good knowledge about the involved culture as well as to compare and value their own language. It is well
known that language categories rely on uses that native speakers give to them, becoming a kind of window to grasp another view of reality and life. From greetings, the common gateways to other communities, to sophisticated metaphors, students should recognize that they are in contact with other traditions, references and meanings linked to Anglo- American cultures.
Area CompetencesEditar
- Uses wide and varied vocabulary and proper grammar structures, in the exchange of information, colloquial conversations and instrumental communications.
- Writes simple stories, summaries, news and other texts, based on the reading of literary or scientific texts of general disclosure, using precise and varied vocabulary and proper grammar structures.
- Uses precise and concrete vocabulary when having oral or written communication based on a national and international context.
- Appreciates the cultural and linguistic diversity of his country, the Anglo-American countries and other countries.
Competences by YearEditar
Teaching Methodology NotesEditar
Before any learning action, it is necessary to make diagnostic assessment to check language level for each student. This will help determine the developed skills level and which of them will need reinforcement and practice.
Teachers should be opened to dialog, arguments, reflections about social norms, good relationships activities and to provide cooperating tasks and achieving goals. They should use techniques from specialized methods for learning languages such as suggestopedia, which allows the teacher to encourage students to go through negative suppositions like: «I can not do it, it is too hard to me, I do not like it, I do not want it, I do not understand it» to positive and active ideas: «It is possible, I will try to do it, I can do it, It is funny, It is not so hard as it seems».
So, teachers should build up an amusing environment with resources as posters, draws, pictures, lights, videos, songs, sounds, music, to make everyone to relax and to settle other kind of associations to understand and interpret meaning of words and phrases. These activities allow students to stimulate their right cerebral hemisphere so the creative part is learning and not only the conscious one. They would act in an assertive way, would look and accept their own intuitions and would trust in their learning capacity.
Teachers model the foreign language class and their actions are actually suggestive for students. The inflection in their voices, the gestures and body movements, the construction and orientation for every dynamic exercise, as well as recommended resources become significant. This method makes teacher to prepare and practice positive experiences to develop a meaningful learning and to have pleasant emotions. Teaching a foreign language conveys collaborative participation, to throw out stage fright, suspicion and fear to be wrong or punished. The activities must be interdisciplinary and motivating to reinforce positive behavior and self-confidence from learners.
Suggested ActivitiesEditar
To organize a learning language classroom, we suggest:
- To develop oral and written interaction mechanisms: cooperation, negotiation, new information, coherence, relevance, emphasis, repetition, summarizing in different topics.
- To speak only in the learning language as possible.
- To teach grammar in an inductive way; it means that students should reach conclusions about learning language grammar structures by themselves better than receiving explanations.
- Lots of vocabulary should be taught with practical demonstrations of objects, pictures; the figurative vocabulary should be taught by associating ideas.
- Start the class with a short story or dialog in the new language, using modern and conversational speech.
- To design short dialogs and exercises based on common questions in learning language about motivation topics.
- To intuitively teach associated culture to the learning language.
- To focus in creative uses of language. Speaking does not mean to repeat given phrases but to build up all possible phrases (linguistic competence).
- Stimulate reading, writing and speaking with motivating activities according to the student’s interests.
- Mistakes are necessary to learn. Never let correction inhibit the communication process.
1. Use English knowledge to exchange information about different topics:
- Spontaneously talking about interesting topics with a clear and rich vocabulary.
- Answering in a proper way to questions or commands.
- Sharing with native speakers or language learners in clubs in any opportunity.
- Conversing with native or non-native speakers.
- Using new words, idioms, sayings and proverbs when needed.
- Joining to cultural activities such holiday celebrations or others.
- Telling and hearing stories or anecdotes among others.
2. Produces oral or written texts based in previous readings:
- Reading Anglo-American books as reliable sources to obtain information and inspiration from.
- Avoiding literal translation when reading or writing.
- Writing with accurate syntax and spelling.
- Taking care of proper tense or mood when using and irregular verbs.
- Applying new vocabulary in written texts.
3. Value different cultural practices:
- Applying observed social interactions when conversing with native or non-native speakers.
- Judging the different situational approaches to everyday, commercial and advertising activities.
- Being aware of the usage and meaning of idioms, sayings, and words in his community.
- Grasping relation between language and culture through behavior and communication patterns.
- Playing roles about a character of History or tradition.