ray's blog

Wow!! What an amazing month we just have been through. Now that I read again my essay I did before start TKT course I realized how many of the goals and expectations I had I’ve gotten. For me it is incredibly awesome what I could get in the future by teaching a foreign language as it is English.

Now that I’m done with this course my goals are to keep up and get better in English. I want to be better in English not just to teach it also to learn more vocabulary and get a great level of English. I think that the more vocabulary, practice and use of language I get the better I can teach it.

The first thing I’m going to do is to do the TKT exam so I can get my certification of teaching knowledge (so I can get a job as a teacher) and then I’ll practice and study to get the CAE certification. After this certification I’ll look for the certification of Italian and French.

The time about back talking I remember the most was in high school, it happened in my classroom between the teacher and my closest classmate (who I always used to chat with). That time we were talking during the class (as usual) when all of a sudden the teacher stared at us and got upset, but, I acted like if were doing nothing so he just saw my classmate.

Hahaha well all this situation turned into a back talking (teacher-classmate) where the teacher was just saying to my classmate: “Javier stop talking. You’ve been talking during the whole lesson!” And my classmate was just responding something like “I wasn’t doing anything!”

The good thing was that he never let me down and never said that actually I started chatting!!! While the rest of the class was just laughing at the situation!!

I REALLY MISS THOSE DAYS!!!

My last days as an EFL student? Well I really don’t remember exactly how my last days were, however I can’t avoid remember that I didn’t really like my teacher in view of his absolutely boring class management (my personal opinion). The class was everyday at 3 pm (can you just imagine how sleepy and hungry you fell at that time of the day) and WE really need some physical activities in order to don’t fall asleep….well it hardly ever happened. Awful isn’t it?

I gotta say that I had no idea how to plan a lesson to teach English…in fact I’m still working on it but now that I’ve just read those articles about Bloom’s taxonomy everything’s become clear and I can start practicing and planning lessons for English learners.

I mean who won’t be able of doing something like this following step by step starting with collecting information (Remembering) about the topic you wanna explain, then you got the main ideas by either interpreting, classifying, explaining or paraphrasing (Understanding), once you’ve already understood you just have to apply using that information by implementing, using or executing in another familiar situation (Analysing), however if you have analyzed then you have to evaluate your work in order to justify the decision by checking, critiquing and experimenting (Evaluating) and to finish you gotta generate new ideas or ways of viewing things by designing, constructing, inventing or planning (Creating).

Let’s take a chance to apply this method and we’ll see how planning a lesson turns easier than we thought.

1. Recalling: listing the names of sports the learners know, name the ones they like and practice, describe the ones they practice or like. Identify sports by flashcards.

2. Understanding: classify the sports into individual or group. The ones which are played with balls, the most popular in their country. Explain how they practice them.

3. Applying: listen to a conversation which is about sports and list the ones they hear. Then answer specific questions which have already been given to them.

4. Analysing: compare answers with classmates, organize their ideas in order to write an essay about your favorite sport.

5. Evaluating: students will investigate about olimpic games or world cups (football, basketball, tennis, etc) and discuss in the class what they think about those games and if they think will be better change some of them.

6. Creating: As a homework they will have to organize a mini-olimpic games in the school and come up with an advertisment for that activity.

I hope this image explains everithing:

Well…according to this test (you can see the picture) I’m absolutely kinaesthetic!! I guess you all have noticed that because I’m always moving myself while I’m sitting in class. I prefer to do things more physical and also I love music since I can remember (you can notice that because of my earphones I wear everyday) and I like to be talking to everybody or just saying foolishness. One of the ways to learn I love the most (talking to other people and listen to them) —->

And here you can see that I prefer doing things physically instead of being just sitting and listening.

An easy, useful and very interesting tool for speaking lessons. Using this tool learners would not be affraid of talking because they’ll be using their own computer; I mean if a guy doesn’t really like talking in front of a group he’ll probably prefer this tool so he will feel more comfortable and could say anything about the topic he just saw in class without being affraid of his classmates.

The fact that you can show your pictures or videos (your ideas) while you’re explaining (talking in English) I think is terrific because yes, your classmates will se the video but isn’t the same as if you were talking just in front of them. I really got lot of fun using this tool called screenr.

And here’s the link if you wanna try it: http://www.screenr.com/

Wow!! Definitly working with literacy circles was awesome!! I never thought that would be funny but from that day I just change my mind.

For example I love reading and now I got another technique of comprehension and some subskills of reading. All these to get the idea (s) I wanna catch from a text even if I like it or not (when necessary).

Working with activities like this one will make easier for learnes to learn how to read properly in order to get what they want from a reading (even if they don’t feel like reading). Anyway we as a teachers must have our pupils reading any kind of text so they can speak fluently, write and speak with coherence and get more vocabulary. Because well I think they won’t get all this information from the TV  will they?

Hey TKYers!! I just looked up (as we should’ve) for tyhree graphical organizers in order to make the learners that reading isn’t as hard as they think. We need to look for the easiest ways to help them how to catch the main ideas from  a text.

So here they are: Graphical Organizer 1; this first graphical organizer is for teenage learners, where they can write, first of all, what’s their knowledge so far, what’s what they want to know or discover by theirselves (through reading) and then they’ll see what they learned so they can summarize and come up with their conclusions. With this graphical organizer  learners will have a schedule of their daily reading in order to have their progress checked. They’ll be able to see what days they read, which book and from what page to what page. This last one thing will help students how their progress is rising up.

This last graphical organizer I chose is oriented to beginners in which they can write their progress in a funny way even colorful will make it funnier, writting their current knowledge, what they’re learning and their conclusions. What a good way? Isn’t it?

Here is the information I looked up for about CEFR and ALTE so we can know the differences between them.

matrix