During today's class we have been speaking about our experiences learning languages. After our explanations, we have done a list with bad and good things about our process which you can read below.
Good things:
- Class organisation: teacher in the centre and the students in circle around him/her. Collective studying.
- Have a lot of fun.
- Sing, play... in English.
- Have the same teacher for six or seven years.
- Private English School got us to be ahead in school.
- Stay in an English speaking country gets the immersion in language.
- Tell stories in English with puppets.
- Funny teacher.
- Having no other option than to speak the language.
- Use the body language.
- Listening exercises with songs you know.
- Real life examples and exercise.
- Activities linked to your interests.
Bad things:
- Class organisation: students in lines. Individually studying.
- Old methodology. Teachers hits students with a rule or ring.
- Learning only with books.
- The level they asked too high.
- Boring classes.
- English learning trips with a Basque Group.
- No external motivation to learn English.
- Too simple and repetitive classes got bored.
- French Revolution in English at 12. Too complicated, we didn´t understand.
- Grammar only.
- Students that go to private languages schools made me bad and left behind.
- Expensive if you want to improve English.
- Learning alone.
- The classes are only a preparation to the exams. After passing the exam, you forget everything you had learnt.
We have also talked about these issues:
1. How we should address diversity of levels in the classroom
2. Grouping in classrooms: should we group by levels or just by age ...?
3. Should it be mandatory to speak English? If not, how can we make pupils talk in English?
4. Evaluation: should we evaluate the net knowledge, or the effort employed?
5. At what age should we start learning English?
5. At what age should we start learning English?
We sum up the answers we have at the moment to those questions:
The first and the second issues are related to each other. The second one answers the first one; in our opinion, the diversity issue would be resolved using the Interactive Groups, where people of different ages, level ... learn from each other.
Our answer for the third question is the next one: the teacher should create a dynamism of English atmosphere, starting with her/him who speaks only in English. In that way, children should know that they have to try to say things in English but they can speak in another language if they need to.
About the fourth question, we think that teachers should evaluate the effort employed by children or students to improve English. In that way, exams wouldn't be the most important thing of the subject and they would learn more.
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