Enseñando inglés

Teaching English to young learners with deeper intercultural experiences

About my project

This document is aimed to describe briefly the content of my final project which is organized basically in four sections, the first one refers to the chosen topic in which I explain the reasons for it, my role as a teacher and my teaching philosophy that I have been working along this specialization. Then I set the theoretical background in which I based my arguments to do this project, considering different authors’ views to support my work. As a third component I included the application stage, in this part I put into practice all that I have learnt in the specialization through five connected lessons that were focused on the development of the four skills in a cultural approach, I took some moments and different tools to assess and test my students progress. Finally I reflect about my own performance and I add a conclusions and suggestions section to improve my own teaching practice.

Considering the importance of communication and its evolution English is being considered as a Universal language to communicate over the world. Mexican Public Education is aware of this need and Mexican government has implemented the National English Program in Basic Education. However, learning a second language is often challenging for older teenagers and adults, but if a child is introduced to a second language, they are more likely to learn that language with ease and understand the language. There are different theories that justify and explain the second language acquisition process, in my project I included references about the three main schools; the behaviorism and structuralism, generative linguistics, and the socio-cultural theory.

Having in mind that English education was before started until students were in middle school and now English is been though since preschool, it is important to realize that starting earlier to learn English is not necessarily the solution to make Mexican students better English speakers. Looking back on previous methodologies and approaches to teach English that Mexican education has taken, we have mainly the grammar translation, the communicative and one of the latest is the experiential learning approach by Kolb. Therefore, in my project I worked with social practices of the language, the experiential learning approach and the audio-lingual method to approach them not only with the use of the language as well with the usage, by using different strategies and activities. But it was not enough, thousands of people who study a language many times are not competent to communicate with another person it is usually because of the lack of the intercultural competence.

The major goal of my teaching is to enable students to use English effectively. But the purpose of those connected lessons in general was to encourage children to learn English considering the intercultural aspect to develop their communicative competence. The lessons followed a simple format as a project work, there was an introduction and discussion, followed by a role-play activity. The focus of the class was the role-playing going through customs. By the end of the lesson students were able to give and obtain personal information while traveling to a different country.

The topic for my lesson plan was traveling around the world. After different activities with my groups I noticed that they did not find a concrete use to what they were doing or learning in the English class. In this project the topic was a rich source of motivation, I considered their learning styles into my activities and materials used in the lessons.

The size of the groups always worries us because it will affect our teaching, I used different interaction patterns and classroom settings to provide different learning opportunities. Something else I considered while planning was the use of technological resources and authentic materials, other ones adapted and the course book.

I mainly used the socio-cultural learning to achieve my goal. This is an approach to learning based on Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory, which is one of the foundations of constructivism and

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