Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. INTRODUCTION
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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
LEGAL FRAMEWORK.
MAIN CONCEPTS