2-Oral+skills

In our second theme we work with the oral skills that we want our students to develop. For that we will encourage children to participate in the classroom, we will design group activities in which they have to take part following some "social rules" (like stablishing eye contact, smiling, turn taking...) and we will pay an special attention to phonetic, pronuntiation...of our discourse.

Is in this theme when we include an important document to help us take decisions related to plan lessons/units. It´s the [|Common European Framework of] [|Reference]. As the CEFR is a really wide document and difficult to manage, we only focused on some specific things, like understanding in general lines what it offers to us as learners of a language.

(Brief summary of what the CEFR is : )

After a brainstorm in which the whole class participated, and having the CEFR as reference, we define a language user as someone who interacts to build a message (that can be verbal or non verbal) taking into account the social rules in a specific context.

On the other hand, as it´s already mentioned, we are working with suprasegmental features, stress and non stress, rhythm, entonation, pitch... We can practise at home to improve our skills; there are many examples to imitate and work with. For example, we can use some of these, which have been registered in our teacher´s wiki.

The task for this second theme is creating a lesson in which we work with oral skills, decide how we want to organize classroom, students, the activities, resources...and analyze the class discourse. The template we follow for designing lessons is adapted from the one used in Britain:

We were given some advices about how to plan a lesson, as it was our first time doing it in english and following this pattern. Is important to start from the end, last activity of lesson, having a question in mind and deciding a clear leading activity for the lesson.

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My group´s topic is Pancake Day tradition; the main objetives we set for this lesson are understanding what is a pancake, approach to a typical english tradition, understand oral messages, participate/interact in a game... The lesson was created from the "Pancake song", a video of the tradition and an activity sheet suggested to use in the class. media type="youtube" key="FLjNjJwDV7E" height="315" width="420" align="center"

You can check the song and the act. sheet in our group page for this task.

And finally, the results: Our lesson, the discourse and fonectic analysis of Pancake song.