Interaction in Class

If I think about a specific learning context where I would like to teach in the future, I choose teaching in Bachillerato. In these lessons, I would like to promote interaction among my students since I think that it would take them to avoid any fear they would have related to fact of communicating in English. 

I would like to use a daily vocabulary which would lead them to be able to have a real communication with other speakers of this language.

Some of the teaching strategies which I know to promote interaction in class are:

- Role-plays.

- Debates about different topics.

- Presentations.

- Etc.

Now, I am going to list some of the advantages and disadvantages of interaction in class. On the one hand, I think some of these advantages would be that students would get a fluency on the different skills of the language and they would remove the fear of making mistakes as well. On the other hand, talking about the disadvantages I think it would be a mess if all the students interact among them at the same time in class and, in addition, it is a new technique so it would be a little bit hard to implement it at the beginning.

See you in the next post!

Word Maps

Here you have my word cloud related to my field of study:

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Corpora

Corpora are a kind of 'dictionary' which shows some texts as examples where the selected word or words have been appeareed. 

Those are the results of the expression 'by the time' in British National Corpus and Linguee:

- British National Corpus:

- Linguee:

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Thesaurus

After the comparison of some dicionaries, I am going to work a little with Thesaurus (based on synonyms and antonyms).

I have been very surprised of seeing this results since I have never used Thesaurus and it is very interesting. When you obtain the results, there is a long list with a lot of words listed: first, the most relevant and, then, the less ones. The choice of the best one must be done according to what you want to say or where you are going to use it (the field).

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Comparison of Dictionaries

In order to do the comparison among some dictionaries (Oxford Dictionary, Webster Dictionary and WordReference), I have chosen the word 'learning':

- Oxford Dictionary:

- Webster Dictionary:

- WordReference:

Those have been the different results which I have obtained. I used to use WordReference but, now, I am disconcerted because I do not know which one I will use in the future. I think that each dictionary has its own advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, I think Oxford Dictionary is the least complet because it only offers the basic definition, the origin and the pronunciation. Although it offers the possibility of going to other section to see some synonyms, On the other hand, I think Webster Dictionary and WordReference have a lot of information from different fields and they are more complete than Oxford Dictionary.

Looking this word up in Learner's Dictionary this is what I have found (a concrete definition with a n easy and comprehensible vocabulary):

I think I would be good to take into account all these dictionaries when teaching English and to give each of them the properly use in each case according to the necessities.

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Students' Needs (1st Bac.)

Acoording to the syllabus established for 1st Bac. in the Valencian Community by the Ministry of Education, Investigation, Culture and Sports, the official requirements for the learning of English, as a subject, are the following ones:

- Comprehension of oral texts.

- Production of oral texts: expression and interaction.

- Comprehension of written texts.

- Production of written texts: expression and interaction.

- Cross curricular elements: sound, accent and intonation patterns, its relation to the communicative intentions and morphosyntactic and discursive structures.

On the other hand, the linguistic exchanges that students must use in the English class are all of them referred to the requirements mentioned above: basic narrations, little presentations, short questions and answers, some descriptions and definitions, etc. 

Students of this level must achieve at least an English level between A1-A2, although it is not always carried on, in order to be able to have a basic communication with other speakers of this language. It has to be mentioned that the main objective, in the future, is that students can achieve the B1 level of English but it is a hard work.

See you in the next post!