Just to Share... Teacher Paola Andrea Cardona

§ Building language awareness:

In many of my courses with kids I’ve notice that there is a common fact among students: most of the time they don’t speak English. They are starting the process of interacting with this language and in general they don’t realize the importance of it in their lives.

We as teachers are mainly the support they have, not only for telling them that it is important, but for encouraging them to use it in their daily activities as something fun that can enjoy and at the same time learn from it.

There are several activities to build language awareness that don’t have to be focus on a specific age, they can create consciousness in kids, teenagers and adults- those ones who are not completely involved with English and perhaps are true beginners; those things can help them to get involved in the process of learning the language enthusiastically.

§ Contextualizing language:

It is not a secret that interaction and visuals are vital to the development of an effective learning process no matter in which subject: English, social studies, arts and even math. Sometimes we learn both faster and better by association; our job as teacher is to provide as many activities to associate with the background knowledge as we can, of course, taking into account the aims and expectations of our students and avoiding the confusion with something else.

When contextualizing something, many doubts and misconceptions can appear- there has to be a fact that clarify those doubts with both the teacher’s help and the clarification of the existing context- everything around us (sounds, smells, objects, etc).

§ Integrated skills tasks:

This is something we must keep in mind all time because with activities like this we can not only test our students’ comprehension, but have a clear idea about their strengths and weaknesses and that way know specially where is important to focus.

When we talk about integrated skills task, maybe the first thing that comes to our minds (at least to mine) is something boring, long and sometimes even doubt about the success of the activity. I think those activities should be developed with games, that allow our students to have fun and acquire a kind of accuracy dealing with all the skills.

§ Authentic materials:

Sometimes I found myself in the middle of a lesson planning session without knowing which extra material would be helpful for my class, and actually I had never thought about the authentic materials we discussed in our last session.

To me, the class was mainly focused on the academic purpose and the materials I used were directly related with the topic of the class leaving music as an extra-aid to focus even more in the topic of the lesson, or sometimes to relax the students. Realia wasn’t something actively used, but after our session of “authentic materials” I came up with a bunch of ideas for my classes.

Not because I’m teaching kids it has to mean that the class is going to end up being a mess, but the authentic materials used can be that “key” to let the English as a passive component for a while and incorporate things from the outside -from that reality they know and enjoy- to set a nice class environment.

*Paola Andrea Cardona M*