Week 3- What Do We Say When We Speak

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 :-)

Week 2- Thinking of possibilities

While visiting your blogs, I started to wonder about the different realities in which we can be working as teachers of EFL.

I, actually, wondered how you guys in Egypt are teaching; or, what levels students have after graduating from their secondary schools in Ecuador; or what kind of teaching appraoches you are using in India.

I don't know if this is the right place to ask all this; or whether I should be writing about something else here. But I guess this is a unique opportunity to learn about others' teaching practices and, in time, create a community of practice. That sounds great to me!

Actually, I've started a community page on Facebook, called Celebrate Learning , to share ideas of how EFL teachers are using technology in their classes.

You know, I am a bit of a dreamer, like John Lennon used to sing, but this possibility is starting to fancy me a lot.

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)

Week 1 - Getting Started

To tell you the truth, this is not the first blog I have created. However, this will be the first blog I will post on.

When blog and blogging became buzz words, and many started to talk about it, I felt curious about it; and I wanted to learn more. And I found this video which helped me grasp the idea:



I have been asking my students to create blogs for their EFL students. I showed them Blogger and Posterous (http://posterous.com), which I think it is the easiest and quickest to set up. However, not many blogs were created. No wonder, I was not walking my words.

This time, I'll give it a try and see what happens. So, I am eager to get started!

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)