LENGUA EXTRANJERA

INGLÉS
Práctica

SPECIFIC ENGLISH PART

OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS
COMPETITIVE EXAM

EXERCISE 1
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PART 1: Listening comprehension

Listen twice to this programme on How students learn from The Weekend Teacher and
complete tasks 1 to 5 below:

1. Complete the following sentences from the recording with word or expression you hear:

a. Invite interest, ___________________ , demonstrate your own interest and passion for what
your teaching or show the relevance of the material and how it can be used.

b. material presented in ways that fit the content being shared, audio, video, or discovery
through __________________ in pairs or in groups or through field trips out of the
classroom, help students with personal discovery, create problems for them to solve.

c. asked to do something with the content they’ve acquired, divide it, connect it to something
else, ____________________ compared to something else or create something entirely
new with it.

d. they learn from each other, most students benefit from having the opportunity to _________
ideas _________ others.

e. emotional experiences are deeply _________________

2. Write a sentence with three of the words or expressions above to illustrate their meaning:

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.
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Exercises

3. According to the speaker what needs to be considered in relation to how students learn when
designing tasks?

4. What can be done to ensure content is received and manipulated by students in a multisensory
way?

5. Why are students said to enjoy learning socially?

6. Design an activity for students to work on food that includes as many of the criteria given in the
listening excerpt as possible.
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PART 2: Text comprehension

Read the following article by Scott Thornbury out of his blog An A-Z of ELT on educational
aims and answer the questions below:

A is for Aims

This must be one of the most frequently voiced questions in the discussion that follows an
observed lesson. The trainee –with little or no idea of how language learning is managed– is
pitted against the trainer, convinced that learning can be manufactured according to precise
specifications, and with the reliability of a Swiss watch. It’s all about planning, anticipating,
predicting and pre-empting. Hence, the need for aims, and hence, the kind of advice on
lesson planning of which the following is typical:
“To write an effective plan the teacher needs to think carefully about what exactly the aim of
the lesson is. What will the learners learn?” (Watkins, 2005). 
Yes, but what will the learners learn? Will it be something entirely new or simply consolidation
of existing knowledge – in which case, will the improvement be perceptible? Will all the
learners learn the same thing, and at the same pace? And what does ‘learn’ mean here? Is this
conscious or unconscious learning? Are we talking about the acquisition of inert, declarative
knowledge, or is this knowledge available to be proceduralised, and, if so, how can such
proceduralization be realistically achieved in the space of a 45-minute lesson? And how, in
the end, do you measure it? How do we know when someone has learned something? And
so on and so on.
The concept of aims seems to be based on the fallacy that language learning is the incremental
accumulation of discrete-items of linguistic knowledge. But, as Diane Larsen-Freeman (1997)
reminds us, “learning linguistic items is not a linear process – learners do not master one item
and then move on to another. In fact, the learning curve for a single item is not linear either.
The curve is filled with peaks and valleys, progress and backslidings” (p. 18).
Not only that, the classroom –being essentially a social organism- is a complex dynamic system,
where small effects may have unintended consequences, and where major interventions
may produce only trivial results. As Dick Allwright (2005) points out “What learners get from
a lesson is not predictable merely from what is taught in that lesson and certainly not just
from the teaching points covered… We cannot now sensibly measure the overall success of a
lesson simply in terms of the percentage of teaching points successfully learned because the
learners may have learned little from the teaching points and a lot from everything else that
happened in the lesson” (p 12).
Hence, it might be better to start with the assumption that learning cannot be programmed,
in any deliberate sense, and that, as Leo van Lier puts it “it might be a good idea to design
… lessons as if they formed a small organic culture (or an ecosystem) in themselves, where
participants strive to combine the expected and the unexpected, the known and the new,
the planned and the improvised, in harmonious ways” (van Lier 1996, p. 200).
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Exercises

What advice should we give trainee teachers, then? Allwright suggests that we should not
abandon the idea of planning, but that we should replace the notion of ‘teaching points’ with
that of ‘learning opportunities’: “I see planning as crucial to language teaching and learning,
but planning for richness of opportunity and especially for understanding, not planning to
determine highly specific learning outcomes” (op.cit, p. 10). That is, rather than defining the
aims in terms of pre-specified outcomes (typically grammar McNuggets), trainees should be
encouraged to think in terms of the desired learning opportunities, or what van Lier calls
‘affordances’.
Moreover, evidence from research into expert teachers’ planning decisions suggests that
effective teachers seldom start their planning processes with a clear conception of an ultimate
aim. Rather, they start with a somewhat fuzzy notion of what will feel right, for this class, at
this stage of their learning, at this time of day, and given such-and-such contextual factors –
what I call ‘fit’. I now tell my trainees to try and establish a ‘fit’ for their lesson, and work from
there, while at the same time incorporating plenty of elasticity into the design. And I tell them
to be prepared to adapt or even abandon their plan in light of the response of the learners.
Such an approach, of course, sits uncomfortably with the ‘teaching point’ culture imposed by
coursebooks. But coursebooks (mercifully) consist of more than simply a syllabus of teaching
points. They include topics, tasks and texts – all of which, with only a little ingenuity, can
be usefully detached from the teaching point that might originally have motivated them. If
trainees can be encouraged to see the ‘affordance potential’ of coursebook tasks, for example,
they may be some way towards designing lessons that maximise learning opportunities,
even within a coursebook-driven paradigm.
In the end, as the man said, we cannot cause learning; we can only provide the conditions in
which it may occur. And maybe, therefore, we should learn not to fear unpredictability, even
to celebrate it. As Stenhouse put it, a long time ago now, “Education as the induction into
knowledge is successful to the extent that it makes the behavioural outcomes of the students
unpredictable” (1975, pp. 82-3).
Scott Thornbury

1. Define or explain what is meant with the following terms in the text:

a. To be pitted against:  

b. Pre-empting:
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c. Proceduralised and procedudalization:

d. Discrete-items:

e. A fuzzy notion:

2. What according to van Lier are ‘affordances’?

3. How does the author use the word ‘fit’? and what does he mean with it?
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Exercises

4. Rewrite the following sentences using the word provided so that the resulting sentence bears a
similar meaning to the original one:

a. This must be one of the most frequently voiced questions in the discussion that follows an
observed lesson.

PREVALENT:

b. And how, in the end, do you measure it? 

CAN:

c. Learners may have learned little from the teaching points and a lot from everything else
that happened in the lesson.

WHEREAS:

d. Effective teachers seldom start their planning processes with a clear conception of an
ultimate aim.

DO:

e. If trainees can be encouraged to see the ‘affordance potential’ of course book tasks, for
example, they may be some way towards designing lessons that maximise learning
opportunities.

UNLESS:
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PART 3: Didactics

1. How would you define a warm up activity?

2. Look at the following activity taken out of a Teacher Training Guide that includes warm up
activities.

Guess the picture

Materials: blackboard

Procedure:

1. One person comes to the front and starts to draw a picture.

2. The students must try to guess what the picture is before the person has finished
drawing it.

The person who guesses correctly comes to the front to draw another picture.

How could you apply this warm up to a lesson about clothes?

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Exercises

3. What would be the aims you would set for such an activity? What about the affordances?