Thoughts after the meeting in December
- Jan 19, 2018
- 3 min read
After the meeting on December the 18th I had a lot to think about regarding my future the Language of Clay project. During the seminar, we discussed what the project should be like and its principal goal, which is to create an activity that will allow students to produce language. One of the questions I had was whether the activity had to aim to teach specific elements of the English languages, i.e. Grammar or vocabulary. However, this is not the case as the project to be developed could be either focused on the previously mentioned elements or just the language being used freely.
Because of my interest in teaching English as a foreign language and the qualification I obtained through The TEFL Academy I feel confident of my understanding about teaching English as a second language and, the linguistic features of it. Nevertheless, my lack of experience in actually teaching to a group of people makes me doubt about choosing this possibility. Additionally, my lack of knowledge about the ages of the young people I will be interacting with, and whether they would be interested or not in learning English as second/foreign language leads me to believe a free speech activity could be more suitable. This, however, is something that is still undecided and to be considered in the following days.
Meanwhile, I have been thinking the activity I can create.
My main inspiration for my personal edlab project is my experience as an EAL student. From the start of 2015, I took part of an English intensive course offered by the Kaplan college, which lasted for six months. During this period I was able to learn academic English, something which would be necessary for my future education. However, I also learnt the language through interactive and creative ways. One of the activities I remember the most are the following.
* Pictionary: This is a popular charades-inspired guessing word game. The class would be divided into two teams and one player of a team had to pick a card. This card had a word, which the team player had to draw or, in some cases perform, so the team could guess and win points.
* Dictation: The class would be divided into pairs. There were several papers on the walls and each one had a paragraph written on it. This was a race like competition so each pair had a runner and a writer. The writer would run to see what was written in the papers, would have to memorize as much as they could and then, run back to the writer and tell them everything. Whoever pair finished first and had accurate paragraphs would win.
* Building a story: The class would be divided into groups. Each group would be given various strips of paper, each one containing a paragraph. Together, and placed in the correct order, the paragraphs would tell a story. Whoever finished first would win.
Despite I consider myself quite a traditional learner ( I absorb information through texts and, sometimes, audio) I believe activities like these helped me to improve my speaking skills and they were a great way to know and interact with new people.
I'm confident that an activity similar to the ones previously metnioned could benefit young people or children who prefer kinesthetic learning. And, in case they prefer traditional methods of teaching, the activity could be a fantastic opportunity to engage and communicate with each other.
Those are the activities I remember best. However, I know there are others employed in the classroom which I will investigate so they can help me to create my own activity. Given that The Language of Clay is about learning through the creation of something made of clay, I would like to combine one of the activities above, focusing on the content of a friendly competition, and mix it with the chance of building something with our hands.
After this, the task I assigned to myself is to read secondary sources about how to teach language interactively and how to use material, (any kind) in order to engage with the language.
Above there is an example of a video I found while researching about TEFL activities. In this, the teacher altered the game known as "hot seats" to make it more interesting for his students by including funny, long phrases te team players had to describe and make another player guess. Academically speaking, the game was useful to teach prepositions.
Below are a list of source which I will analyse in the upcoming days.
* http://iteslj.org/games/
* http://www.pnas.org/content/98/23/12874.full
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