Our experience as Master´s students

One of the best things about this degree is the Practicum which we all consider very useful and some of us think it should last longer. Also, studying a little bit of Psychology was very interesting since most of us have no idea on that, that could have lasted longer too. Another interesting subject is the one that teaches us how to teach the different skills like listening, speaking, etc. because it´s very useful for the teaching practice.
Most of the other subjects require quite a bit of work outside of classroom and the tight schedule makes it very difficult and stressful to comply with all of them. Some of us consider this whole degree as a mere introduction to teaching. There´s too much theory and too little practice. And the theory itself we see very briefly so even if we consider some of it interesting and possibly useful, we don´t have time to focus on it and it´s extra work for us trying to explore it in more depth.
As in everything else in education, there´s room for improvement. So, innovate away or innovate your way!

My experience as an English student

I was raised bilingual in Spanish and English, therefore I had a higher level than average. English was obviously very easy for me in school but I thought it would be helpful for my writing and reading skills.

When I think about it now, I think my teachers should have given me extra readings to do to then comment them. This would have been a good chance to take good advantage of my time in English class and learning something I didn´t know. Instead I sat there like one more student and had to follow the speed of the rest of my class mates, which was just boring and a waste of time. Some teachers also expected from me to follow the book and just write answers and vocabulary that had been seen in class. In other words, I was expected to forget all my "extra knowledge" in the classroom and only to remember what everybody else was learning. This means, that if I ever wrote something in American English, the teacher would consider it wrong because it wasn´t what we had seen in class. Obviously I didn´t give into that but didn´t feel like making a big fuss about it either. In my opinion, teachers who did this were those who had less knowledge of English and were uncomfortable with the fact of having a student in class who could feel more comfortable with the language than them. Maybe I was more familiar with the language since it´s my second mother tongue, but I always felt I had a lot of things to learn in regard to English, just like we had a lot to learn in Spanish. I wish someone would have thought of this and had thought of an alternative for those who had a notable higher level than average.

A very interesting website on teaching for the 21st century

I found this great site from the United States of an organization called "The Partnership for 21st Century Skills" that provides tools and resources to help the US education system in promoting 21st century readiness for every student. I think we can all learn something from them so I strongly encourage you to visit www.p21.org

eTwinning

http://http//www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm



The eTwinning project aims to encourage European schools to collaborate using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
It's a very innovative project since it inserts the New Technologies and the Collaborative Learning in an international context.
Here is the Homepage including information of the new projects started in 2011.
I encourage you to take advantage of this platform because it can be a powerful tool for you as Foreign Language Teachers!

The Valencian Context

The Autonomous Region of Valencia is not like many other regions in Spain, here you get bilingual students and theoretically this should make teaching English easier or more effective but academic results show otherwise. Something must go terribly wrong in classrooms if teaching English to bilinguals is as successful or unsuccessful as teaching monolingual students in Castilla la Mancha. I don´t have the facts and figures of that but I think teachers here are not taking advantage of their students´ bilingualism. Personally I blame it on the whole immersion craze. It seems that because it works with young children we should always use English and only English in class. I think that a contrastive approach especially when teaching grammar would prove more useful. Actually, textbooks recommend giving the grammar explanation in students´ first language.

CLIL - Content and Language Integrated Learning

http://http//www.isabelperez.com/clil.htm

http://http//clil.wordpress.com/

webpages with information about CLIL (activities, projects, opinions and teachers' experiences)
very interesting! It includes a lot of material for english teachers in secondary school;
you can also contribute with any interesting link or particular experience.

My experience as an English student

I consider myself lucky in this respect. I´ve always had good English teachers. The one I´ve learnt the most from is the first teacher I had in highschool and the amazing thing is that in a time of teacher-centered, whole-class instruction all around, she was using the communicative approach. She had us organizing debates and one of us would be the moderator and she would be a simple spectator. Sometimes our homework was a poster, other times a comic strip. She was very creative and always encouraged creativity in her students. This may not seem like much now but this was happening some 20 years ago so it was a big deal to me and it has influenced my views on teaching. A "side-effect" of all this is that it has made me more demanding as a student, so the next teacher I had for the last two years of highschool I simply could not stand because she only used the textbook and nothing else. She seemed bored in class and she didn´t try to make it interesting for us in any way. Had I not had the fortune of having such a great teacher the first two years, she wouldn´t have seemed such an awful teacher...