It is well known that in the education field the backward design should be coherent with the goals proposed by the government, the questions is what are they? According to my own educational perspective we have not been able to get an agreement in order to discover what society really needs. That is why we work separately pursuing different goals what distorts the results obtained in the system. From my point of view the purpose of learning other languages should be known first by teachers and then by the students. If we regard that learning other language is a vital tool to have access to different pieces of information, we must focus our teaching on its use and application and forget for a while our current way of teaching which just points to explore the theoretical aspects of it. Therefore I think that the process should pursuit the development of practical skills among the students, in order that they can use them as a true means of gaining in communicative competences which are necessary to insert in this global world.
The problem is how we can become a bilingual nation if we are not able to set up our goals clearly?. May be, the answer is in the design area which has two main problems according to the chapter: the aimless coverage of contents and isolated activities which
In my opinion are the responsible that lessons pursuit neither a deep understanding nor the transferability of big ideas, together with the misperception that teachers show to
promote probably unconsciously the learning of the contents by heart what is seen as the right method to get understanding by the students without regarding the most relevant part of the process which is to take this information to the reality through its application in daily and common situations. The only way to revert this phenomenon is through the improvements of our current teaching practices, which should have a free access in order to obtain progressively better results in education along with the state of long-term goals which allow students to fulfill with the requirements to learn a foreign language.
As a conclusion I would say that is impossible to impart a ‘quality education’ without regarding the fact of promoting the inquiry, analysis and transfer capacities on the students, because they arise as essential to bring contents to life and extract a real understanding from them.
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aimless coverage of contents and isolated activities are the real concern in here, why do we give our students isolated activities, why are we acting in such a way in classes, it is supposed we are proffesionals (not only we teachers of English but all teachers), thanks good we realize this problem and I really hope we do something different, to show that we are really capable of being the best teachers, now we have the tools, lets use them.
ReplyDeleteJo,
ReplyDelete"According to my own educational perspective we have not been able to get an agreement in order to discover what society really needs.
That is why we work separately pursuing different goals what distorts the results obtained in the system"
I think that we really know where we are going to and what is intended to be pursued and also what society needs. I guess it's a mixture of things as you mention, it's to develop language, it's to give people oportunities and so on. Perhaps we just don't wanna think about it. What society needs it's people who can work effieciently. This has two sides, one seen as just people to be exploited without caring much about whether they think or not, and people to help the country to be developed constructively. I'd like to think that we're trying to boost our country and our students towards the later point, and that we're creating critical thinkers who may be able to carry out changes. Let's cross fingers.
Claudio
First of all,why did we learn a foreign language?? When I say 'we' I refer to english teachers in general.Starting with having the answer to that question quite clear we can construct a kind of path for our students to follow.What was so interesting,useful,funny,challenging and rewarding of learning english, wherever we lerant it, that we pursued a career on that????
ReplyDeleteand spend most of our time reading,writing, listening and even thinking in english??????
MAYBE we can share some of this with our students, who knows???