Welcome to my site
What is this Portfolio about?
This portfolio contains material of a course I took at UFMG called "Pedagogycal Grammar". It is an online course, where students and teachers discuss some texts suggested by our Professor (Deise Dutra) at Teleduc Plataform, as well as some individual and group work we have done.
I have selected the activities, texts and discussions that were more meaningful for my learning process. I have learnt a lot taking this course and I intend to show you how I have grown up. Hope you understand it! ;)
Individual Task - Learning narratives and Expectations
Students were required to write individualy about their learning experiences in English, as well as what were their expectations towards this course and think about definitions to "language" and "grammar".
I chose this activity because I've learned a lot from this reflective process and it is good to compare how I´ve started tolearn English and the importance of grammar on it (which was enormous, as at my school all we did was mainly memorizong grammar structures) how I got amazed by the Integrating Skills approach I had contact at UFMG and the way I reflected about grammar instead of just memorizing it. Doing this individual activity right in the beginnih of the course made me reflect about what I have already known and what I was expecting from the course, which was motivating;.
Group Activity based on Larsen-Freeman Text
We were required to create activities based on some of the ideas proposed by Larsen-Freeman, following the steps below:
1. think about your fictitious or real class (age, level, interests, etc.);
2. decide which category/subcategory you want to focus on and write down the possible structures related to it;
3. choose the genre(s) we would get the authentic examples from (e.g. oral and/or written data from newspapers, novels, short stories, comic strips, film excerpts, sitcom, cartoons, blogs, etc. )
4. start planning a 40-50 minute class which should integrate skills (listening, speaking, writing and writing – at least 3 of them):
a. Input - The first activity should expose learners to language. It can be a reading or listening activity or both with pre-listening/reading questions, reading/listening questions, etc.
b. Output - Plan a production activity (speaking or writing). This should be a real life activity and other skills may be involved;
c. Language analysis - Create a language exploration activity to lead your students to understand the social use of the grammatical structure(s) on focus. Remember to emphasize meaning, use and, then, form (if necessary).
The group was supposed to decide if they want to have the language analysis before or after the production activity. This should be justified.
The lesson plan should be presented in Power Point, therefore, it should include a step by step explanation of what would be done in class.
I chose this group activity because was the most interactive one my group and I have done. The kind of input activity provided using a sitcom scene seemes fantastic for me. I would hardly think of a thing like that. I thought it very creative and motivating for the kind of students which we addressed this lesson, as it can easily be part of their interests in their free time. The way grammar was proposed to be taught also caled my attetion, as I haven´t learned like that and even after reading about new approaches, I have some difficulties of putting the new information I get in practise.
Forum Discussions
Students were required to answer by Tuesdays at midnight questins made by the Professor about suggested texts every week and then comment the online mates' answers by Thursday evening. The forum discussion I enjoyed most was the one about Lewis' chapters 4 and 5.
I liked this discussion more because was the only one my colleagues had made comments about. Honetly I missed interaction this semester. Although I made comments about the others' answers they didn´t anwered to it, or even commented about my suggestions, what made me feel discmotivated to keep on commenting. As comments were required in order to grade me, I made comments, but hardly ever I made suggestions or expected interaction from the students. I teraction is highly expected in this kind of subject, is the part where we learn the most, defending our point of view or having to recognize our mistakes. Unfortunetly I missed it in his course during this semester.
Inspiring Texts
This semester I am taking another course, which is about Theory and Practice of teaching a foreign language in regular schools in Brazil. It is an expansion of a subject we had last term where we read theoretical texts and researched how theory and practise really happen in an English classroom. Our professor Laura Micolli suggested six chapters of a book named "Pedagogycal Grammar" written by Prahbu. It is about an interesting project Prahbu leaded in India after complaint about the difficulties students finded in using effectively the language outside the classroom. He developed a new approach which was task-based and there was a whole concern in developing an internal grammar in the students so that they could effectively learn instead of memorizon the language structure.
Chapter 1 inttroduces the project and the justification for its existence; chapter 2 is the most interesting one because it talks more about the way grammar was developed in the project. chapter 3,4 and 5gives more explanations bout how the project was developed and chapter 6 talks about the choices made in oirder to teach grammar more pedagogycally.
I decided to put this chapters here because it helped me know different ways of teaching and learning a language and the role of grammar on it.
Teaching Material
Here you'll find another activity created by my group and I during his term for a ficticious class that reflect one of the issues discussed during the course.
Final considerations
As a teacher, I learned a lot during this course, as for me the role of grammar in the laerning process of a new language was bigger than it actually is. It has an inportant role, but it shouldn´t be taught so explicitly, otherwise students will only memorize rules without context and languages are primarily to communicate and people don´t communicate without context. Many teaching suggestions were given by the texts I read adn the group activities helped putting in practise the theory learned. I learned a lot as a teacher, but I am still a student so I'm still learning, right? So this learning process doesn´t finish here ;)
