rejane teaching project4
DESCRIPTION
Projeto de Ensino da lingua inglesa utilizando recursos de redes sociais e internetTRANSCRIPT
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO PARÁESPECIALIZAÇÃO EM LINGUÍSTICA APLICADA AO ENSINO DE INGLÊS
TEACHING PROJECT
PROJECT “TEACHING ENGLISH IN COUNTRYSIDE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: DEVELOPING READING SKILLS USING DIFFERENT RESOURCES AND
THEMES”
REJANE SANTOS NONATO
BELÉM, PARÁ2008
TEACHING PROJECT
1. IDENTIFICATION:
TITLE: Teaching English in countryside public schools: developing reading skills using
different resources and themes.
AUTHOR: Rejane Santos Nonato.
TARGET AUDIENCE: Students from countryside public schools.
SCHEDULE:
CLASS TITLE ACTIVITY TIME
LE
SS
ON
1
1 Theme Introduction Heart Card Activity 45 min
Song activity 45 min
2 Word Spectrum Hot potatoes Activity 45 min
Reading Song activity 45 min
3 Grammar Simple Present-Affirmative Form 45 min
It’s up to you Discussion about love definition 45 min
LE
SS
ON
2
4 Theme Introduction Discussion about dating 10 min
Word Spectrum Hot Potatoes Activity 45 min
Reading “A fact of life” text 35 min
5 Grammar Simple Present-Negative Form 45 min
It’s up to you Pamphlet exercise 45 min
LE
SS
ON
3
6 Theme Introduction Valentine Card Activity 45 min
Word Spectrum Hot Potatoes Activity 45 min
7 Reading Song Activity 45 min
Grammar Simple Present-Interrogative Form 45 min
8 It’s up to you Video Clip production 90 min
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CONTEXT:
This project will be applied for second level classes at Manoel Antônio de Castro public High
School in Igarapé-Miri city. Each class has about 45 students between 15 to 18 years old. These
students, as we can see, are teenagers, and, as others their age, are interested in celebrities’ lives,
love, dating, games such as video games, volleyball, soccer, etc. and connected to the world by
their cell phones, MP3s, 4s, 5s and the internet. It is a little group among them that still lives far
from these technologies.
These classes are basically about reading strategies, grammar rules and vocabulary
acquisition, what allow us to say that the English subject in this school is planned to be an ESP
course and the English teacher is meant to use the mother tongue most of the time.
The school has a reading room, a video room, a computer laboratory, and a science
laboratory. But, although it offers all these spaces, it is not enough to have a good course, mainly
because most of these spaces are not prepared to receive English students. Example: the reading
room has only four English books and they are all about grammar (there is no dictionary); the
video room has a television and a DVD player, but it does not have videos (the teacher has to
bring the videos from home). When we talk about the computer and the science lab the problems
increase. They have never been used. The computers are not connected to the Internet and all of
them are in Linux system, what does not allow the students to use them even to type texts once
they do not know how to use them. The science lab has never been opened due to the lack of
instructors. In other words, for a long time, these spaces are closed to the English teacher. They
are there, but they are only there, without being used. But we want to change this now. We want
to make these spaces part of our English classes.
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2. JUSTIFICATION:
In my personal opinion, teaching English in a public school is a very difficult situation.
The English teacher is alone: the school does not offer any support for the teacher to give a good
class (most of the schools do not have CD players, computer labs, and even students’ English
books). The other teachers treat English as an insignificant subject. As if it were not enough,
public schools are scrapped and their classes are in their majority crowed due to the reduced time
that the English teacher has in each class (1:30hs a week). Thus, it makes English in Public
schools become an ESP course without any opportunity to develop the students’ listening,
writing or speaking skills. Along with all these problems, if the public school is in the
countryside, the problems increase. It is not new that most of the countryside students are far
away from English. They do not know English and they do not want to learn English, because
English does not make part of their reality. So, more than teaching content, an English teacher in
the countryside has to teach his/her students that knowing English is important to their lives,
even if they cannot see its importance now.
This way, understanding the necessities and the peculiarities of the countryside students
and believing that it is possible to make English classes in the countryside something beyond
vocabulary and grammar memorizations, is what I propose in this project, that aims to develop
countryside students’ reading skill using different resources and themes, and, in the same time,
motivating the countryside students to study English.
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3. GOAL AND OBJECTIVES:
2.1. Goal:
To develop countryside students’ reading skills.
2.2. Objectives:
To motivate countryside students to study English.
To integrate countryside students to the globalized world.
To promote the social-cultural development of the students.
4. CONTENT:
Reading Strategies:
o Genre Recognition
o Cognates
o Background Knowledge
o Skimming
o Scanning
o Non-verbal Information
o Layout identification
Grammar:
o Simple Present Tense
Affirmative Form
Negative Form
Interrogative Form
Vocabulary:
o Greetings
o Numbers
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o Holidays
o Seasons
o Days of the week
o Months of the year
o Family members
o Verbs related to emotions and everyday activities
o Adjectives related to appearance and emotions
5. THEORETICAL GROUNDING:
4.1. Curricular Orientation of Foreign Language (FL)
For a long time, FLs were considered subjects of little relevance to the basic school
curriculum. Fortunately, this has changed now, once the LDB (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da
Educação Nacional) made the FL subject element of essential importance to and in the individual
formation. Besides, the PCNEM (Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais do Ensino Médio) point
that:
The FL assumes the condition of being part not soluble of the essential knowledge conjunct that allows the students to be near many cultures and, consequently, make favorable his/her integration in the globalized world1.
(PCNEM, 2000, p.28)
As you can see, the PCNEM as well as the LDB, point the importance of the FL, once
they are forms of access to the different ways of thinking, creating, feeling, acting, and
understanding the reality, making favorable, thus, a more wide-ranging formation and, in the
same time, more solid to the students.
The PCNEM also argue that the FL teaching must promote the development of four basic
competences: the grammatical competence; the sociolinguistic competence; the discourse
1 From the original: As línguas estrangeiras assumem a condição de serem parte indissolúvel do conjunto de conhecimentos essenciais que permitem ao estudante aproximar-se de várias culturas e, consequentemente, propiciar sua integração num mundo globalizado.
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competence; and the strategic competence. For this reason, the PCNEM suggest that the teacher
should work in three fronts: a) the linguistic structure; b) the vocabulary acquisition; and c) the
reading and the text interpretation. On the other hand, it is important to point out that the last
item is the most important and will utilize the two mentioned before in order to be effective.
The primordial competence of the FL in the Secondary School must be the reading and the interpretation. The acquisition of this competence depends on the development of reading techniques as skimming, scanning, prediction, as well as the perception and identification of textual interpretation marks (graphics, tables, dates, numbers, titles, subtitles, beyond of elements of style and genre)2.
(PCNEM+, 2002, p.107)
Presenting the reading and the interpretation as the primordial competence of teaching,
the FL teaching presents to us, as the mother tongue teaching, the text as the basic unit of study.
This way, the work with the linguistic structure and the vocabulary acquisition will only have
meaning as a strategy for the text comprehension.
The language approach through text allows the comprehension beyond the grammar and the metalinguistic study. With this, the student realizes that the linguistic learning is not reduced to a grammatical rule conjunct applied to the written language3.
(PCNEM+, 2002, p.107)
Finally, it is important to point that also to the FL teaching, the PCNEM suggest that the
teacher works with textual diversity:
It is necessary that the student has contact with texts – advertisement, journalistic, narrative, dissertate, poetical, literary, scientific – in which can narrow his/her contact with the formal and informal language, as a way to bring different communicative resources4.
(PCNEM+, 2002, p.107).
In other words, the students’ exposure to texts of different natures will promote many
opportunities of language practice, as well as the social-cultural development of the student, that
2 From the original: A competência primordial do ensino de LE no ensino médio deve ser a da leitura e, por decorrência, a da interpretação. O substrato sobre o qual se apóia a aquisição dessas competências constitui-se no domínio de técnicas de leitura – tais como skimming, scanning, prediction – bem como na percepção e na identificação de índices de interpretação textual (gráficos, tabelas, datas, números, itemização, títulos e subtítulos, além de elementos de estilo e gênero). 3 From the original: A abordagem da língua por meio de textos permite a compreensão para além da gramática e do estudo metalingüístico. Com isso, o aluno percebe que o aprendizado lingüístico não se resume a um conjunto de regras gramaticais, aplicáveis apenas à língua escrita. 4 From the original: É necessário que o aluno tenha contato com textos – publicitário, jornalístico, narrativo, dissertativo, poético, literário, científico – nos quais possa estreitar seu contato com a linguagem formal e informal, de modo a confrontar diferentes recursos comunicativos.
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through text diversity will recognize him/herself as a speaking individual of a language
representing a determined culture.
4.2. Communicative Approach for Language learning: a general overview
The origins of Communicative Approach (CA), also called Communicative Language
Teaching or Functional Approach, are to be found in the changes in the British language
teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s.
The Communicative Approach, inspired by Chomsky’s theory of linguistics and in
Piaget’s theories of cognitive psychology, appeared as a strong reaction against the Structuralism
and Behaviorism embodied in the Audiolingualism method.
In the Communicative Approach, the basic unit of language became not the sentence, but
the communicative act. Function rather than form and meaning rather than pattern determine the
designing of materials. Communicative competence rather than grammatical competence is the
goal. Language is tentatively subdivided in areas according to functionality.
The CA in language teaching starts from a theory of language as communication. The
goal of language teaching is to develop what Hymes (1972) referred to as “communicative
competence”. It makes a definition of what a speaker needs to know in order to be
communicatively competence in a speech community.
Hymes’ view of communicative competence was complemented by Halliday’s theory of
the functions of language. In his studies, Halliday (1975) observed that learning a second
language was similarly viewed by proponents of Communicative Approach as acquiring the
linguistic means to perform different kinds of functions.
A more recent analysis of communicative competence is found in Canale and Swain
(1980), in which four dimensions of communicative competence are indentified: grammatical
competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence.
Elements of an underlying learning theory can be described as the communication
principle (activities that involve real communication promote learning); or as the task principle
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(activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful to the learner supports the
learning process).
As we said before, the goals in CA are to make students communicatively competent,
what include being able to choose the most appropriate form for a specific function, and to
develop procedures for teaching of the four skills and communication. This way, the CA is
characterized by the following aspects:
a) Syllabus: The main syllabus proposed for CA was described as notional syllabus and
the categories of communicative function that learners need to express;
b) Teacher: The teacher in the CA is the facilitator of his/her students’ learning. He/she is
a manager of classroom activities, as well as advisor and monitors students
performance;
c) Students: In the CA, the students are communicators. They are negotiators between
themselves, the learning process, and the object of learning. Students are responsible
managers of their own learning;
d) Materials: Authentic materials, which are used by native speakers in real life are used
as class materials. Communicative activities are used to promote students’
communication in class. Task-based activities are also used to promote students’
involvement in class;
e) Errors: In the CA, errors of form can be tolerated since they are natural outcomes of the
development of communication skills.
6. METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES:
STEP I: Lesson 1 – P.S. I LOVE YOU – Theme Introduction
o The teacher gives some artesian hearts to the students;
o The students must write in the heart the name of a special person to their lives;
o Them, the students will have to say to the class why that person is so special;
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o In each class, the students will have to add another name in the heart, and so the teacher
asks to one or two students to explain the importance that new person has to his/her life;
o In the end of two months, the teacher will take back the heart cards and make a mural
with them;
o After that, the teacher will give to the students the letter of the song “You make me feel
brand new” and say to them that this song is about love. From this, the students will have
to highlight in the song lyrics words and expressions related to love;
o The teacher will check the words and highlight expressions for the students;
o The students will sing the song.
STEP II: Lesson 1 – P.S. I LOVE YOU – Word spectrum
o In the lab, the students will do some vocabulary exercises as hot potatoes activities.
STEP III: Lesson 1 – P.S. I LOVE YOU – Reading
o The students will see some pictures on the OHP;
o The teacher will give a song to the students and they will have to relate the picture to
parts of the song;
o The students may sing the song, if they feel like it;
o The students will answer some comprehension questions about the song.
STEP IV: Lesson 1 – P.S. I LOVE YOU – Grammar
o The students will learn the Simple Present Tense (Affirmative Form);
o The students will perform some grammar activities based on this grammar topic.
STEP V: Lesson 1 – P.S. I LOVE YOU – It’s up to you
o The students will read Camões poem “Amor”
o The students will read other small poems in English that define love;
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o The teacher will show to the students the way that Longman, Oxford, Collins Cobuild,
and others dictionaries define love;
o The students will discus about what love is, point their opinion about the theme;
STEP VI: Lesson 2 – TALKING ABOUT SEX – Theme introduction
o The students will associate some pictures (greetings) with their names in English;
o The students will discus about how the dating begins.
STEP VII: Lesson 2 – TALKING ABOUT SEX – Word spectrum
o Hot potatoes exercise to introduce the vocabulary in the text in the computer lab.
STEP VIII: Lesson 2 – TALKING ABOUT SEX – Reading
o The students will read a text that is about teen pregnancy using the reading strategies
learned before (genre recognition, cognates, background knowledge, skimming,
scanning, non-verbal information, layout identification), and do some reading
comprehension exercise on the text.
STEP IX: Lesson 2 – TALKING ABOUT SEX – Grammar
o The students will learn the Simple Present Tense (Negative Form);
o The students will perform some grammar activities based on this grammar topic.
STEP X: Lesson 2 – TALKING ABOUT SEX – It’s up to you
o The students will complete a pamphlet about the risks of a precocious pregnancy,
classifying the items given as health risks to a teenage mother, health risks to the baby, or
consequences of teenage pregnancy;
o The students will create a campaign to prevent teen pregnancy:
The teacher will divide the class in groups of five;
Each group has to interview a man and a woman that have become father/mother
when they were teenagers;
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The students must have to ask about what the more common problems that a teenage
faces when they become father/mother. What are their regrets?
Pointing the problems and the regrets, the students, with the teacher help, will make a
pamphlet in English to alert teenagers about the problems that a precocious
pregnancy offers to them;
The students will spread the pamphlet in the school.
STEP XI: Lesson 3 – BE MY VALENTINE! - Theme introduction
o The teacher will bring to the class some valentine cards and show them to the students;
o The students will listen to sing Fábio Jr song;
o The students will show all their romanticism making their own valentine cards in English.
STEP XII: Lesson 3 – BE MY VALENTINE! – Word Spectrum
o Hot potatoes exercise to introduce the vocabulary in the text in the computer lab.
STEP XIII: Lesson 3 – BE MY VALENTINE! - Reading
o The teacher will give a song lyrics to the students
o In groups of five, the students will have to draw pictures related to parts of the song
o The students will present their pictures to the class;
o The teacher will show the pictures that are in the book;
o The students may sing the song;
o The students will answer some comprehension questions about the song.
STEP XIV: Lesson 3 – BE MY VALENTINE! – Grammar
o The students will learn the Simple Present Tense (Interrogative Form);
o The students will do some grammar activity based on this grammar topic.
STEP XV: Lesson 3 – BE MY VALENTINE! – It’s up to you
o In groups of five, the students will choose a romantic song and interpret it;
o Based in their interpretation, the students will make a video clip of this song;
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o Each group will present its video to the others.
7. TEACHING RESOURCES:
o Computers
o CD Player
o CD
o “Context” book
o DVD Player
o DVD
o Recorder (cell phone)
o Hot Potatoes Program
o OHP
o Transparency
o TV
o Video camera (cell phone camera)
o Xerox from the “Context” book
8. ASSESSMENT:
In the end of two months, the students will present to the teacher and to the other students
all that they have made during this period. So, they will have to present the Heart Card, the
pamphlet about teen pregnancy, the Valentine Card, and the video clip. During the two months,
the students will have achieved three vocabulary activities (hot potatoes exercises) and other
three reading comprehension activities, the teacher will also take into account their participation
in these activities as a way of assessment. This way, the students will be assessed from tasks
realization. Each task, corresponds to a number of points, as shown below:
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a) Heart Card (15 pts);
b) Pamphlet about teen pregnancy (20 pts);
c) Valentine Card (15 pts);
d) Video Clip (20 pts);
e) Vocabulary Activities (15 pts);
f)Reading Activities (15 pts).
Of course, the evaluation will also occur in a continuous way through the observation of
the students’ participation and attendance in class. It also will analyze the students’ individual
production, noticing their development, the problems that some students can face during the
course, and the strategies they will use to solve these problems. According to the students’
performance in class, the teacher will make a development graphic for each student. This graphic
will start from 5 and go to 10, indicating that the student development was excellent.
9. REFERENCES:
BRASIL, Ministério da Educação. Secretaria de Educação Média e Tecnológica. Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais do Ensino Médio. Brasília: MEC, 2000.
BRASIL, Ministério da Educação. Secretaria de Educação Média e Tecnológica. PCN+ do Ensino Médio: orientações educacionais complementares aos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais. Brasília: MEC, 2002.
CANALE, M. From comunicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. In : RICHARDS, J.; SCHMIDT, R. Language and communication. London: Longman, 1983. CANALE, M.; SWAIN, M. Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. In: Applied Linguistics, v. 1, nº 1, 1980 apud RICHARDS, J. C. & RODGERS, T. S. Approaches and methods in language teaching: a description and analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
CARDOSO, R. C. T. The communicative approach to foreign language teaching: a short introduction. Campinas, SP: Pontes. 2004.
HALLIDAY, M. A. K. Learning how to mean: exploration in the development of language. London: Edward Arnold, 1975 apud RICHARDS, J. C. & RODGERS, T. S. Approaches and methods in language teaching: a description and analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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HYMES, D. On communicative competence. In: PRIDE, J. B.; HOLMES, J. Sociolinguistics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 apud RICHARDS, J. C. & RODGERS, T. S. Approaches and methods in language teaching: a description and analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
RICHARDS, J. C. & RODGERS, T. S. Approaches and methods in language teaching: a description and analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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