I have been teaching since last year and have done internships at the university. For me teaching has to be focused on meaning. I think it is the same process as we learn our L1, developing the four skills we will learn how to produce on a correct way. If we provide good input, students will naturally learn grammar structures. Once they are aware that meaning goes beyond grammar, they will understand that reading a text is focus on meaning, listening to a conversation is focus on meaning, by writing and speaking the goal is to make you understood.
Taking this idea, I believe we have to give special attention to fluency, once they feel confident on speaking; they have to start improving accuracy. But the first stage is to speak, no matter how well the performance is. My students are learning English since this year, so during my classes I make them speak but I do not correct them, because of what I already said.
Following the points before mentioned, language classroom should have plenty meaningful learning. As a teacher, I have to provide not only meaningful activities, but also consider in my teaching practice high quality activities. Looking for good resources is vital nowadays, because there are too much, and it is our work to discriminate which one is good and pertinent for the students.
I have confirmed, by seen it during this year that it is a must to teach in a variety of ways in order to make learning available to each student. Students have different learning styles, some of them prefer visual activities, or auditory, or kinesthetic.
Alejandra I agree with you when you say that first we should pay attention to fluency. Students need to feel comfortable with the language, speak and speak a lot no matter how they do it and then when they feel more confident then they should be improving accuracy. And the teacher starting to check more the pronunciation and being more accurate.
ResponderEliminarI do not agree completely with waht you both say about fluency. I think that fluency needs to come with accuracy. It is true that we need to motivate our students to speak and not be very demanding in terms of grammatical accuracy. But I think that we need to ask them to speak with a certain degree of accuracy, depending on their ages. I think that we need to work with both, accuracy and fluency becuase one leads to the other, so we should pay attention to both. Obviously we are always trying to encourage our students to speak and I do not think we should care about grammar but I do think we should ask them to be accurate to a certain point when they speak. In my opinion, accuracy helps the students to speak fluently.
ResponderEliminarAlejandra, after many years I came to the conclusion that before speaking the children need to write as much as they can. We must give them plenty of exercises that can help them to imagine the way they can speak about different topics , you can teach them to read, write about their bedrooms , for instance, and after some exercises they should be ready to say one or two sentences about theirs.After that you complete their sentences with more relevant information, you correct their pronunciation and finally they work in pairs or present a small project about their bedroom in this case.
ResponderEliminarI agree that teaching has to be focused on meaning (I also agree with Angela's comment on a balance between fluency & accuracy - but think the timing is crucial - something we will focus on soon). However, most learning programmes are based on grammar sequences.
ResponderEliminarQuestion: What alternative is there to a grammar-based syllabus? How would you organise course content? Should classes be linked to one another or should chaos reign?
I've written twice, but I don't know why it disappears I'm trying again
ResponderEliminarWow! it worked.
ResponderEliminarAle, I also think that meaning is very important, but also we must teach some structures (grammar) to help them to express better in English. The challenge is how to do it in a motivating way.My contradiction is: if we don't correct will those mistakes stay there "forever"? With my kinders I repeat what they say in the correct way, it seems that works, because they make less mistakes as time goes by, but I don't know if it will work with older girls.