Assessment types and tasks - Unit 18

 This unit helped me to understand and get failiar with the different types of assesment in teaching.

We can define Assessment as a mean that judge learners’ performance by collecting information about it.

Assessment tasks are the methods we use for assessing learners.

We can assess students formally or informally.

Informal assessment

We observe learners to see how well they are doing something and then we give them comments on their performance.

Formal assessment

When we assess learners through tests or exams and give their work a mark or a grade.

Diagnostic Test

At the beginning of a course, we give our students a test to find out what they know and don’t know. This information can help us decide what to teach and which learners need help.

Placement Test

When the school or teacher wants to know at what level the learners are and decide what level of class they should go to.

Formative Assessment

We assess our students when we want to know how well they are doing after teaching part of a course.

Progress Test

When the formative assessment is done through a test, it is called progress test.

Proficiency Test

When students want to see how good they are at a language.

The contents of this kind of test are not based on a course program or syllabus.

We as teachers should know that by assessing we can collect data on student understanding that  is an essential step in moving students toward full understanding of important concepts and standards.  Changes in the skills base and knowledge our students need require new learning goals; these new learning goals change the relationship between assessment and instruction. Teachers need to take an active role in making decisions about the purpose of assessment and the content that is being assessed.

The TKT Course Modules 1, 2 and 3 By Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness and Melanie Williams

Practice activities and tasks for language and skills development - Unit 17

Activities and tasks designed to give learners opportunities to practice and extend their use of language.

While studying this course we learned that there are more than one way to teach through different activities and tasks, such as new vocabulary, functional structures, grammatical structures, subskills.

this unit  focused on three different types of activities:

Controlled activities.- give students repeated practice in accuracy and the form of language, and allow them to make few mistakes

Free activities.- allow students to use whatever language they wish in

order to complete a task.

Freer activities.- teacher can predict to some extent what language the student will need to use e.g. role-plays, information-gap activities, sentence completion, etc.

There are also many activities and tasks that are commonly used to develop reading and listening skills, those can be practiced receptive and not productive skills. Once again the teacher is the one in charge of choosing the appropriate activity according to learners.

Background to language teaching - Presentation techniques and introductory activities - Unit 16

Another important part of teaching was this unit about Presentation techniques and introductory activities. An effective teacher is an excellent communicator and therefore thinks about improving his or her presentation skills. One of the most important aspects of communicating is shaping both content and style to fit your audience. In the classroom, if you cannot communicate in a way that is both comprehensible and interesting to your students, their learning will be greatly reduced.

Two ways of presenting new language to learners are the following: The presentation, Practice and Production and the Task-Based learning. The first one which main aim is to focus on the lesson by making them comprehend the lesson and the second one is to make students complete a task. There are introductory activities that help teacher to  make students understand or get familiar with the new lesson. 

Moreover, warmers, lead-ins can also take the student´s attention  and help to succeed in the lesson.

We as future teachers may choose the best way of presenting information to students either the PPP or the TBL should be focused in the main goal that is the language learning.

Approaches to language teaching - Unit 15

The main purpose of this unit was to show us which are the different approaches that are used in language teaching. To start getting familiar with this we have the definition for approach that is referred  to our view of ho language leaning takes place. The best example of methods and approaches id the communicative one since it is a tool to communicative meaning that best focuses on fluency.

Some approaches have had a great influence of English language teaching practices and materials. Here we have some of them:

- Presentation, Practice and Production (PPP)

In this  approach grammatical structures and functions are the most important aspects of language.

- Lexical Approach

Vocabulary is the most important aspect of language, it consist on individual words and different kinds of chunks.

- Functional Approach

Functions are the most important part of language.

- Communicative approach

Communication is the key point of language.

- Grammar-Translation

Language is made up of grammatical rules.

- Total Physical Response

Grammatical structures and vocabulary are the most important aspects of language.

- Guided Discovery

Language has patterns of meaning and use in which learners learn language best if they work out patterns and rules of language.

- Contest-Based learning

Lexical, functional areas and skills are all important.

Those are the approaches that a teacher can use in the classroom, taking into account the different aspects of learners, some of these are more developed in some areas than others. Also there can be  a mixture of some of them according to the teacher and learners.

References:

The TKT Course Modules 1, 2 and 3 By Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness and Melanie Williams

Learner needs - Unit 14

In this unit we can find interesting information in order to know that learner needs is essential for providing quality education. One approach for accomplishing this is through the use of student evaluations. A common argument against the use of student evaluations is that students do not know their own needs.

 However, many studies have shown student feedback/suggestions to be reliable and valid. If we do not even attempt to understand their needs, we may fail to recognize the support they require to be successful. Adults learn better when they can see a reason or relevance as to why they are following a programme of study. 

By conducting a learning needs analysis with prospective students, the learning provider can identify what programmes are needed. Including learners from the outset will help ensure that course content, schedules, etc., are in line with the needs of the student. By assisting the learner to identify the gaps in his/her own learning, the provider will be better able to support the student.

Moreover it is necessary to know what kind of needs a learner has, those ones can be personal, learning, or professional needs. The personal needs include security, challenge, praise, learning expectations which vary according to the age, gender, cultural background,etc. On the other hand we can find the learning needs which are set to achieve specific ways of learning, specific subskills, learner autonomy, etc. Finally, we have the professional needs which are focused on specific subskills, specific vocabulary and grammar.  

Leaner characteristics - Unit 13

This unit showed us many of the traits that are taken into consideration to talk about learners. Learner characteristics involve things like learning style, motivation, learning strategies, etc. Adults are characterized by maturity, self-confidence, autonomy, solid decision-making, and are generally more practical, multi-tasking, purposeful, self-directed, experienced, and less open-minded and receptive to change. All these traits affect their motivation, as well as their ability to learn. So let’s see the adult learners' cognitive and social characteristics, and what instructional designers need to know in order to create the right course content and structure, and adjust their attitude. Here we have some of the learning styles which are the ones that learners naturally prefer in order to take it, process and remember information and skills.

·         Sensory Learners – if you rely too much on sensing, you can tend to prefer what is familiar, and concentrate on facts you know instead of being innovative and adapting to new situations. Intuitive Learners – if you rely too much on intuition you risk missing important details, which can lead to poor decision-making and problem solving.

·         Visual Learners – if you concentrate more on pictorial or graphical information than on words, you put yourself at a distinct disadvantage because verbal and written information is still the main preferred choice for delivery of information.

·         Verbal Learners – when information is presented in diagrams, sketches, flow charts, and so on, it is designed to be understood quickly.

·         Active Learners – if you act before you think you are apt to make hasty and potentially ill-informed judgments.

·         Reflective Learners – if you think too much you risk doing nothing.

·         Sequential Learners – when you break things down into small components you are often able to dive right into problem solving.

·         Global Learners – if grasping the big picture is easy for you, then you can be at risk of wanting to run before you can walk.

Moreover we can find some learning strategies that are the way that learners choose to learn a language, some of them are the following:

• -          Repeat words in your head to learn new vocabulary
• -          Ask for feedback
• -          Experimenting
• -          Paraphrasing
• -          Thinking about how to memorize

Differences between L1 and L2 learning - Unit 12

This unit helped us to notice the several differences between L1 and L2 language. The aspects taking into account to establish some differences are the following: the learners age, and the context and the ways of learning. When acquiring L1 the learning start when the individual is a baby rather than the L2 learning that start in primary school and secondary school. It is said that babies learn at the same time as their cognitive skills are being developed in the learning language process. 

 Another important aspect has to do with the exposure and Even if some L2 learners may receive as much input as L1 learners, the quality is very different, given that it does not directly address the learner’s communicative goals and intentions. 

Hatch (1978), for example, compares interactions between L1 learners and adults with interactions between L2 learners and adults, and finds that in the second type of interaction exchanges are initiated overwhelmingly by the native speaker adult, and thus challenge the L2 learner with identification of the topic. Knowing some of the different between L1 and L2 learning we can conclude that a target language can be seen as hard target to achieve because of the complex aspects that those ones involve.





References:

Cook, V.J., Long, J., & McDonough, S. (1979), ‘First and second language learning’, in G.E. Perren (ed.) The Mother Tongue and Other Languages in Education, CILTR, 7-22