ENGLISH DIDACTICS I

 Hi dear teacher and classmates! Welcome to another entry1 Once again, I will be reviewing last class activities and topic. So, the topic for today will be: 🥁🥁🥁 "Teaching Receptive Skills".  In my last entry, I described teaching productive skills, however, to produce, we need to receive. So today, we will get a little more into deep into this topic. Receptive skills are what we commonly known as listening and reading; they refer to the ability to understand spoken and written language. Teaching Listening and reading comprehension might be very challenging for teachers since for new learners English might be a completely different world and they might not be accustomed to certain structures or sounds, for that reason, teachers need to make sure they teach in a supportive and engaging environment. To achieve our purposes of teaching receptive skills, we need to make sure that we use authentic materials in our classroom, the idea is to make the students exposed to the langu

 Hello teacher and classmates! It´s nice to have you back for another entry. This time we´ll talk about speaking. Speaking is everywhere, and it´s an essential part of communication, which makes it crucial for students to learn this productive skill in the most effective possible way. In our classes, we are always having talks and debates, we share our opinions on different topics, and we are always practicing. And I think that's one of the most important aspects that we as future teachers, or as knowledgeable people on the topic, should take into account. Practice is important. And once again like in Writing, Speaking can be Academic like speeches, or Communicative like in everyday talks. In the Classroom, we should take into account student´s needs, basically, we communicate because we have needs. We should know our students well, their levels, their interests, and aspects like their age to promote student practice.    That takes me to a nice exercise that we watched on a video:

 Hi there! Welcome back to a new entry on a new topic. This time, we´ll be talking about: writing! 🤩 Our last two classes have been more theoretical, we have had some nice exercises too though.  In our first class, we rehearsed our muscles, drew some tracings, and practiced cursive and print handwriting. It felt weird, to be honest. 😅 I don't remember when I last wrote a complete sentence in cursive style I assume it’s been in years! I remember that coming back from virtuality, my hand even felt stiff! This is my handwriting in cursive and printing styles. 🤭 I am not good with cursive and kind of mix both. 😅 Then, we went a little deeper into what we actually mean by writing skills. Writing involves aspects like handwriting, spelling, punctuation, sentence construction, paragraphing, text cohesion, and register or style. We discussed that maybe for us, as Spanish speakers, we don´t have to struggle that much with handwriting, or at least not as much as learners whose writing sy

Hello! Welcome to a new entry!   Thanks once again, for taking the time to read my thoughts on a new topic. This time, I will describe all about our body language class, coordination, and improvisation. In this class, we learned a lot of useful tips to improve our body language, we did many exercises, and I loved our very dynamic class.   To start off, we made some space in the classroom and arranged ourselves into two rows, one in front of the other. Then we had to keep eye contact with the person in front of us, trying to be serious. I was in front of Dani, and it was difficult at the beginning but then I could focus better and made it to the end! This kind of exercise helps us be serious even when students might be telling jokes or laughing but we,  teachers, have to be focused on what we are doing and try to look professional and serious when needed. We also tried to keep eye contact with a peer as we walked around, this was harder than I thought! because everyone was walking aroun

  Hello everyone! Welcome back to a new entry!  🤩 Last classes have been a blast! At the same time, I have learned a lot of new things regarding voice, intention, articulation and resonance. Teachers need to be skillful when it comes to presenting in front of a class, since sometimes classes are very large groups and we have to rely only on our voices as a teaching aid. Teacher’s voice has to be clear, well articulated, and resonant. We have been practicing with many voice exercises so that we can improve.  Teacher Orlando presented    to us, a video of a voice trainer, in which he explained that we can modulate our voices to sound either more or less nasal, more profound, we can vibrate higher or lower and get a more appealing voice. I think practice makes perfect, and just as Nidia said, there is not a thing such an “ugly voice”, it’s just a matter of training it, or as she said “educating” our voices. Another good practice is to mimic people’s voice. Whenever we listen to radio ads