Session 4
February 10

next

previous

Monday morning, and I’m going late for class!
I went running to the classroom, and, when I got into, I was pleased to find out that the class was just started. Fifteen minutes had passed already, and the teacher began the day with the teaching tip n° 6: “learn your students´ names”. Everyone was laughing… I guessed something had happened related to the tip Harold just dictated.

Then the teacher showed us today’s agenda. It was not only about understanding the difference between approaches, methods and procedures, but understanding how they are related. All this theory was based on the argument of Richards and Rodgers (2001: 33); also, we discussed different types of learning and teaching activities, and we concluded that: a) the purpose of any practice or activity (in the classroom) is to fulfill different goals (communicative and academic) and, b) this purpose is more easily achieved during pair work.

At the end of the class, the teacher talked about how motivation is socially constructed, taking into account the affective filter as one of the most important elements to have in mind when teaching a language, or any other subject. As homework, we were assigned Tomlinson´s (1986) reading, about using poetry (literature) to teach languages.