Marcela's E-Portfolio

I would like to start writing my reflection by highlighting that I consider very appropriate to start with the course writing an essay about what methodology is, since this helped me to realize what course would be about. At the beginning I had some ideas of what methodology could be, then thanks to the essay, now I have a clear conception of what it is. Besides, while writing the essay, it wasn’t everything about authors, since we had to include in the essay the definition that each one of us wrote in class.

Moreover, I think that it was essential to have a clear and accurate concept of what methodology means and what it involves before continuing with the course. But the essay wasn’t all about methodology; the essay also explored the importance of planning a lesson. Now that I reflect about this essay, I think that it included the main aspects of the course. What’s more, through the essay I could comprehend the importance of planning lessons and how it helps to the teaching-learning process. Considering that as teachers to be, all what methodology involves and lesson plan will be always with us, as part of our jobs, that’s why it is so vital to manage these concepts, not only in theory, but also in practice.

Thanks to the creation of this folder, we could put into practice all our knowledge about planning a lesson. After plenty of readings and exposures to real lesson plans, we were able to plan our own lessons. Besides, thanks to the essay written some weeks ago, we knew why it is important to plan. Moreover, through the creation of this folder, the use and purpose of scoring instruments was emphasized.

On the one hand, planning two lessons including their scoring instruments was a hard task to do, since it was the first time we were planning. On the other hand, planning these two lessons was extremely useful for everyone, because we were about to start the tutorials, so it was just what we needed. Finally, I would like to point out that getting feedback from the whole work on the folder was also really valuable, since in that way we had the chance to see our mistakes and improve them.

Language learner profile: LLP. Another long and exhausting work, even when we had done a LLP last semester. Nevertheless, the creation of a new LLP including a theoretical framework and strategies was a necessary work to do on our teach-training process. Now that I analyze the LLP, I think that one of the parts of it that took us a really long time to finish was the theoretical framework, since it was necessary to support everything with authors.

In contrast to the LLP that I had created the previous semester, in this one after interviewing someone, we had to create a class to improve those errors or problems the participant could have. Moreover, we weren’t supposed to plan any class: we had to plan with the CALLA model, this meant, with strategies. I must confess that it was difficult to plan a lesson in terms of activities to developed, because it was a one to one lesson, so at the moment of planning, we had to bear in mind that the interaction would be only teacher-student.

Thinking now how this work helped me academically, I believe that planning a lesson based on strategies helped me to notice how useful strategies are, and how necessary is to teach them to the students. We as teachers teach content, but students need the tools, the strategies in this case, to study on their own. Even if maybe strategies are innate in students, we need to raise awareness on how to make a good use of them, especially when it is about learning a foreign language.

In this work we had to interview a teacher to elicit her view on coursebooks. Also, we had to do a deep analysis to a coursebook. The teacher we chose for the interview provided us with good and extensive answers, so it wasn’t difficult for us to analyze then the answers according to the criteria. Maybe a more demanding task to do was to relate each criterion to an author. Nevertheless, since this was the last work of the semester, and considering how many articles we had read, now that I think about it, it wasn’t that hard to find a suitable author or article for the criteria.

Working in this assignment and analyzing coursebooks made me notice how influential coursebooks are. What’s more, even when coursebooks are a guide for teachers and students, as teachers, there are many aspects to consider, like the cultural bias, guidance, flexibility, and contextualization. Also, it is important to think about the approach developed through the coursebook, since some of them are very grammatical, and at the end, students just do not use their coursebooks.

Another aspect that I would like to highlight is that thanks to the feedback provided by the teachers, all the tasks were easier to accomplish. We received feedback and orientation on how to do not only this work, but all of them, and that was something that helped us a lot: to have the chance to recognize our mistakes, and at the same time, to fix them. I really appreciate all the feedback I received during the course and I hope in the future to not forget how useful feedback is for students, in order to improve their work, since feedback is essential for student in the process of teaching-learning.

This course introduces the teacher to be into the process of acquisition and learning of second languages. It presents an overview of the diverse approaches and methods to teach English as a second language. This course creates learning opportunities for the students to analyze the acquisition characteristics of each ability and system of the language and to design integrated learning units .It examines diverse learner centred strategies and foster the appropriate strategies to face the curriculum changes in the process of teaching and learning English according to the Mineduc requirements. This course must be taught in English.

(Taken from the course program )