Micro classes

Today the society live immerse in constantly changes, including the educational process. For this reason teachers should be in a continual investigation, being update to offer an adequate education. This is being developed since the trainer is in formation. This is a reason why we did in our Methodology course two demonstrations and a micro class.

The Demonstrations consisted on develop a class in which we had to teach some language skills and components. The purpose of did them was that we were used to develop skills and components for each class. As well as was important give them a communicative goal. Then, we had to do a micro class, with the purpose of mix all together and also, to choose what were the best skills and components for each class in order to make an appropriate and communicative class. The main objective in those micro class was giving to the learners a communicative goal in which they can used in real life what was teaching in the classroom. In addition, it was important to make clear the stages that should be develop during the teaching of the skills.

From my personal point of view, this kind of activities for us as future teachers are important because we need to be well prepared at the time we face real students. At my first demonstration I had lot of mistakes, then with practice, some advices from Professor Nahir Aparicio and Victor Ojeda and giving practice to the theories we saw I could do a better job. I have to recognize that at the beginning I did not see the necessity of all those classes and demonstration, but now I realize how important is to have all those experience before face teaching a language.

We need to remember that we work with human beings, and this fact is an important aspect to consider. We need to know how we can evaluate our students, how they can appreciate better a content, how they can learn that content better, how to motivate them, which strategies, techniques and resources use, how to give them instructions, how much the teacher and the students need to speak, how to use the language according to the level, and so on… And we need to know all these in order to make the learning process more significant, useful and proper for the students.

The Communicative Approach

The Communicative Approach seems to be the more appropriate one to be presented to the learners, because in this sense they can see the useful aspect to the target language. Also, the knowledge of the communicative application in the language since the very beginning could motivate students during the learning process.

This approach view the language as a mean of communication and everything is done with a communicative intent. During my personal experience in the IPC, I feel that exercises with a communicative context are easier to understand and solve than those which only have the instructions and the task. I think this occurs because we can place ourselves in that situation and find the solution. In addition, role plays, games, and other creative activities have more sense and more motivation if we give them a real context.

Although it is important to include the Communicative Approach in our classes, we cannot leave aside all the methods and theories that exist in the field. The students need some variations in the classes and teachers should evaluate which theories and methods better apply for each group of students.

Methods and Approches for ELT

Teaching is not an easy task. It has aspects involve in the teaching process that are not simple to manage. Teaching a Language is not the exception, it is important to take into account the different aspects that are imply in this process.

According to Larsen-Freeman (1986), the language teaching is a science that has as principal purpose to make the teaching/learning process relevant, effective and important for the participants. It is true that, as all sciences, the language teaching has been evolved as new theories and methods do; and there is always a relationship between them. This is the reason why there are no correct or incorrect methods and theories but big branches to improve the teachers work. Here will be presented a brief content with the nine most famous methods and theories to ELT.

· The Grammar-Translation Method: this method was created by H. S. Ollendorf y Karl Plötz. They considered that the foreign language was not for communication, so it can be learn by translation and the knowledge of grammatical rules having as reference L1. As a result, the listening and speaking skills were either practice not develop in the acquisition of the foreign language.
· The Direct Method: created by Maximilian Berlitz, this method promote the use of the foreign language without translation or extensive grammatical explanations (not in a deductive but in an inductive way), and offering the learner a direct expose to the language. This method allow the students to develop their listening and speaking skills, focus their attention in acquire a native like pronunciation.
· Audio-lingual Method: This method was presented by Charles Fries and was developed in the United States during the World War II. According to its creator, teachers should take into account that the target language is learning by habits. This method used the individual repetitions, in chore and the listening activities.
· The Total Physical Response Method: if people is in movement they are learning, this is one of the premises developed by James Asher. His propose for the foreign language teaching is consider a useful tool to basic level students, but it is very complicated when the teacher work whit big advance groups.
· The Silent Way: the name of this method is because the teacher should be quiet as silent as s/he can be the student who constructs his /her own learning. The Silent Way was presented by Gattegno, he considers that the target language is learning by an logical order that is based in the difficulties of the language structures.
· Community Language Learning: this is a holistic approach created by Curran, who presented the language learning as a process which considers the students as a whole and the language as a means of communication.
· The Natural Approach: created by Krashen y Terrel who consider that the target language satisfaction the communicative needs and that these are learning in an specific order. According to those authors, the language learning process is based in five (5) hypothesis proposed by Krashen (acquisition/learning, monitoring, natural order, input and affective filter).
· Suggestopidia: presented by Lozanov, this method considers the language learning process unconscious and it says that the mental state of the learner is an important factor in that process. This method includes the use of music, adequate furniture and other resources that allows the relaxation.
· The Communicative Approach: it was presented by Halliday and Himes. They propose the communication as the main goal of the language acquisition by making use context, as well as the meaning that this context gives to the language. This approach take into account that the language is for communication and in this term they expose the students to realia exercise in order they learn how to use the language in real life context.

Finally, it is important to know that every approach has its positive and its negative aspects. The best way to develop an appropriate teaching process is taking the best thing of each method and remembering always to give students a communicate goal in all classes. In this way the students can feel after every class they can communicate in the target language.