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TOPIC 21 LA PROGRAMACIÓN DEL ÁREA DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS.

2.0 PROGRAMMING IN THE FOREING LANGUAGE AREA: PLANNING


UNITS
2.1 CONCEPT OF PLANNING
2.2 PLANNING PRINCIPLES.
2.3 THE PLANNING PROCESS
3. CRITERIA FOR SEQUENCING AND SCHEDULING AIMS AND CONTENTS.
4. SELECTING THE METHODOLOGY TO BE USED IN LEARNING AND
ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES.
4.1 CREATING COMMUNICATIVE NEEDS.
4.2 LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES.

1. INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, learning English as a Foreign Language is essential in order to have better


chances in our society.

Due to the influence of the Communicative Approach, our current educational


system has incorporated this functional and communicative potential of language
in its objectives and methodology, the ultimate goal being the development of
the students´ communicative competence, which is one of the general
objectives for Primary Education established in the RD 126/2014 28th February
which establishes the teaching requirements for Primary Education nationwide

Based on this view, I have chosen the topic ... because it is a good example of
how to work the Communicative Approach under different authors’ perspectives
and showing, as examples, communicative activities.

2.0 PROGRAMMING IN THE FOREING LANGUAGE AREA: PLANNING


UNITS
2.1 CONCEPT OF PLANNING
Let me start developing the first part of this topic by establishing the concept
of planning. According to Tessa Woodward in her book ‘’Perspectives of
Planning’’ written in 2002 and published by English Teaching Professional,
planning is something that teachers must learn through experience.

Then, planning consist of doing all what necessary in order to know in advance
what is going to be done in class, in order to be as efficient as possible, to
ensure a variety of contents, activities and material types.
It is the result of adapting the DCB (basic curricular design) first, through the
PEC (school educative project), and then, by the teachers to their students
through the class planning.
Moreover, in order to plan, teachers must follow the DC 108/2014, of 4th July,
which establishes the teaching requirements for Primary Education in the
Valencian Government which describes that a plan must include 1.Introduction,
2.aims, 3.key competences, 4.contents, 5.didactic units, 6.methodology,
7.students assessment. 8.attention for students with special needs or with
compensatory education needs, 9.Cross Curricular aspects, 10.assessment of
teaching practice and achievement indicators and 11.material resources and
bibliography. It must be realistic, practical and coherent to solve the problems
found during its development. And, as you know as teacher, we must hand in it to
the school management team by the end of September.

2.2 PLANNING PRINCIPLES.


Now, I am going to focus on the principles of planning, that are 6, where the
four first responding to the constructivist approach. In this sense the planning:
1: Parts from the developmental stage of the learners: it means that the
planning must take into account the characteristics of the students, their age,
interests and previous knowledge, etc..
2: Contributes to the construction of meaningful learning: meaningful learning is
the knowledge built up by the learners, with the help of the teacher, connected
with their previous knowledge.
3: Promotes the pupils’ activity, and their communicative competence
4: Contributes to the abilities of learning to learn: students must be able to
learn autonomously to some degree with their own learning styles and strategies
and this must be one of the objectives that guide the planning process.
5: Ludic activity must be considered as an especially adequate resource in
primary education. They should always be motivating and useful, necessary
conditions to build up not only meaningful but any kind of learning.
6: the planning should include operational objectives: the objectives proposed
should be clearly defined, in an assessable way. These objectives have to
express the competences that the students have to achieve during the time the
unit lasts.
Moreover, activities, materials, etc...must be varied in order to enhance our
students’ motivation
Another condition for a successful planning is flexibility, which implies that the
teacher should be able to change plans, to adapt what is planned to the
classroom circumstances and to the students needs following the Order 16th
July 2001 by which the education to students with special needs is regulated in
Infant and Primary Education

2.3 THE PLANNING PROCESS


Now, I am going to describe why it is open, dynamic and continuous through the
Diagram: the planning process

Curriculum Initial diagnosis

Class planning

Implementation Assessment

As you can see in the diagram, the process starts by taking into account the
prescriptive curriculum, which every school has adapted through the PEC. Then, the
teachers must develop de class planning for every group of students, according to
their characteristics, parting from an initial diagnosis that helps to determine the
students’ previous knowledge, interests and other variables that could affect the
teaching-learning processes. During and after the implementation of such class
planning, the whole process must be assessed by the teacher. The following aspects
should be evaluated:

- The class planning, the lessons and the sessions. This includes assessing the initial
diagnosis, as some impressions that the teacher might have about some students
may be modified with further evidence collected during the sessions.
- The objectives established, to see if they were adequate for every group of
students.
- The teaching process: the procedures carried out, the teaching and learning
materials, etc..
- The students, to evaluate if their learning process has been adequate and if they
have reached the established objectives.

When the results of the assessment of any of these aspects were negative, the
planning should be revised in order to solve the possible problems.

Now, let’s analyse the different parts of the process.

Before planning, teachers need to know about their own profession and about their
students, in order to decide what activities would be the most motivating and suitable,
what language level they should part from, etc. This constitutes what we have called
the initial diagnosis.

The following aspects must be taken into account regarding the students:

Who the students are (age, sex, social background, and parents’ occupation), what they
bring to the class (motivation and attitude, knowledge of English, interests) and what
they need (achieving a communicative competence in the foreign language, the four
linguistic skills must be worked, attention to students with special needs, etc)
According to the teaching profession, well-prepared teachers must have knowledge
about these aspects mentioned, which have to do with the educational system, the
curriculum, the methodology and the school in which the planning is going to be applied.

plan

When parting from a year planning, I organise all the objectives and contents into
units. When defining a unit, the first step I do is to fix its objectives, and then
determining what contents are necessary to fulfil those objectives, And all this, taking
into consideration the results of the initial diagnosis.

When the objectives and contents of the unit have been fixed, I check that the topic,
the functions to be developed, the grammatical aspects, the procedures established,
the assessment criteria, etc.. are coherent.

Then it is the moment when I define the activities to carry out, which will be as
communicative as possible, and will be planned in order to practise the four linguistic
skills.

After planning the general activities, I prepare remedial and additional activities, for
students who need some extra explanations and/or practice to achieve the objectives
and fast finishers. Moreover, in my year planning, I organize the activities taking into
account that each session lasts 45 minutes as it is established in the RC 7/2014 of 15th
of July which establishes the guidelines of the beginning of the academic year.

According to J.Brewster in his book ‘’The Primary English Teacher’s Guide’’ written in
1992 and published by Penguin, a usual session is usually structured around three main
stages:

Language presentation: its main objective is to introduce a linguistic issue and the new
language must be introduced contextualised. It is important to use a model sentence
ant its repetition can play an important role at his stage.

Controlled practice: it starts from activities of controlled practice to reach a freer


production of the students. The main objective is that the students learn through
practice, that they memorise and assimilate the new language. Suitable activities at
this stage are drills, short dialogues, information gap activities, games..., the teacher’s
role is mainly as a conductor and corrector.

Free practice: the students must have the chance to try in their own what they have
been drilling before. During these activities the teacher should not intervene unless
there is a serious communicative problem

Planning the assessment


Review: its aim is that students are aware of their learning process: every day they
must know what they have learnt or practised. However, other phases such as an
introductory activity can function as a warm-up, or as an opportunity to review what
was done the previous sessions.

Moreover, the teacher must assess the students and also the whole teaching and
learning process, because it can be re-oriented in order to solve the problems
detected. I will explain the self-assessment at the end of the topic.

3. CRITERIA FOR SEQUENCING AND SCHEDULING AIMS AND CONTENTS.

According to the Organic Law 8/2013, of the 9th of December, for the Improvement
of the Educational Quality, there are a series of general criteria for sequencing aims
and contents based on the constructivist and communicative theory.

When introducing a new linguistic element, there is a pre-eminence of oral language


over written language, also the receptive skills must always precede the productive
ones. But, in this sense, the four linguistic skills must be integrated and well balanced
in the teaching-learning process.

In general, the pattern form the simple to the complex must be followed when
sequencing both grammar and procedures. And they must be worked on a cyclical way.
This constitutes one of the key of achieving a successful teaching process.

The input is a key as well to achieve a successful teaching process. As Krashen says in
his book ‘’Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning’’ published in
1981 by Longman, the input should be at a slightly higher level than the students are
capable of using, but a level that they can understand. This selection of the language
input is called rough tuning.

When sequencing the contents, it is also important to take into account the linguistic
transference the learners are going to make from their mother tongue. For example,
the first concepts to work on may be based on those which the students already know
(e.g. colours, numbers, clothes, etc.) and they will be progressively widened to include
concepts. But, apart from these basic criteria, there are other aspects that must be
taken into account, such as characteristics of the students, cognitive development,
social development, linguistic development in their mother tongue, etc.

4. SELECTING THE METHODOLOGY TO BE USED IN LEARNING AND


ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES.

4.1 CREATING COMMUNICATIVE NEEDS.

According to Jeremy Harmer in his book ‘’The Practice of English Language Teaching’’
written in 1991 and published by Longman, there are different techniques, appropriate
for designing and carrying out communicative activities, which should be taken into
account during the planning process:

Information gap activities: are those in which each interlocutor has a part of the
whole information, and their aim is to complete that information, putting it in common
with their partners.

Information transfer activities: are those which an interlocutor has all the
information, and has to transmit it to the second interlocutor to achieve the goal of
the activity.

Jigsaw principle: in these activities, the information is distributed among several


interlocutors that have to share it in order to carry out the activity successfully.

Task dependency: it implies that students can learn the foreign language being asked
to do a task that is motivating itself. The learners will use the foreign language to
carry out the task.

For instance, I have adapted an activity from the Carol Read’s book ’’ 500 activities
for Primary Classroom’’ written in 2007 and published by MacMillan Education’’ where
students, in group, should complete a web quest where they have to organise a trip to
London. That is a motivating activity where they have to communicate in the FL using
the new language they have learnt. Each student look for specific information: flights,
hotels, excursions, and later they have to share the information to organize the trip.

Moreover, they play in groups, then they develop moral and civic competence based on
the Cross- Curricular contents established in the order of 20th December of 1994 of
the Valencian Government

4.2 LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES.

As David crystal says in his book ‘’The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language’’ written
in 1987 and published by CUP, following the communicative approach, most activities
should be based on the creation of communicative needs in the students. These
communicative activities present the following characteristics:

- They create a desire to communicate in the students and provide a


communicative purpose.
- They are based on content, not on form, and they present a variety of language,
as occurs in real life situations.
- The teacher must not intervene unless one student has serious communicative
problems. And learning materials should be authentic and varied.

It is important to say that any learning activity can constitute an assessment activity,
depending on the moment it is developed and its aim. Assessment must take place
through the same kind of activities they have practised, which implies evaluating the
four skills, the group work, etc. All the objectives and the different contents must be
assessed during the normal development of a lesson and not only at its end.

The kind of evaluation is normally carried out not by the student or teacher alone, but
by the interaction between them. In this process, the students’ opinion about their
own learning progress is necessary, and the use of self-assessment is one of the most
effective means for developing the students’ critical awareness of their own learning
skills.

In this sense, students can use the ELP which is a project launched in 2001 by the
Council of Europe in an effort to support learner autonomy and plurilingualism,
recording their work and including them in the Dossier, which is a collection of samples
of their work where they record their learning achievements.

This is a tool that allows students to create strategies to learn developing the learning to
learn competence following the Recommendation 2006/962 of the European Parliament
and the Council of 18th December on key competences for lifelong learning.

Moreover, another way to include self-assessment in the general evaluation system


could be through the use of self-assessment sheets. The advantages of using them
are:

1. They constitute a useful tool of reflection for every student


2. They act as a positive reinforcement, becoming motivating elements.
3. They Encourage students to become responsible for their own learning and make
students aware of what they are learning.
4. They take into account more personal elements.
5. They inform the teacher about the students’ feeling and needs
6. They serve to establish communication with the students on a regular basis.
7. They help students to keep a record of the in-class tasks, exercises... which
they can use to prepare for their exams.
8. The students learn structures and this helps them to gain proficiency in English

5. CONCLUSION

In this topic we have dealt with the planning of the Foreign Language area. We have
justified the incorporation of this area in the curriculum and explained planning
process. Finally, we have provided some criteria to sequence and time the contents and
objectives, and to select the methodology to use in the activities.

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Brewster, J.(1992): ‘’The Primary English Teacher’s Guide . Penguin


 Woodward, Tessa (2002): ‘’Perspectives on planning’’. English Teaching
professional.
 Harmer, Jeremy (1991): ‘’The Practice of English Language Teaching’’.
Longman
 Krashen, Stephen (1981): ‘’Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Learning’’. Longman
 Read, Carol (2007):’’ 500 activities for the Primary Classroom’’. MacMillan
Education.
 Crystal David (1987):’’ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language’’. CUP

LEGAL FRAMEWORK.

 Organic law 8/2013, 9th December, for the improvement of educational


quality (LOMCE)
 RD 126/2014 of 28th February.
 D 108/2014 of 4th July
 Order of 20th of December of 1994 about Cross Curricular Contents.
 Order 16th July of 2001, about educative attention to the students with
special educative needs
 Recommendation 2006/962 of the European Parliament and the Council of
18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning.
 RC 7/2014 of 15th of July which implies the instructions for the
organization of the schools of Primary Education during the 2014-2015
school year.
 ELP which is a project launched in 2001 by the Council of Europe in an
effort to support learner autonomy and plurilingualism

MAIN CONCEPTS

Other main concepts

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