sábado, 1 de diciembre de 2007

sábado, 17 de noviembre de 2007

Motivate to Educate

This is a wonderful stuff with the main ideas that connect the learning of an L2 and motivational aspects. Enjoy it!

jueves, 15 de noviembre de 2007

Piaget and Eagan

Till the moment, we have talked a lot about Vygotsky and Bruner, but it is important to pay special attention to the theories and findings of other remarkable authors when choosing an adequate course book to work with children attending their EPB cycle. One of those specialists is Piaget. He proposed a theory to show the different stages of cognitive development any human being go through in his life. They come to be known as: sensory-motor intelligence, pre-operational knowledge, concrete knowledge and abstract knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
The Canadian educator Kieran Eagan also describes human development but in terms of the characteristics that determine how the learner gains access to the world. He thinks of educational development as a process of accumulating and exercising layers of capacity for engaging with the world. As individual develop, they add new layers of sophistication. There are four layers: *the Mythic layer (4/5 to 9/10):Emotional categories have primary importance. Children want to know how to feel about whatever they are learning,simple binary opposite, for instance, the understanding of hot and cold precedes the concept of warm, the story form is the most powerful vehicle for instruction.* the Romantic layer (8/9 to 14/15):The key is in the search for the transcendent within reality. There is an outside world distinct and separate from the world within, The separate world is perceived as potentially threatening and alien. Children confront the task of developing a sense of their distinct identity.They seek out the limits of the real world. Material which deals with courage, nobility, genius, energy or creativity is potentially suitable for them.* the Philosophic layer (14/15 to 19/20): Students begin to understand the world as a unit, of which they are part. Focus in this layer is on the general laws by which the world works. * and the Ironic Layer (19/20 through adulthood): A major task is to control the capacities of all previous layers. If one scheme does not serve adequately, it is discarded and another is used instead

Food for Thought

“Great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities, but to make them.” Colton

More about Theme-based Teaching

What is important in this topic/theme-based learning situation and what deserves our attention is the scaffolding provided by the teacher. Let us remember that the one who coined that term was Bruner when talking about his famous LASS. That scaffolding can be either linguistic or cognitive and affective. The former is going to be characterized by a teacher who is going to start using the language the child does not know, but the he or she needs in order to solve some task or problem. So, little by little the child is going to “borrow” the patterns needed. If you pay attention to the micro-teaching lesson, the teacher, from the very beginning of the lesson, uses constrained and familiar activities, which provides systematicity for the child, that is, order. This is what Bruner refers to as “formats”, patterns extremely essential when teaching young learners. As it was suggested some meetings ago, this LASS or scaffolding makes the educator act as a fine-tuner of the language, helping the child till the moment he or she can participate without the help of the adult, thus moving into his/her ZPD.The cognitive and affective scaffolding is found in games and tasks which requires imagination –imagination is seen as games without action- Both are paramount during childhood. Why? From the age of three onwards, different situations appear in the child’s life that make him or her unable to satisfy his or her needs just by touching objects. This is the moment where imagination appears and he or she plays. She plays to be a mother, a teacher, etc., and these games have got rules, laws which are fundamental for the development of moral codes in him or her.

Theme-based Teaching

Theme-based teaching is an approach that provides the opportunity of dealing with different activities linked together by content. The theme connects everything you are going to work with. Surely, it is very demanding on teachers because when planning a good theme-based lesson plan, they must know about the cognitive development of children, the language they know and the way that language develops and the form motor skill development occurs at the ages the teacher in contact with.Theme-based teaching is also known as topic-based teaching or content-based teaching. The most profitable aspect in this approach is that it can be related to all the areas in the school curriculum. In consequence, as students are going to be using real language to talk about topic probably they already know something about; the approach is going to turn out to be absolutely communicative and meaningful.The language learning of children is likely to revolve around chunks of discourse learnt from talk, stories and songs, vocabulary development, and some aspects of grammatical knowledge, together with elementary literacy skills. Early foreign language learning can be much more “organic” developing from partial to more complete knowledge by building links and connections in the networks of children’s language resources.The planning is on-line, that is, it should be really flexible and open. Two basic planning tools for theme-based teaching are brainstorming and webs. In the first case, it is highly recommendable to take into consideration the following clues: find a theme and find the contents (people, objects, actions, processes, typical events and places) An alternative planning procedure is to build up web linking activities to areas of the school curriculum: Maths, Technology, etc., thus extending a mere lesson plan to a possible project work. Themes can include different aspects of the same topic requiring different types of discourse -graphs, charts, reports and commentaries-.

Food for Thought

“If the child is not learning the way you are teaching, then you must teach in the way the child learns.” Rita Dunn

Vygotsky and Bruner

When talking about the learning of a foreign language and the cognitive theories supporting it, it is necessary to pay close attention to the two major figures in the field: Vygotsky and Bruner.
Vygotsky, in accordance with Piaget, considers that from the time of their birth, children learn independently by exploring their environment. Curiously and in agreement with Behaviourism, he believes that adults are responsible for shaping children’s learning by the judicious use of rewards or comments, as well as routines. But most importantly and going to the heart of the matter, Vygotsky thinks that children are born into a social world and that because of that, learning occurs through interaction with other people: we make our own sense of the world. Here comes the importance of language in this process of learning. Through language and through the interaction resulting from its use culture is transmitted, thinking develops and learning occurs. And for effective learning to truly happen, that interaction must occur between people with different levels of, in our case, communicative competence. In other words, the one who is in a higher level, together with a mediator (the teacher for instance, because he/she is a sort of “significant other”, someone who selects and shapes learning experiences) is going to help the other one to move to the following layer of knowledge, that is to advance in his/ her Zone of Proximal Development or layer of knowledge which is a bit beyond what he/ she can solve alone.
It is clearly seen that for this social-interactionism trend, the emphasis lies on the interaction, the relation between the teacher (norm), the learner (with his/her level of interlanguage development) and the task (challenge), creating the appropriate context for education, defining it as the combination of instruction, learning to learn, developing strategies and skills and the presence of meaningful experiences; all this to educate the whole person.On his behalf, Bruner recognizes that there exits a capacity, biological in origin –LAD- in every human being that predisposes him to use language for communication, but at the same time, that human competence is a hundred per cent cultural in the means by which it finds expression, that is, we need to interact with others, to exercise our innate capacity for communicating ideas. So language, which is made up of phonology, syntax, semantic and illocutionary acts, comes to be a means for interpreting and regulating culture. This starts the moment the infant enters the human scene, in accordance with Vygotsky. Bruner thinks that any pre-linguistic infant is predisposed to acquire culture through language. How? Through good-directed activities which imply actions, activities which are familiar to him, activities which demand a format. In these activities, the role the adults play is paramount for Bruner. The adult is going to become a model and a partner fine-tuning language, that is to say, creating a LASS or Language Acquisition Support System, which contains the LAD (Chomsky). Through this LASS, the adult is going to “scaffold” the child till the moment he or she can solve the problem aloneGames are of great importance in these two theories due to the fact that: they have got a format to follow, to comprehend, children follow a routine, they require the exchange of language, they are end-oriented, moral develops through them, there are turn-takings, among other things. http://www.slideshare.net/maeugenia8/our-curriculum-design

Food for Thought

“To become critical educators is to empower the powerless and transform those conditions which perpetuate human impertinence and inequity”.
(Mc Laren. 1988)

What is Language?

Defining language is a difficult task. The first idea we come across is that language is a faculty, characteristic of any human being because of the mere reason of being one: we are people, we can speak a language. Secondly and taking into consideration recent theories, language has come to be considered as a means of cognition, a quite vygostkyan approach to it, due to the fact that through language we learn to think.Both, as a human faculty and as a means of cognition, it is impossible to deny that language is a system. Any single language spoken in the world is a system made up of a set of conventions, conventions which are totally arbitrary passed on and transformed generation through generation. These systems are dual ones because they are composed of finite elements, for example, letters, sounds, that in isolation have got no meaning by themselves but when combined, gist is asserted, and in fact, there are infinite ways of combination.Till now, we have been talking about what language is, but the idea of its function has remained quite blurred. Language fulfils functions. We can just convey information –this is what is called the “transactional function of language”- but we can use it, too, to exchange social meanings –this is the “interactional function of language”.So, in a few words, we can make a division. On the one hand, language is a social construct. People create pieces of discourses, which are going to be coherent and cohesive (discourse competence); that piece of discourse (locutionary act) is going to be uttered in the proper way and place –pragmatics- (sociolinguistic competence) to have an effect on somebody else (illocutionary act) with the ultimate aim of getting an answer, a response (perlocultionary act) (Austin, 1962). If what we are communicating is not understood, we can negotiate meanings with our interlocutors to compensate for breakdowns in communication (strategic competence)On the other hand, language is a cognitive construct. We have got, probably subconsciously though it can turn out to be conscious if required, a set of rules in mind. The left hemisphere of our brain is rule-based, and it emerges when the activity requires accurate constructs. The right one is said to be memory-based and it is in charge of fostering fluency. Correct forms, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc account for what is known as grammatical competence. Both, the social and the cognitive concepts, materialize in what is known as Communicative Competence (Hymes, 1972; Canale & Swain, 1980)
Though all these concepts sound extremely coherent to our times, this has not been the case through the years. Along time, language has been seen through different ways, through different perspectives, namely: Classical-Humanism, Reconstructionism and Progressivism.
1) transmission of knowledge, structuralism (you are given a set of rules and you apply it to varied circumstances. No preparation for life or work (Classical-Humanism, teacher as one who transmits knowledge
2) everybody can learn everything, different backgrounds are accepted, the curriculum is end-oriented, that is, by the time students finish, they behave in a certain way: “to speak about plans in the future” (reconstructionism, teacher as facilitator)
3) you learn by yourself (learning by doing), problem to solve are the axis (progressivism, teacher as mediator, educator, paying attention to what ss need, in consequence, he or she becomes a reflective teacher)

http://www.spresent.com/view/?p=/inglesepb15@yahoo.com.ar/language

lunes, 12 de noviembre de 2007

Food for Thought



You can choose to stay as you are.

Or you can choose to move on.


Or you can choose to do a bit of both.

What is important is to have the choice.

It’s…in your hands.


Revell, J. & S. Norman