LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ME AND MY WORLD

Classroom project by Ana Janneth Gmez Gutirrez

Objectives

General

To create a portfolio about me and my surrounding world.

Specific

To develop workshops about me and my surrounding world.

To learn vocabulary about me and my surrounding world.

To write sentences using simple grammar structures to talk about me and my

surrounding world.

To organize all the worksheets about me and my surrounding world in a creative

portfolio.

Implementation time

The idea is to build the portfolio along the academic term, so that students are able
to file all the activities that develop during the two hours of English a week they have
during the term.

Methodology

The project will take two general phases: workshop development and portfolio
organization.

Workshop development phase is divided into three sub phases: exploration

(mapping), language construction around the exploration and presentation.

Pedagogical strategies

The pedagogical strategies that are going to be used during the implementation of
this classroom project involved the following focus and activities

Vocabulary Building as a pedagogical process that involves decoding and

comprehension of the new words in the foreign language by different activities
 that embrace the following strategies; establishing relations between images
and names in English (images dictionary with flashcards and other
resources), choral and individual repetitions (audiolingual approach) in order
to feed the phonological memory, crosswords, word searches and puzzles
between others in order to build the new words comprehension.
Community Based Pedagogies as pedagogical approach that implies the
exploration of the surroundings of the students in order to feed the language
curriculum with meaningful aspects and understand the language as a means
of expression. In other words, this approach allows that students explore, their
community and find in there things to be said in the new language they are
learning, English in this case. The activities related to this strategy include
different worksheets in which students find out information about them.
Students interview different people from their families using their mother
tongue. That interviewing process include questions about their birth, their
first words and some others aspects from their first years of life, after having
the information with the teachers help they look for the appropriate language
vocabulary to try to tell those stories in English.
Collaborative learning as one of the key aspects that benefits the learning of
a foreign language, in the sense that there is an understanding of the
influence of others in the ways we learn a language. The others (Classmates
and teachers) are part of my language learning process. This approach allows
the collaboration between the learners; all are part of the scaffolding in their
language process. This strategy is evident during the project by group work
activities in which students share their interviews to their relatives and help
each other in the foreign language expression of their products.
Writing from the known, as a strategy that engage students in a writing activity
that starts from their inquiries about their own lives and their own
surroundings. The writing experience in this strategy is meaningful in the
sense that does not come from the isolated aspects but from a contextualize
issue like their own story and try to talk about it using a foreign language.
Oral presentations using both Spanish and English as an attempt to lead
students in the foreign language learning process in all the communicative
 skill. In those presentations the learners use the new vocabulary they learnt
in the different activities in the foreign language, they are allowed use of their
mother tongue as part of the process, as an understanding of the
characteristics of the level they are in and the importance of the first language
in the scaffolding process when earning a foreign language.
Implicit grammar instruction as a strategy that allows students to get in contact
with simple grammar structures that are useful to describe their lives without
feeling the leaning process is centered in the mere and decontextualized
grammar instruction. The students develop worksheets about descriptions in
which they use verb to, have got and some other simple structures that help
them to express things about themselves.

Resources

Worksheets for the different workshops (vocabulary, writing and speaking)

Audiovisual material

The students community a source for knowledge (the place from where the
information is taken)

Products

Each activity has a product that is going to be part of the portfolio.

The portfolio is the big product in which all the information about they and their
surrounding world is going to be filed and presented in a creative way.