Gina's social and psychological distance to Spanish language, culture and speakers .

Schumann's hypothesis is that the greater the social distance between two cultures, the greater the difficulty the learner will have in learning the second language, and vice versa.

The following are the 8 factors that influence social distance (Lets analyzed how successful Gina would be)


1. Social Dominance. When one group dominates the other there is a greater social distance...

Whose social group is more dominant? As we are in USA, native-English speakers are the dominant group, English is the official and main language here. So according to this theory Gina is not likely to be successful in learning Spanish.


2. Integration Pattern. There is more social distance when exists limited integration between the two cultures...

How much do learners integrate, or do they do most things apart from the main stream? I think Gina is not very familiar with the Latin culture or Spanish language (apart from what she might know about Mexican culture), so because of that she is not very likely to be a successful Spanish learner.


3. Enclosure. If the learner group is self-sufficient and does not need to interact with members of the target culture in daily life there will be more social distance...

To what extent does learner's group have their own resources for interaction, such as church, publications, clubs? As English is the official language here, Gina is self-sufficient, she does not need to interact with Spanish speakers in her daily life, apart from that, most of the Spanish speakers (like us) are supposed to know English. Therefore, Gina would not be successful in Spanish.


4. Cohesiveness. When the learner group is tight-knit there is more social distance.

How much does the group "stick together"? I think the native-English group has a great cohesion so they do not need to care about there other cultures that are surrounding them, and as Gina belongs to this native-English group she would be less likely to be successful in learning Spanish.


5. Size. If the learner group is big there will be more social distance.

How large is the group? I think that the largest group here is the native-English one, so as the theory points out it would increased the social distance so Gina would be less likely to success in learning Spanish


6. Cultural Congruence. When groups are very different culturally there is more social distance...

How are the cultural patterns and customs of the home culture and the target culture alike or different? I think that there are more differences than similarities between Latin and American culture, in terms of manners, food, political and educational system, etc. So this would be detrimental for Gina's success (according to the theory)


7. Attitude. When the learner group has a negative attitude toward member of the target language there would be more social distance...

What attitudes do the home and target cultural groups have toward one another?
I think that since in the US there are many different cultures existing together, the native-English speakers have a good attitudes toward other cultures, such as Latin culture. So in this terms Gina would be successful.

8. Intended length of residence. If the learner's intentions are just to stay in the country a short time the social distance will be greater...

How long does the learner intend to stay in the new country? Since Gina is not living in a Spanish speaking country I think the social distance would be greater so she would be less successful in learning Spanish.

After analyzing all this 8 factors I would say that, according this theory Gina does not have much opportunities to succeed in learning Spanish, but apart from this factors there also exist some others I will analized then

Factors that influence Psychological Distance:


I. Motivation.

Does the learner want to learn the new language? Yes she does. I see Gina is very is very motivated in learning Spanish, I hope we're able to teach her some.


II. Attitude.

How does the learner feel toward the target-culture group? I think Gina has a very possitive attitude toward Spanish and our culture, she is always trying to know more about us, our culture and customs, so if she wants to learn Spanish I think she will be able to do it.


III. Culture Shock.

Is the learner suffering culture shock? No, she isn't. Since she is here in the Us she does not have the problems of suffering from culture shock, so it gives her even more opportunities to learn since she does not have to deal with getting used to a foreign culture.

As a conclusion a can say that according to the social distance theory Gina does not have much opportunities to succed. On the other hand, if we take into account the psychological theory she has many opportunities to succed because she is motivated, has a positive attitude and does not experience culture shock.

In my personal opinion, I think psychological factors are more important and deciding than the social ones, because if you are motivated, have a positive attitude and does not experience culture shock you can overcome any social dominance, enclosure factors, etc.

Homework

1. Give a general description of the students in your school, I need information about the type of school, social status of children, family structure, the relation between parents and the school, etc... anything else you can add is ok.

Colegio Forjadores de Casablanca is a semi-private school located in the country side of Casablanca. Forjadores de Casablanca is a new school with a great infrastructure, big classrooms, football and basketball fields, a tennis court, a gym, a computer lab, a library, all this surrounded by hills and trees. There are only six grades in the school, from first level till sixth level primary, and a kindergarten. The number of students per class is small, from 6 to 17 students. The total number of students in the school is about 90. The school counts on eight teachers, only one teacher of English.

The students have got four hours of English exposure per week. Despite the number of students per class is small, some students present difficulties when acquiring the second language; this is because some of them are new students in the school and their English background is at a minimum level and they have not been able to catch up with their classmates.

All of the students belong to a middle class family. Most of the children belong to a family consisting of two-parents; however, there are a great number of students belonging to a single-parent family. The school community is very committed with the school, that is, parents always take part in the school activities, yet, many parents from the older grades, 5th and 6th grades, are reluctant to participate.


2. Describe a successful English learner and a bad English learner.

The sample students are from a 3rd grade primary. The successful learner is always committed with the class, does his homework, studies for every single quiz or test, sometimes misbehave but obeys the class rules. This learner makes questions every time he is not sure about content, is willing to participate and help his classmates.

On the contrary, the bad learner is always misbehaving during the lessons, he has never done his homework, he does not care about getting bad marks, he does not obey the class rules, and he never studies, although he understands the contents, he is just lazy and he knows it. The bad part of it, it is that his mother knows the situation but does not take any action in order to change this situation; according to my findings, I believe that he cannot motivate with anything, I have tried different approaches with him in order to capture his attention and motivate him, but it seems that nothing works.

Professor: Roberto Espinoza


Analysis

Here we see that the school has many material resources, besides it does not have a great amount of students, so we can say that the education is more personalized, it gives the teacher the opportunity to get to know each student better .

I think the successful learner mentioned here is highly motivated, he wants to learn more. I do not know but maybe he has more support of his family or has higher expectations for his future.
On the other hand, we see that the "bad" learner is unmotivated, he does not care about making his homework or following the rules, maybe what happens with that boy is that he does not feel the support of his family, I mean his mother knows but does not do anything so the boy feels nobody cares.
I think one of the bad things of the society we are living in is that every day families have less time to share togheter, sometimes parents work hard to give their children the best and do not realized that material things are not enough, sometimes all children need is a minute to talk, so they get all that they want but they feel lonely, and then when they realized life is not that easy they can feel frustrated, because they are growing up alone.
I think techers job is a beautiful but hard one, as teachers you have to know your students so that you can find different ways to teach them, however sometimes there are students very hard to deal with, and no matter what the teacher does they do not motivate, so teachers have to be constantly searching for different metodologies.

School visit to Bridgeport and Brewster

This tuesday we went to visit the schools of Bridgeport and Brewster. What this two schools have in common is that both have a large amount of mexican children, actually 81% of the students speak Spanish as their first language.

I liked Brigdeport School, because it shows that good results can be possible no matter the social status or the background of students, I mean if those children who, primarily, are not Americans, living in a country with a language that it is not theirs, can achieve things like being listed as one of the better schools, (in fact it has been National and State distinguished as a very good school) why not the rest as well.

One of the things that I really liked was the possibility of taking some college classes at school so that students can obtain credits then when they go to the University. I think it is great, I hope in Chile we had something like this, because I think it motivates students to continue their studies after school, and they can also see how different is college from school.

On the other hand, we have Brewster, which has not been so successful, actually it has been intervened and now they are working with an Scripted Curriculum.

Another thing that draw my attention was the fact that if students show up late for classes too many times they receive notificatios and their parents can be required to go to the court and they can actually go to jail... It is also interesting the fact that each state has their own curriculm for classes.

Now some questions to think about...

What other laws do exist in the US to control dicipline and attendance to classes??

What of the things you saw in this visit do you think you can apply to the teaching of EFL?

What are the benefits and drawbacks of having a national curriculum for schools or having a different curriculum for each state or region?

... Settle...

The trip to Seattle was amazing, I really liked the city, but it was so huge that the time we stayed there was not enough to see and visit all the things and places the city has.

I tried to visit as many places as I could, and with Pam we walked almost all over the city... we went to Space Needle, that has a beautiful view of the city and we also traveled by monorail.

I really liked the Aquarium and the sea otters, they were so cute and I also found Nemo!!

Another interesting place was Pike market and Dog Alley, where we found a bookstore (of used books) and I bought 3 books of Harry Potter... so I have enough reading for the summer when I arrive Chile.

We also visit China Town, that was like been in a different place.. in China!! I almost forget to tell about Pacific Science Center, in there we saw the dinasaurs and the butterflies, it had a lot of interesting things to learn about science in a funny way!!

So I just can say that I really enjoyed going to Seattle... It was a lot of fun, I took so many pictures that I had to use my second memory card... can you imagine that!!!

Well that was my experience in Seattle...

Class Activity

Memory Game!!!

http://www.1-language.com/materials/memori/elementary/fruits/memori1.swf

This web page has memory games to teach vocabulary. I chose this site because I think it is a funny way of learning new words, because apart from the images, the students can see the words and also read them, and then pass to next level.

I choose fruits as a topic because aparts from recognise the fruit, students have to disctinguish between plurals and singulars, but there are also other topics such as animals, food, feelings, occupations, etc.

So I think it is a good place to find different topics in order to teach vocabulary in an interesting way. It is good activity, specially for kids.

It has some of the 11 conditions such as student-centered, right amount of time and feedback, it is motivating, interesting, it provides autonomy and variety of language as well because the students can see the picture, read the word and also listen to the pronunciation, so thet they can relate all this things.

Interview

1. What role do you think technology does take/can take in learning?

To me the role of technology in learning is mostly supporting the teaching process during the lesson, that is, by integrating technology into the classroom, a lesson can turn into an attractive experience while learning. Internet and computers have got a decisive role when giving input or developing a lesson, students’ attention remains and acquiring contents is fun, and the result is a successful learning process. However, technology is not essential, is just a handy tool to support the teaching process; we must keep in mind that a successful learning is on the teacher’s hands.

2. What role should the learner take in the classroom?

The role of the learner should be of an active participant during a lesson, being a negotiator with the teacher and his/her peers.

3. What role should the teacher take in the classroom?

The role of the teacher should be of an active agent during the teaching process, a leader, a counsellor, a monitor, and at the same time a negotiator when giving input, teaching contents and guiding when monitoring the students.

4. What does good teaching look like?

Good teaching can be appreciated when seeing a prepared teacher to teach, that is, a well planned lesson, a teacher who knows and manages the contents, a teacher that is able to keep a class motivated, and one that is able to transfer the contents properly; these features are very important in the teaching process, but it is necessary to point out that good teaching is a process in which both big participants, students and teachers are responsible for.

Analysis

After reading this questions I can see that the English teacher is instrumentalist because he sees the technology just as an useful tool in teaching and motivating students in order to make the lesson more interesting.

In terms of protagonism in class I think that the teacher sees both, student and teacher, as important in the process of learning, however he thinks that the teacher is the main responsible for the success of the class.

del.icio.us

Social Bookmarking

In today's class we visited many interesting sites, such as Nova http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ and National Geographic http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ that have some interesting and educational games and videos.

We also learnt about bookmarkers, such as delicious http://delicious.com/

I didn't know about this, but I think it's a good way of organising your favourite websites. You have to create a delicious account and then you can start using it and adding your websites in order not to lose or forget them, you can also add them some tags and descriptions so that you can find them easily. Therefore you can access your webpages in any computer, any time and anywhere.

Our delicious account as a group is http://delicious.com/chileteach where all of us can add the interesting pages about ESL or EFL that we found.

I really hope this page will last forever... so that we constantly can help each other with tips and links for teaching English.

TEACHING TEXT AND CONTEXT THROUGH MULTIMEDIA1

http://llt.msu.edu/vol2num2/article1

This article talks about teaching language in its authentic cultural context, this research analyzes the interaction of text and context in a multimedia Quechua language program.

Nowadays language teachers are encouraged to use the technology, since it can give students a better understanding of culture nad language use nad imoprove their sociocultural competence of language. Most multimedia materials present language in a formal way and not in a discourse and interactive way nor related to the culture.

Culture has many signs used to give meaning to things in the enviroment, but when culture is shown through video or multimedia, we can only see what the filmer recorded and there are many things, situations or people that do not appear.

Multimedia transforms the way of language teaching from a formal system to a communicative practice that reproduces the thoughts and beliefs of people. Teachers tend to share linguistics prespective of language, they see it independently of the culture. The text has an example that shows the importance of the context in order to understand the conversation. The problem is that contexts can not be taught, it can only be experienced, but what we can do is to textualized the scene to hve a better understanding of the situation.

Teaching a language also implies teaching the culture, so it is important that the leanguage teachers has knowledge about the culture to develop socio-cultural competence in their students. In the text appears the example of a mony lender woman who was being judge, so in order to fully understand the context nad the way of speaking it is necessary to know some things such as the role of woman in Quechua society, the penal system, etc.

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Reflection

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From this article we can realize te importance that the context has when learning a language. We have seen that the language can not be separated from the culture, they both go together, in fact is the context and the culture that gives meaning to certain situations and behaviours. So we have to teach lenguage through culture and for this we have to use all the resources and technology that we have, and also appy all the knowledge we are acquiring at EWU.

As future teachers we have to keep this in mind, and we also have to take advantage of this great opportunity of studying in Eastern Washington University and try to learn the more that we can.

I am sure that living in USA and experiencing the culture by ourselves will be an unforgettable experience that will help us in our future careers as teachers and in our personal life as well.

... Go Eagles!!!

Where is the technology-induced pedagogy? Snapshots from two multimedia EFL classrooms

This article deals with the introduction of technology to the classroom. This research was carried out in China in two differnt classes, one of them used more technology than the other.


The results demonstrated that despite using technology no changes were made in any of the classrooms. Both classes were teacher-centered, he was the main source of knowledge, so students depended on him. It can be explained because of the conservative view of knowledge of the Chinese society.


As we saw in this research the introduction of technology only made a change in the appearence of teaching, so we can conclude that technology alone is not enough, what is necessary is a change of mind, a change in the concept of teaching an learning and also in the teacher-student relationship.

Podcasts

Here there are some websites:


1. For teacher's use:

http://www.mediafly.com/welcome.aspx?gclid=CNP35eDZvZUCFQkiagodHxTpRA
http://a4esl.org/podcasts/
http://china232.libsyn.com/

I found this page with many sites in there:

http://iteslj.org/links/ESL/Listening/Podcasts/



2. For students to practice

http://www.podcastsinenglish.com/index.htm (this page has podcasts and diferrent levels such as elementary, intermidiate and upper intermediate so that each student can choose his better option)


3. Podcasts for Gina to learn Spanish

http://teresasanchez.biz/podcast/
http://www.notesinspanish.com/ (this page has different levels!! to choose from)

* when i find other sites i will let you know ;)



4. Ideas:

I would like to use podcasts or video-podcasts as a Tv series or a soap opera, so that every day or every week students see a chapter of the same story. I think it would be intersting for students because they can get involved with the storie and the characters, they can get familiar with the way of speaking, so they will have interest in wait for the next episode in order to know how the story continues.


Poscasts are a very good tool to get students involve in English learning, it is specially good in contexts like Chile were students have no much access to speak whith native English Speakers. I think that by choosing well the topics of the podcasts you can motivate your students to listen and pay attention, you can get them involve in a conversation or composition about the topic.

CALL, CMC and Drill and Practice

CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning):

Its focus is on learning instead of teaching, it has 2 important features: bidirectional and individualized learning. Interactive in CALL means feedbacks are given after learners' inputs are assessed by the system to help learners improve their language competency.
A good example would be

http://www.esl-lab.com/

(In this page you can practise listening skills, there are a quiz for each recording, matching activities, multiple choice and mix-up sentences, you can check your answers online and it also gives you the correct ones, there is also the option of see the transcript).

http://www.englishforum.com/cgi-bin/00/messages/s/mess.pl?view_records=1&ID=*&uid=pub

(This is a forum for english learners, where you can communicate, you also have exercises, the idiom and quotation of the day, recommendations of books and dictionaries)

A bad example of CALL is

http://alice.pandorabots.com/

(In this page you can chat with ALICE, a robot, it can be useful for beginers because sometimes the conversation can be a little incoherent. This kind of pages are not consider to belong to the CALL approach)

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CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication ):

It is defined as communication that occur via computer-mediated formats (instant messages, emails, chat rooms) or text-based interaction.

Here there are some good examples of language chat rooms

http://chat.overpal.com/
http://www.mansioningles.net/chat.htm
http://www.sharedtalk.com/

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Drill and Practice:

It promotes the acquisition of knowledge or skills through repetitive practice. A good example of it is

http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330/grammar/regcom1.htm

(This is a page for practising comparatives and superlatives, this page does not give you the correct answer but a hint to solve the problem)

http://www.audioster.com/

(I really liked this page because it has many exercises and give you hints for the correct answers)