Tuesday, 20th October

Today Francisco surprised us all with these challenging questions: What language should we teach in our class? How do we know which are the words that we should teach our students? If you are working with a publisher, how do you select the words you are going to use in your book? We tried to answer them, as well as we could, but it was not easy to give a proper explanation of our loose ideas. Francisco explained us that the basic words that are used in a specific field are gathered in a CORPUS (plural CORPORA), which we can always check in order to know the relevant concepts that we should be teaching in our class.

In order to teach these difficult words we can use CLIL activities, based on scaffolding strategies. For example, in order to present a lesson on neurones, instead of lecturing our students we could prepare activities for them to do. These activities should be designed in a way that even without having a vast knowledge about the subject our students should be able to complete them in a successful way. For example, we could ask them to match the beginning and the end of some sentences, or to match questions with its corresponding answers. When preparing these activities, the teacher can use simple grammar structures that our students already know in order to help them guess the correct answer in each case. Later, just to check that they have correctly understood the contents, we can ask them to write a brief essay or to complete a drawing labelling the parts of a diagram, etc. This is also a way to change the focus of the class, from the teacher to the student.

In order to let us know how important it is to use clear, understandable language in our classes, Francisco showed us a very interesting video, which can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OaIdwUdSxE . It was Tyler Dewitt's TED talk about the way science teachers speak in their classes.

According to Tyler Dewitt, the use of serious, academic language can be a problem in order to communicate with our student and engage them. Textbooks which are fun seem to be unscientific. If we get obsessed with perfect accurate scientific expression, they will be completely impossible to understand for our students. Communication should be simple and understandable. Telling stories and using funny examples is much more effective and engaging. If we leave out the jargon and make the pupils laugh things will be much more interesting for them. A teacher should also be a good story-teller, and this has to do with emotional connection with the audience.

I couldn't agree more! In fact, I think that this is one of the basic aspects of my own teaching, and my students always tell me that this particular way of speaking is for them the most valuable and useful element of my classes. Anyway, there is an aspect that Tyler Dewitt doesn't take into account in his wonderful presentation. Even though understanding is essential, and using a simple and clear language can be an excellent way to achieve rapport and to transmit contents, the teacher should also take into account that students must be able to learn how to use educated, academic language in their tests. This is particularly relevant when we are teaching sixth form students, who must prepare their A levels. My personal experience with 17 and 18 year old students shows me that one of the most difficult aspects of teaching in such a way is the importance of teaching the pupils how to shift from an informal simplified version of the contents to an academic formal language. This skill is not easy to master, and is certainly quite difficult to teach, but it is essential, especially if our students are planning to continue studying at university.