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.