miércoles, 19 de febrero de 2020

MY FAVOURITE READING STRATEGY


Reading is a challenge in the English classes, especially because our students do not usually read a lot, not even in their native language. I have learnt in this module that extensive reader has got much more advantages than intensive reading, which is what I mostly do in my classes. I will try to improve the extensive reading part.

I work reading almost every day in class, we use it mainly to read the instructions of all the activities that we do and also most of the exercises we do, we read them aloud, but I reckon that this is not a reading that students or even I enjoy; it is just that it is easier to focus their attention if we are working with written rather than oral texts.

My favourite strategy is the use of the reading to work other skills, especially oral ones. I usually use this one especially with lower level groups; this year I am using it with 2nd FPB. It consists in the following: I tell them to read the text on their own and silently and underline five to six words that they do not know how to pronounce (maybe they know their meaning or maybe they do not, we focus on its pronunciation), then we listen to the text read aloud (by me or played on any device that we can make use of), they should focus on the pronunciation while they are listening and finally they read it aloud making the effort of reading the words they have chosen correctly, in this way, they focus on learning the pronunciation of some words of their choice, it helps them develop a better understanding of the text and of oral comprehension. If all the class does it well, they get a prize, that is, extra points, listening to a song in English of their choice, getting time to do homework in the class and so on, it depends on the day.

viernes, 14 de febrero de 2020

MY READING HABITS

Helsinki's Public Library
I have liked reading all my life, I can remember how the pages of books made me happy and made me stay up till late. My reading habits have changed, though. When I was younger I liked reading novels, especially long ones from the beginning of the 19th century, nowadays I read a lot of articles, I still read some novels and I am starting to appreciate good poem books. I usually read literature on paper and articles on electronic devices. And I still try to read as much as I can, in fact, my favourite places are libraries and bookshops. I like reading in the original language, but this is only possible in English, French and Spanish, and the choices are quite the same for the three languages.

In the images you have presented us, we find several readers' profiles: it is interesting that children seem not to have chosen their readers, the one who seems to be with her grandmother has a book on flowers and the kids in class are all reading the same book (at least the first one has an affective bound to the person who has probably chosen the text). Adults seem to have more freedom and therefore be happier with their choices.

domingo, 9 de febrero de 2020

INNOVATIVE TEACHING PRACTICES SUPPORTED BY THE FOCUSED USE OF ICT TOOLS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM



I created this blog a few years ago to use it as a virtual notebook online for all of my courses. I usually write in Spanish in it, because I have been doing other online courses in which the language was Spanish, but I was sooo looking forward for a course in English.

I am doing this new one in English at the CEP de Castilleja, the "school for teachers" that our employees have given us teachers and which I am so proud of. This is a very necessary place for teachers to develop their skills and not to feel alone, if we work together, we will get further and that benefits our students. Therefore, we will have some posts in it in English.

I have added this list of links they asked us for, I have also added some more blogs and a picture here in the post. Since they asked for two pictures and I don't like entries with two pictures so much, I have changed the background of the blog with the picture I have for my real blog Close your books, which helped me work with my students for several years and also cowork with other teachers who didn't work at my high school (I don't know if you will be able to see it for, as long as I know, it was stolen from me a couple of years ago, so I had to migrate the contents to Close your books2). I have also created the list of links and the cloud of tags I was asked for, so I am willing to jump into step/module 2 when my tutor allows me to.

We are going to have a great course!!!