Unit 2 Any questions?

In this unit I have learnt the importance of checking for real understanding when I give instructions to my students because it helps me to develop my class and to save time doing additional explanations. I also learnt the difference between elicitation (how it activates students’ knowledge)and asking concept questions (for checking their understanding) and the relevance they have in class. Besides, these kind of questions increase students’ participation and knowledge. On the other hand, I didn’t like the creation of a new forum on May 5th due to I supposed I was about to finished the unit, but I realized that a new one had been created later. It discourages me due to the duties we have to develop and we have to come back to the unit many times. additional reflections: Vocabulary: We did not look earlier at the vocabulary in the article because: o Some students can infer their meaning by associating the words in the context without falling in fallacy. o A student could know the meaning of an unknown word and can help the whole class. o Students must realize that unknown vocabulary can’t affect reading comprehension. o Unknown vocabulary could be worked in a post-reading activity. On the other hand, some of them use to underline unknown words then they try to guess the possible meaning. Students could give us different strategies to close to the real meaning of a word. Teacher questions The truth is that I didn’t use to work with elicitation questions because I didn’t know they exist as a strategy. But I consider that this kind of questions must be asked in the mother language because the students could feel more comfortable doing explanations about their knowledge. Asking concept questions are very useful and now I use them more often. I haven’t realized how important they are in our class but since I have studied about giving correct instructions and focusing on real understanding I have noticed that activities work better and students too. Sometimes we as teachers must ask in English first trying to get our students’ understanding and then if things don’t go right we could ask in Spanish. It depends on the topic and the level! question games visual aids: to make easier the activity for my students I could tick some flash cards using wh-questions words which can be downloaded in http://www.mes-english.com/flashcards/questions.php in order to review these kind of words. In order to review the grammar in questions, I could give my students different set of scrambled yes-no questions in different tenses with different scores according the difficulty they have. In lower levels I could use pictures of different activities as well. Grammar terminology In my experience Grammar terminology is important but for my students it doesn’t have the same value due to they are interested in learning the use of the language and no the terminology instead. However, when I teach Grammar terminology I realize that it helps to clarify doubts in our mother language. It improves Spanish because it goes into deep Spanish terminology to make easier English and Spanish learning. According the amount of grammar terminology we must teach, I only can say that sometimes we need to use it if we want to make differences in categories, function words and starting making sentences.