Reflecting upon our experience as students, and everything
being comprised in it, we believe that “English language teaching materials
should encourage learners to develop learning skills and strategies” (Jocelyn
Howard and Jae Major, 2005). We are aware that
sometimes we studied by heart because we were not taught strategies that would
help us to improve our learning.
Now, as future teachers, and with all the theoretical
framework that we manage and some experiences in front of classrooms with “real
students”, we know that the assumption made before is true but sometimes
reality overdoes theory.
Nevertheless, with persistence, effort and willingness we
can make at least a little change in the classrooms we are going to work in.
A useful way to reach this aim is to follow a task-based approach
that, briefly put, consists of
presenting related activities and tasks that would lead to a final goal. Within
this way of working, it is important to teach students different strategies
that would help them in this process and in the future. One of the greatest advantages
of this approach is group work. By interacting with others, students can share their experiences and the
difficulties they may have and develop different strategies to sort them out.
Also, by following this approach, we must design
materials that challenge students’ abilities and at the same time, that
implicitly serve them to improve different learning strategies. The result of
this, in the long-term, would help them develop autonomy while learning not
only a language, as in our case, but also to apply this in other aspects of
life.
For example, this was a grill we used with real
students in a project in which they have to make a leaflet to promote the adoption of a
homeless dog. In the following activity, students, who have been working with an
authentic leaflet of a shelter, have to realise which is the purpose, the
audience and the content of the leaflet so as to put this into practise when
deciding on theirs in the next lessons.
This is the leaflet:
This is the task:
Look at the Austin Pets Alive! leaflet and decide:
Which is its purpose? What do they want to do with it?
And what about the audience? Who is going to read it?
And the content? What information does it include?
List your answers below:
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We are aware that presenting authentic material, as these
authors also suggest, is highly motivating and a good opportunity to expose the
students to real, unscripted language specifically produced for language
learning purposes.
This task of creating a leaflet for an awareness campaign
not only needs the learners to reflect on the language, but also on the
behaviours required from them in the world outside the classroom.
In conclusion, we can say that the
real challenge for many teachers is not to give all the responses that students
require; instead, they have to provide tools, strategies, resources and
guidance so as to make students find their way.
