Learning Styles and learning strategies.

Andrea Lozano - 1010910865 

Didactics of English

Learning Styles and learning strategies

Most of people say that you learn better when information is Presented according to the students learning Styles taking into account their likes, beliefs and so on....because as human Beings we are really different, some of us learn practicing, through experience, reading, memorizing, writing and another people learn visually and here is where strategies has an important role, and it is the hardest part to teachers for teaching. someone will not learn if they feel uncomfortable, that is why teachers should try to focus their  classes to involved students to learn and enjoy the session, however, motivated and created and environment of learning is necessary to handle multiple strategies such as: the use of images, flashcards, audio clips, games, reading text and oral activities. To do that, teachers needs to take into account the context, the age and of course identify the way their students learn easily.

Personally, in this text I want to show my preference about the use of visually activities such the ones I named before. Because visual strategies let the students think by interpreting what they see with they own prior knowledge and they real life, of course in education every strategy a teacher can use to improve learning is important.

To add, as most of Teachers known teaching and learning process are extremely related with self steam, motivation, realia, creativity, flexibility and constantly evaluation and feedback. Those aspects make the process enjoyable and meaningful.

Didactics of english, reflective essay.

Andrea Lozano  - 1010910865

Didactics of English

Effectiveness in teaching - learning process

First at all, I consider the relation between teacher and students is the most important part in the learning process, because it affects the motivation, attitude and of course the learning of the students.  When I started teaching, I had an experience; there was a student who hates English, he felt he can not learn, he was not motivated, that situation is so difficult when it is your first time teaching, you feel unmotivated, but at the same time it makes you stronger.

When I understood  what happened with that student,  I realize I was so rude with him, I changed my attitude,  I started to be more lovely, funny, I showed him I wanted him to learn. Besides, I used a lot of visual strategies such as: Images, pictures, videos and also body language. In that way, he started to learn and loving to learn English.

According to that experience and what effective learning and teaching is, teachers should try to understand what are the feelings which affect the students learning and take into account that we are human beings and we have different learning styles. That is the hardest part of teaching because teachers must include many strategies in one session in order to get the students attention so they can get a meaningful learning process and make them learn something useful for their life.

In my personal opinion, I try to use a lot of strategies in my classes, but I recommend to read some teaching theories such as: (Piaget) theory and their states for learning, or( Ausbel) and their meaningful learning and why not (Skinner)and their behaviorism  or being more contemporaneous (Sandra Rief, 2005) she has a book called “ visual strategies to teach children with attention deficit” I think those authors  involved some of the most important aspects that a teacher should  know to teach: motivation, strategies, learning style, process and how can they include their knowledge in a real context.

Juan Camilo Martinez Marquez

1010921448

Didactics of English

Mutual Motivation As Teaching-Learning Process.

My teaching practice was made with kids between 8 and 10 years old, at the beginning I was little scared, but with the time and with the help of the main teacher I began to feel more comfortable in classes, since I had to performed a lot of activities with them, they seemed to like it and the kids showed me their interest in learning.

I remembered one day that I arrived early to the school and three kids where there, they said to me ¨what are we going to do today?¨. In that moment I realized that what kids like the most is to play, and I have to develop many activities involving games so the students can get better time in the class.

Since I taught in a basic level, the idea was to use flashcards so the students can get a better idea of the vocabulary, also the idea of using flashcards was helped by Budden (2004) who suggests in her article ¨Using flash cards with young learners¨ that the flashcards may be accompanied with many types of activities like memory activities, drilling activities, identification activities, TPR activities and so on. All those kinds of activities encourage the students to be more motivated of learning English.

All that experience I had with those kids encourage me to do more research on didactics and the use of flashcards, and also as they were learning from me, I was learning many things from them. This make me think that if all the teachers are motivated with their students, all the students will be motivated with their teachers, and this motivation will help the teacher and the students to get a better teaching-learning process.