At the class of last day we had a guest
speaker, Jane House, who is a published author of children's material. She told us some things related to materials writing and talked
to us about experiential learning, communicative methodology and CLIL, which
approach to language learning.
Experiential learning: it is recommendable to try to make
learning experiential for children, for example personalizing it; dealing with
something that can identify them, something they are related to. Jane also told
us that it is very important that a book is physically appealing, so that it
doesn't make lessons boring.
It is also useful to include tasks in which
children need the language, not just studying the words. For example, they can
use the language by writing a poem. And there are many reasons to incorporate
for children reading other poems, like learning new vocabulary or guessing what
the poem speaks about. Reading it aloud once written is good, but if the
children write it alone, then the classmates will have to listen to 30 poems
and will get bored. If they do it in groups, the classmates will only have to
listen to 4 or 5 poems.
Communicative
methodology:
treating the text in a communicative way. It is important to mix the treatment
of the text as a vehicle for information (TAVI) and as a language object
(TALO); to find the information that the text gives and also to focus on the
language that it contains in order to study English.
She showed us different kinds of text,
fictional and non-fictional, that a book can include: stories, daily routines,
instructions, e-mails, news, poems, maps, dialogs or postcards, for example.
CLIL: Content and Language Integrating
Learning. It means teaching a subject, such as Mathematics or Science, in
English. The coursebooks in our country use to have CLIL pages instead of being
a complete CLIL book, because it is difficult to do CLIL in a country where
English is not so usually spoken. But with CLIL you can include some lessons of
a subject in English.
During the speaking we were shown a coursebook
to see how CLIL was included in it. Each book in the series had 9 units; an
opening unit to review (unit 0) and eight more units. Every unit was organized in
an introduction of the unit theme, a vocabulary lesson, a grammar lesson, CLIL
lessons (for example a Geography and an Arts lesson) and a writing lesson.
The authors of that book tried to make it
attractive for the pupils, enjoyable and from the real world. The book also
allowed pupils to produce something to learn.
At the end of the speaking, Jane House told us
about the teacher's books. The coursebook came with one, which is dedicated to
teachers. In that book they give you a structure of how to plan your lesson,
which will be really useful for us, as future teachers, if we want to take
profit of the activities of the book.
