Practical N° 17: Reflection

Which class did you enjoy most? Why? (Back up with theory)

What was the greatest challenge for you during the Practicum? What did you do to face/overcome it? (Back up with theory)

     The class that I enjoyed most was the one on the 25^th of August, I was working with Food and Healthy Habits and I decided to deliver a class about Nutrients employing CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). The use of CLIL allowed me to teach English including contents related to the rest of the school curriculum, in this particular case, Natural Science. Beside, children can appreciate the usefulness of the object of learning because English was not taught in isolation. The foreign language was learned in a real context so it was view as authentic. Another advantage of using CLIL was that children could enhance their thinking processes since they were provided with a situation in which the learning of another subject was more successful because of the effort of decoding it and thinking about it in English. Moreover, the fact that children shared similar contents helped them to pick up the foreign language more easily and therefore improved the acquisition process.

     During this class, I made use of PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production). The first part of the class consisted in the presentation of some flashcards about nutrients, parts of the body and food items. I explained why was important to consume certain kind of nutrients and where we could find them. After that, we did some oral practice with the children repeating the name of the nutrients and the parts of the body that were new for them. Finally, we worked with a text about nutrients too and children did some production solving reading comprehension activities.

     It is difficult to think about the greatest challenge for me during the practicum because I was very lucky as regard the group of children I worked with. They were really an excellent group; I believe that only once they misbehaved and only once or twice I had problems with one student (Gabriel) who did not want to work in group and another time when he did not want to do anything. I decided to talk to him individually and fortunately we could solve the problem together.

     However I think that my greatest challenge was to overcome the fear of speaking all the time in English and that my students could not understand me because they were used to speak in Spanish. First of all, I tried to use lots of flashcards because children are mainly visual and I also used lot of body language. Then, I put into practice some strategies about classroom management that consisted on this idea of “creating and English Environment” where I spoke English all the time and together with listening activities they were exposed to the foreign language during the whole class. Besides, when my students were doing a speaking exercise I walked around the class trying to encourage them and helping them to use English. It was also crucial for me as the teacher that my students knew the importance of speaking English in class because the overuse of their own language interfered with the learning process and do not allowed them to practice English in class. I explained to my students that it was not prohibited to use their own language but it was important to know when to use it. For example, they could use some Spanish during a writing activity but not during a speaking activity because they lost the purpose of it.