SUBJECT: DIDACTICS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

TEACHER: DARLENE MATA

STUDENTS:  OMAR ANTONIO QUINTANILLA SALAS
                        HELEN JEANETH MARROQUIN SARCEÑO
                        CHRISTIAN ALEXANDER MORAN MOLINA
                        JACQUELINNE MELISSA TREJO MARROQUIN
                        KEVIN CHRISTIAN POLANCO AVELAR

Collaborative E-folio

Hoping that the information provided will be very helpful, and we hope you have an incredible apprenticeship in our blogg. Welcome, enjoy learning¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡

INTRODUCTION

Teaching a new language to young learners ir a difficult thing to do because not all the people are able to do it, teaching a new language is a new experience that can help us to improve our academic skills. This document is designed to let people know how they must teach. It will not show every single aspecto of it, but it will give an idea of how to start teaching in an accurately way.

We have learnt a lot in this subject, we tried to apply what we have learnt in order to achieve our purpose: to improve our skills by teaching to pupils in a correct way following what Teacher Darlene taught us through the semester.

It has been a funny experience, and now we want to explain how you can apply these new ways to teach if you want to be a successful Didactics of the English Language’s student.

Index

Teaching Terms

The teaching terms are very important as we have a broader vocabulary and we can adapt it to the way of teaching. It is always important to know new terms and use them at the time we are teaching

LESSON PLAN:A lesson plan is a teacher's plan for teaching a lesson. It can exist in the teacher's mind, on the back of an envelope.It helps the teacher in both planning and executing the lesson. And it helps the students, unbeknownst to them, by ensuring that they receive an actual lesson with a beginning

KNOWLEGE: An understanding of knowledge requires some grasp of its relationship to information. In everyday language, it has long been the practice to distinguish between information — data arranged in meaningful patterns — and knowledge — which has historically been regarded as something that is believed, that is true (for pragmatic knowledge, that works) and that is reliable.

AMOUNT: A quantity of something, or the sum of multiple quantities expressed as a number that may or may not be expressed as a number. For example, a company may have a great amount of brand recognition.

PHONICS: Sort your phonemes from your graphemes, decoding from encoding and digraphs from trigraphs with our parents' guide to phonics teaching. Our step-by-step explanation takes you through the different stages of phonics learning, what your child will be expected to learn and the vocabulary you need to know.

TOPIC-BASED: Topic-oriented authoring for conceptual and task information has its roots in Minimalism, an instructional design technique first espoused by John Carroll. The minimalist approach to information design focuses on identifying the smallest amount of instruction that allows for the successful completion of a task, or that provides basic knowledge of a concept. 

DICHOTOMY: 

In literature, dichotomy is when something is divided into two parts. These two parts could be equal, contradictory, or two opposing forces. Oftentimes, writers include dichotomy to create conflict.

Lesson Planning

A lesson plan is a guide where the teacher details step by step what he will develop during the class, also including the objectives he wants to achieve at the end of the class.

Creating a lesson involves content and specific step; for example, the goals that are expected to be achieved, the activities that you will use to achieve the objectives of the class, the materials that you will use for the development of each activity, etc.

A good lesson plan helps you to create effective activities for each student because not all children are equa; not all children learn at the same rhythm, so a pre-class approach helps create ideas that make all children gain knowledge.

lesson plan helps the teacher improve his teaching; it helps him to establish the purpose of the class. It helps the teacher to evaluate himself and think if what he did fulfilled what was planned, comparing the established objectives and what he achieved at the end of the class, to see, if he managed to achieve the objectives, and if he did not achieve it, he helps him find ways. Doing so may change activities because they may not have worked, since not all activities work the same with all children, but you can see what types of activities work for you and implement them to achieve the purpose of the lesson, which are the objectives and improve the quality of teaching.

The Young Language Learner.

Before to star, we have to know clearly who are young learners. Think of a child about 8 or 9 years old; now think what they like to do? And think about their behavior.  

 In this age their knowledge is still limited and most of them read and write in their native language. This means it is easier to teach them to read and write. Talking about expectations about school, they come from a different culture so, they have different expectations.

But what happened about teaching English to young learners? Some children may only hear and speak English during English class and the amount children are able to learn depends on the amount of English they hear, use and see. Their learning also depends of the teacher and the material didactic that they use should be interesting for them. You can include games, songs, dynamics and activities.

Young learners think logically, they can follow instructions, they have greater memory capacity so, they are allow to develop activities such as writing and listening to put into practice the four macro skills. The motivation is an important factor that can affect the process of teaching and for make that they feel motivated you have to know which activities they like to do and try to exploit their abilities.  

Some students learn because of their curiosity, they see something interesting and they want to do it so, you as a teacher have to try to make the class interesting for them making games and activities for introducing a new topic or to remember something really important. You have to be careful in the way in which you are going to teach because in this age they are going to remember you because of the way in which you teach.

Classroom Management and Atmosphere.

Classroom management refers to the ways in which students’ behavior; movement and interaction during a lesson are organized and controlled by the teacher. (Richards, 1990, 10).  Managing the classroom is one of the concerns for many teachers. You can’t teach if the students are not well behaved. There are some things that teachers can do to effectively manage their classrooms. One of the most important is to have good rules and expectations.

Discipline is the word that should represent a classroom. The teacher has to maintain order and to keep their own feelings in a bad moment. The keyword for this is to prevent the misbehaviors and the teacher can discuss classroom rules with the students and consequences of misbehavior at the beginning of the year and let them know how can affect a bad classroom management in in the process of learning.

The way the students are seated in the classroom will often determinate the type of management that a teacher has, also the success or failure of the lesson. Teachers have to make that their students feel secure in the place that they are seating. To have a schedule in the classroom can help to have a good atmosphere most on young learners because they have to learn the time for every action.

Communication is the most important aspect of classroom management. It is essential to have clear and consistent lines of communication with students, the principal and the employers of the school and parents of the students also. The classroom management depends of the age of the students also every teacher will have a unique style of management to meet each class’ needs.

Oral, Reading, and Writing

ORAL WORK

Limitations: Speaking is perhaps the most demanding skill for the teacher to teach because we do not know what the pupils want to say, we need to find the balance and to correct them if they commit any mistake.

You need to present the new language orally: When children start learning English, they obviously need to be given language before they can produce it themselves. Language has to go in before it can come out. At this initial stage, the activities will be under the control of the teacher. Here are just some of the ways you can present new language orally:

·         Though the pupils

·         Using a mascot

·         Drawings

·         Silhouettes

·         Puppets

Other suggestions:

• Pictures
• Act situations
• Real objects

Controlled practice:

• Simple questions: Do you like…? Yes or no
• Telling the time: What time is it?
• What is he/she doing?

Guided practice:

• Controlled practice
• What is the name
• Real objects
• Practice
• Chain work

READING

Reading is the shill which is easiest to keep up, and the books can open up other worlds to young children, and making reading an enjoyable activity is a very important part of the language learning experience.

There are a number of different ways to approach the introduction of reading in a foreign language.

Ø  Phonics: This aprroach is base don leters and sounds. Basically, we teach pupils the letters of the alphabet, and the combination of letters. Although phonics can become very complicated as all the pronunciation rules introduced; it is not to be recommended as the main way into Reading for those pupils who are already Reading in their ownn language.

Ø  Look and Say: This approach is based on words and phrases, and makes a lot of use of flashcards. It is usual to start by teaching everyday words which are already familiar to children. There are a lot of word recognition games which can be done at this stage, matching words and pictures, pointing to the object on the card. This approach encourages recognition of a range of words and phrases before Reading a text.

Ø  Whole sentence reading: This often means a story which children read for the first time themselves after the whole text is familiar to them. The words are not presented in isolation, but as a whole phrases or sentences.

Ø  Language experience approach: This approach to reading is based on the child’s spoken language. The teacher writes down a sentence for the child to read which is base don what the child has said.

We also have reading techniques:

ü  Reading aloud: It is a useful technique when used slightly differently either individually or in smal groups.

ü  Silent reading: It is what remains with most people for the rest of their lives.

ü  Building up confidence: You should spend more time building up confidence with the whole class about silent reading.

We also have different reading materials:

-          Reading cards

-          Introducing new books

-          Books reviews

WRITING

Writing is not always easy because you cannot make the same use of body language, intonation, tone, eye contact and all the other features which help you to convey meaning when you talk. Writing lets pupils express their personalities, many children take a long time to master the skill of writing but writing activities help to consolidate learning in the other skill areas.

Controlled writing activities and guided written activities

Writing activities are like oral activities, in general controlled activities are being done to pratice the language and concentration and can help students learn how to express themselves effectively in proper English. Controlled and guided writing activities are fundamental to teaching literacy to children adults. Unlike other forms of writing prompts or activities, controlled writing focuseson establishing grammatical patterns, sentence structure, punctuation and word order.

Some free writing activities:

-          Straight copying

-          Matching

-          Copying book

-          Dictation

Pre-writing activities: These activities are usedby teachers to develop writing in order to pupils can improve their writing skill. Pupils normally have a limited vocabulary, for this reason, the teacher preforms pre-writing ativities and pupils can get new vocbulary and ideas developing them.

Some pre-writing activities:

-          Vocabulary charts

-          Topic vocabulary

-          Dialogues

-          Description

Topic Base Work

With the topic-based work is easier to relate the lessons to the experiences and interests that your students have because working on topics can help the learning process, it allows personal materials according to where you live, and allows to rearrange your material to suit what is happening at the time of teaching.

How to set about topic-based work?

• ·         Choosing your topic.
• ·         Planning time.
• ·         Collecting material.
• ·         Assessment.
•    Methods and activities

For your pupils to learn you can use:

- Vocabulary work

• ·         Cards or pictures pasted on the board.
• ·         Card games (like find your partner).
• ·         If pupils have meal, ask them about that.

- Dialogues and role-plays

• ·         Start off with dialogues very simple.
• ·         Let pupils work using cue cards.

- Free activities

- Stories, songs, and rhymes

Planning Your Work

Why good teachers plan their work?

• ·         It makes life easier for them in the classroom.
• ·         It saves time.
• ·         You know what you will need for the next class.

We can divide the plan into three:

• 1.    Short term planning: it might be for a unit of work.
• 2.    Lesson planning: it might be for individual lessons.
• 3.    Long term planning: it might be for a whole term.

Long term planning will take place either before or at the beginning of term, and you can do it before you ever see your pupils. After the long term planning is done, we have to create the short planning term; this one is much easier because we may be planning the lessons in one unit; that topic could be created from tree to ten lessons. Depending on the topic and texts that we want to use; you are going to teach the topic for one unit or for one week; remember the more you teach, the easier it gets to change other´s people plans.

Lesson planning has to be done before every lesson. Unless you work with another teacher in the classroom, you should do it alone. If you want to know if your lessons are working or not, you should ask yourself if the pupils learned what you wanted them to learn. A good time to do that is after every unit.

As you know there are several things that can go wrong in your class and you should be prepared for that. For example: external disturbances (something outside the classroom is butting in the class, so the child get distracted), internal disturbances (a child start to talk and laugh at someone), and the class is out of control (the children are running and screaming aloud in the classroom and you do not know what to do.

EFL ESOL, ESL, EIL, ELF, English as a Global Language

In the rest of the world, English is a foreign language. That is, it is taught in schools, often widely, but it does not play an essential role in national or social life. In Spain, Brazil and Japan, for example, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese are the normal medium of communication and instruction: the average citizen does not need English or any other foreign language to live his daily life or even for social or professional advancement. English, as a world language, is taught among English in the World, but there is no regional variety of English which embodies a Spanish, Brazilian or Japanese cultural identity.

EFL: English as a Foreign Language refers to learning and using English as an additional language in a non-English speaking country. It can be compared with ESL and ESOL, which refer mainly to learning English as a new resident in an English-speaking country. For example EFL includes short summer courses in an English-speaking country, such as the UK, Canada or the US, also EFL taught to people who need to learn it for their studies or their career, and who do not live in an English-speaking country.

ESOL: English for Speakers Other Language this refer to the teaching of English to the students whose first language is not English, but who are living in an English-speaking country and need English to communicate in daily life. This term is used especially in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand.

ESL: English as a Second Language, this is mainly used to talk about foreign students learning English while living in an English-speaking country. (For example: a korean person learning English in the U.K).

EIL: English as an International Language is a form of English that is used by people whose first language are not English.

ELF: The terms English as a Language Franca refers to the teaching, learning and use of the English Language as a common mean of communication for speakers of different native languages.

Nest And Non-Nest

Native speakers and non-native speakers used to be considered two different and clearly distinguishable categories. In recent years, however, this view has come under heavy attack, as a growing number of researchers have discovered the ambiguities with which this dichotomy is loaded.

A native speaker of English is traditionally defined as someone who speaks English as his or her native language, also called mother tongue, first language, or L1. Not surprisingly, the primary advantage attributed to NESTs lies in their superior English-language competence. Their superiority was found particularly spectacular in their ability to use the language spontaneously and in the most diverse communicative situations. Non-NESTs, on the whole, are well aware of their linguistic deficiencies and of the all-pervasive nature of their handicap.

To be sure, the non-NEST teaching in a monolingual class has far more background information about his or her students than even the most well informed NEST can. Indirectly, this knowledge is instrumental in enhancing the teacher's capacity to anticipate and prevent cross-cultural difficulties.

The ideal NEST and the ideal non-NEST arrive from different directions but eventually stand quite close to each other. Both groups of teachers serve equally useful purposes in their own ways. In an ideal school, therefore, there should be a good balance of NESTs and non-NESTs, who complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses. Given a favorable mix, various forms of collaboration are possible, and learners can only gain from such cross-fertilization.

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion, to teach a new language to children is sometimes very difficult but at the same time we can obtain a beautiful experience. During the time we as a group were studying this subject, we learned a lot in this course; we learned many ideas and ways about how to teach children a new language in the best way as possible through lesson plans, activities that we can do for them to learn quickly, and the items that we have to use in the class.

With this knowledge acquired in this subject, we can teach in the best way possible, we can apply our knowledge and develop a class for children. We have learnt the importance of lesson plans in classes and how important are the objects that we use in the classroom for the kids to understand quickly and not to get confuse with the topics that we should teach in the class.

As a summary, English Didactics is a very important subject in our lives as future teachers, thanks to the teacher to gave beautiful experiences during this semester in this subject.