When the time of teaching techniques to develop language skills comes, I always ask my students these two questions:
- What do we say when we speak?
- What do we say when we write?
And every year, the answer seems to be the same: How "what do we say"?
And then, we start dealing with how to teach listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Many student-teachers create wonderful teaching sequences, on sound theoretical backgrounds, and I ask them "what will the learners listen to their classmates for?" or "what are they going to watch the video for?", or "how will you make your learners say something?"
Many students answer, "to practise listening or speaking". So many do realise that the linguistic purpose in the teaching sequence is important because we are teachers of a language. However, many others also recognise that when learners speak, they do so because they want to be heard, so a non-linguistic purpose in the task is essential.
A teacher's aim could be to help student develop listening, but the student's aim will definitely be to speak their minds.
Watch this video, learners are speaking!
Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)
Hi Gonzalo
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, when you said that students need to listening and then "speak their minds", and I realize they should have a clear purpose to listen to speak even to write and read, it should be linked with student´s interests, age, and their own experiences to engage them to engage them with the learning process, In my country we have an standardized program lead, by the Ministery of Education, which helps to carry out the teaching-learning process in the whole educative system where the four skills are well designed to develop them in a natural sequence in order to provoke on the students the necessity of communication
at the beginning of this program everything was confused, but after 19 years we can noticed that the process has being useful because the student´s attitude had getting better, when students come to the university, I realize them get involved in the process easily, we set the skills even if we work one separated from the others, because others are developed as sub-skills.
This video awakes us as teachers, because we are who form the new societies, the social function education must have to be meaningful and useful.
Gonzalo
ReplyDeleteYes, great point here. This is a wonderful video, thanks for sharing it!
There's a similar one for College you've probably seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
Robert
Thanks Robert! I haven't seen it yet :-)
ReplyDeleteHi Gonzalo,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed watching the video, especially when the children asked us to 'engage them and teach them how to think'. Actually this is the Motto at the BUE. We are supposed to teach students 'how to think not what to think'.
Dear Gonzalo Rosetti,
ReplyDeleteI think we need a tie-up between India and Argentina. I came to know that you train teachers, so do I. As you remarked in your project step, my trainee teachers also need feedback, encouragement, resource sharing and support. We are thinking of developing a technology supported system for this. We already have blogs, tele-conferencing and face to face training programmes.
But our biggest challenge is how to provide support to teachers once they leave the campus. Can you give some suggestions for designing a web based online support programme for feedback, encouragement, resource sharing and training?
I really enjoyed your video of 'The visions of K-12 students'. Of course, I agree. We have to make our students create, construct, share and transform lives. By the by, I am from Kerala, one of the states in India where people are Argentinian football fans. We love Maradona and Messy.
With Regards
P.K.Jayaraj
Bangalore
India
Sure, no problem!
ReplyDeleteActually, taht could be great :-)
Feel free to contact me at my email.
Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)