ENGLISH TEACHING II PORTFOLIO

Some ideas to organise activities taking into account differentiated learning: 1. KUDo’S KUDo’S are a useful way of breaking down learning objectives into what the teacher wants the students to Know, Understand and Do by the end of a unit. How does it support differentiation?  ➡️ curriculum objectives can sometimes be very broad and open to interpretation. By considering them in terms of the three KUD outcomes, an objective can be simplified and made more explicit . This makes it easier to plan and decide on differentiated activities and also facilitates the assessment process. KNOW : facts, definitions, dates and other key information to be memorised. UNDERSTAND : concepts, principles or general “big ideas” learned by the students. DO : skills and processes and how children independently apply their KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING in follow up activities or in other contexts outside the lesson . Often written as verbs .   2. BLOOM’S TAXONOMY Bloom’s taxonomy is a mod...

The term “mixed-ability classroom” refers to a group of students Who  are different in terms of levels of … Attention Interest Motivation Learning styles Types of intelligences  Physiological needs  Psychological needs  Speed Maturity - not every 8 year old is the same World knowledge Knowledge of and about English  Teachers can differentiate at least four classroom elements based on student readiness, interest, or learning profile:  CONTENT  - what the student needs to learn or how the student will get access to the information. PROCESS  - activities in which the student engages in order to make sense of or master the content. PRODUCTS  - culminating projects that ask students to rehearse, apply and extend what they have learnt in a unit. LEARNING ENVIRONMENT  - the way the classroom works and feels. HOW CAN MIXED-ABILITY BE TACKLED? PROCESS Using tiered activities through which all learners work with the same important und...

Pronunciation is probably the most neglected topic in English teaching syllabuses and programs. The English and Spanish pronunciations of letters and phonemes are very different, and it’s difficult for Spanish speakers to develop the tongue movements necessary to pronounce certain English phonemes. That is why teachers should know how phonemics work and how to work on pronunciation in class. Features of pronunciation: 1. THE PHONEMIC CHART + BASIC TERMINOLOGY The International Phonemic Alphabet (IPA) is a set of symbols that linguists use to describe the sounds of spoken languages. Some of those symbols can be seen here, along with the muscles used to produce them: From then, we can learn some of the basic terminology for linguistics : PHONEMES : a meaningful sequence of sounds, it can change the meaning of the word. Ex.: cat vs. pat. ALLOPHONES : variants of a sound that depend on the context. Ex.: dark and clear /l/ -> the dark /l/ is pronounced with the back of the tongue (cryst...

Teaching vocabulary isn’t simply providing students with word lists to study. Firstly, there are several features of words apart from their meaning that should be learned: The meaning(s) of the word. Its spoken and written forms (pronunciation & spelling). What “word parts” it has (ex. any prefix, suffix and “root” form). Its grammatical behaviour (ex. word class , typical grammatical patterns it occurs in). Its collocations. Its register - standard, compound, etc. What associations it has (ex. synonyms or antonyms ). What connotations it has (idioms, slang). Its frequency. An example with the word “black” can be found in the following diagram: Secondly, apart from the content side of vocabulary teaching there’s the issue of methodology. There are several methods and activities that enable a more impactful learning than simply seeing the word written. Such are a teacher fronted explanation, student-centered tasks and using context to work out the meaning.  In both the resource...

There are two main approaches to grammar instruction: deductive and inductive. DEDUCTIVE APPROACH : there is a explicit presentation of a rule, then some examples are give, and the students practice.  The advantages of this approach are that it’s time saving since it gets straight to the point, it’s useful for analytical learners who need need to know every rule, and the teacher is able to lead with language points as they come up. The disadvantages, however, would be that it’s not appropriate for young learners (since there needs to be a development of metalanguage tu understand the explanations, and they lack of it), and that it’s heavily teacher-centered. INDUCTIVE APPROACH : based on the idea of emergent grammar, the learners are presented with examples and they induce the rules from them. The greater cognitive effort this approach demands makes the rules more meaningful and memorable (according to Bjork & Bjork, 2001, making the access to information a bit difficult enhanc...