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Comparing Experiences

After reading all my partner’s articles about their experiences learning a foreign language, I have seen that many of us had the same experiences. As Judith and Núria Rodríguez said, we had to read some compulsory task chosen by the teachers. I also think that teachers could give some options of books that we could read to make it more enjoyable. I really like the reading plan that Marta Miguel did in her 6 th grade, where they went to nursey school to tell English Stories. I think that it’s a good way to involve children in practicing reading and speaking and they have to do an effort to be understood by the small children. In the other hand, with the point of view as a teacher, and as some of my partners said, I think that it’s important to adapt the stories and the methodologies to the different ages. As Núria Rodríguez and Judith said, I think that the best resource with younger children is storytelling. Like they said, I also like to use a visual support like
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Using storybooks

Imatge
This is a summary of the third chapter of the article “ Tell it Again! The Storytelling Handbook for Primary English Language Teachers” by Ellis and Brewster. In this article there are some questions and answer about how to use storybooks. DOES EACH PUPIL REQUIRE A COPY OF THE STORYBOOK? No because if we give a book to each child, element of surprise and active involvement can be lost. The best idea is putting one or two copies into the class library and children can look at them in their own time HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD A STORY BE READ? We can read it once or twice each lesson or a few times during several lessons. The repetition is good because children recycles language previously introduced, they learn to predict and participate in the story and their confidence grows. WHAT HAPPENS TO ANY WORK CHILDREN PRODUCE? Is good that children create a story folder or a portfolio in which they include exercises, drawing or masks related to the stories. WILL I NEED TO USE
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Age effects on foreign language learning

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In this entry, I’m going to summarize the main ideas about the age effects on foreign language learning. I will base on the articles written by Carme Muñoz, in which she investigates different groups of children of different ages with the same number of hours of instruction that deny some myths that people have about learning English as a third language. Firstly, she saw that those students that have a high level of competence in L1 and L2, have also a high level of competence in L3. Moreover, she affirms that the knowledge of languages has a positive effect on the development of new languages because they will have more resources and strategies to learn it better. Secondly, some people think that “ The earlier you start learning a foreign language, the better results in written language” or “Children are like sponges because they have more resources to learn a new language” but in her investigation, she obtained that the age of the students has an influence on the lea
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My experience using reading in foreign language teaching and learning

I started learning English at school when I started the first year of Primary. It was not until third of Primary that we started using books to read. We had to read a book each year that it was given by the teacher and we had to read it at home. In the last pages of the book, there were some questions that we had to answer in our notebook. Finally, at the end of the year, we had an exam of the book. I didn’t enjoy reading those books because almost none of them were interesting. I think I would have enjoyed better If I could have chosen the book. Now, I enjoy reading other books in English which are interesting for me. Now as a teacher, I’m doing extracurricular classes to children from 3 to 6 years old. As they can’t read books yet, I incorporate storytellings. I show them flashcards or puppets meanwhile I explain the story. I choose simple books, with basic and daily vocabulary (animals, family, food, numbers…) and with repetitive sentences that they can repeat and memorize eas
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Beliefs among parents and teachers on how languages are learned

Nowadays, people say English is very important to communicate with other people, to travel or to get a good job. But there are some beliefs that I would like to reflect on. In my school, teachers think that the sooner children learn English, the better. That’s why in the lasts years they have been teaching English from Pre-School. Parents agree with this, and a lot of them bring their children to extracurricular classes of English or Sports in English from Pre-School. After reading some investigations about this, the studies indicate that older learners obtain higher results than younger learners. In my opinion, the importance to learn English it’s in the way teachers teach it, and not the age when children start to learn it. I think that because I started learning English in First of Primary, and I was taught with books, a lot of grammar, and the teacher spoke to us in Catalan, not English. During my studies in the University, I had the opportunity to study abroad, and do pr
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The teaching of different languages in a specific school

I am going to talk about the teaching of different languages in a school called Claret. It is a charter school that have Pre-School, Primary, Secondary and Baccalaureate. The learning language of this school is Catalan. In pre-school, children start doing English 3 hours per week, the other subjects are taught in Catalan. In Primary School, children have 3 hours per week of Catalan language, three hours of Spanish and 3 of English, and they have Visual Arts Education in English one hour per week. In Secondary, they have 3 hours of Catalan (except in 4 th of Secondary that are 4), 3 of Spanish and 3 of English (except in 2 nd of Secondary that are 4). They can also choose an optative subject of French (from 2 nd until 4 th of Secondary) or Latin (in the last year of Secondary) that are done 3 hours per week. The school offers extracurricular classes of English (for all the ages) and Sports for Kids for Pre-school. In this school, they give importance to all the communicative c
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Reflection about the programme: "Do you speak English?"

After watching the 30 minutes documentary called “Do you speak English?”, I would like to reflect about some questions that are covered in the programme. To begin with, I want to talk about the importance of knowing English. I know a lot of people, especially old people with more than 40 years old, that have no idea about speaking English. That is because they didn’t learn English at school. Maybe in the past, English was not so important but, at the present, English is the most commonly spoken language in the world and we can find it in different aspects of our life like: technology, science, tourism, education, etc. If we want to travel to other countries, we can use English to communicate in there, but increasingly, we have to use in our own city because, as I analysed in another entry of this blog, there are a lot of foreign people living here. That’s why, we can find almost all the jobs that apply people with a good level of English. Although the schools are conscious a
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