·09· Teaching and learning online

Hi again! today I have been so productive! many post in one single day, yay!

This is the least post, and im going to talk about teaching and learning online.

I would say Internet has been the most important key to learn languages, such as English and german. Let’s be honest, who liked to memorized during school  those vocabularies and list of verbs which we forgot the following day? Thats was very boring. Fortunately for me,  I was always listening to english songs, and I think that was a key factor that improve a lot my english. I have used different VAS throughout my academic life, such as  online dictionaries Linguee, Wordreference,Pons, Diec, RAE, online spell checkers, etc. All those website has helped me a lot when learning languages.

As I said, listening to english song did help me a lot, but also socials networks such as Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I am a huge fan of the TED talks, very recommended if you want to improve your listening skills in english, plus those talks are very interesting.

Here you have my  4 favorite TED talks ( if you have time, just watch them, you wont regret it!)

 

 

I’ve also learned English through movies. I don’t know about you guys, but i am very a very visual person and I learned a lot through pictures, movies, songs.. So i think culture is very important when you are learning new languages.  So sometimes, you might have trouble understanding what native people say, but when u watch a movie with subtitles, you can go back as many times as possibles, and that’s a great technique to learn a new language.

 

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu.

❝Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.❞
‒Rita Mae Brown

·08· Assessment

Hi readers! How’s everything going? I hope everything’s doing fine.

Today,I am going to talk about the assessment…But what exactly is an assessment?

According to UCONN and Assessment  is “the process of gathering and discussing information from multiple and diverse sources in order to develop a deep understanding of what students know, understand, and can do with their knowledge as a result of their educational experiences; the process culminates when assessment results are used to improve subsequent learning.  It’s also the systematic basis for making inferences about the learning and development of students.  It is the process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to increase students’ learning and development.”  (Assessing Student Learning and Development: A Guide to the Principles, Goals, and Methods of Determining College Outcomes by Erwin 1991)
In the following pictures you can A Taxonomy of Approaches to Assessment and Fundamental Components of Assessment, which I find very interesting.

 

From my point of view, I think an Assessment is a key element in learning languages. At school, I don’t remember to take as many exams as in high school, and the teacher didn’t gave us numbers like at high school, they just told us if we had a progress on the subject or if we needed help. In contrast, at high school they gave us a number, from 0 to 10.

At high school, the assessment was quantitative (hetero-assessment). I don’t remember any occasion where we could evaluate ourselves. It was also was continuous with a final exam at the end of the course. I don’t remember exactly what was the durations of the exams, but around 1 hour or 1:30, more or less. The longest exam I have ever taken was at last year of high school with the history subject.  The teacher gave us 3 hours( or even more).

If I could have chosen  which  assessment to follow in the past, I would definitely chosen the continuous, because from my experience, final exams doesn’t tell anything if you have learned something from that subject.

Thats all for today.
Thanks for reading and do not forget to subscribe if you want to hear more about me.

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu.

“Those who know many languages live as many lives as the languages they know.”
‒Czech proverb

·07· Resources

Hi there, today’s topic is about the different kinds of resources. I will try to classify them and give some examples.

Writing

In high school, we didn’t write essays that much, as far as I can remember, but when we were preparing for our uni exams, the teacher used to gave us tons of essays based on a topic, which was pretty useful, because we receive his feedback, and I think that’s a great way to practice your writing skills.

Speaking

This was my favourite part of the course. We used to do it in pairs, and we used to talk about a topic, and we had to share some ideas, whether we agreed with our classmates, etc. It was quite funny and entertaining, but If I have to give a cons about speaking,  I’d we didn’t practice that much, because we used to choose our best friends in class to practice the speaking, and we end up talking in our native language, so at the end it was a waste of time.

Reading

There were so many little stories in my english books, as I mentioned in my previous posts. There were like some questions under those stories, which we had to answer with an :a, b, c or d. The teachers gave us a short book throughout our academic year, which we had to read whenever we want( we always end up reading in the last week of the course) and then we had to write like a review about the book.

Listening

I remember I used to spent  some afternoons in High School listening some clips or videos, and then we had to answer some questions. Other times, we spent around 10 minutes, but not in every lecture. I used to hate listenings, because I never got the whole conversations due to factors such as the CD was quite old, or because it was not as loud as I wanted to be, or because I was/am terribly deaf.

 

 

Let me know what you think guys.

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu

❝Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.❞
‒Rita Mae Brown

·06· Class planning

Hi everyone! We are almost at the end of the course, and I don’t know about you guys, but I have a lot of assignments and projects to do and I don’t have that much time to write, so I am going to make it short. Today’s topic is about class planning. Throughout my academic life, I have experienced a lot of d kinds of organization planning. I am going to focus with the objective-based planning, which  basically is the planning that all my english teachers used. We studied vocabulary and the verbs tenses and then we had to write essays using all those verbs and vocabulary we previously learned. In my opinion, this didn’t really helped me that much.

I didn’t have much experience to plan a class, even though i’m helping some kids with their english, and I definitely never heard about Benjamin Bloom. He was an and american educational who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery-learning, and he was the creator of Taxonomy, in order to promote higher forms of thinking in education, such as analyzing and evaluating concepts, processes, procedures, and principles. In the next picture you can Bloom’s taxonomy and its different categories.

To sum up, Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy not only improved the usability of it by using action words, but he also added a cognitive and knowledge matrix. He mention three levels of knowledge that could be processed. I found this short video quite interesting and very easy to understand so I hope you guys find it as entertaining as me.

 

Thats all for today, let me know what you think about this topic.

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu

❝Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.❞
‒Oliver Wendell Holmes

·05· Syllabus

Hello Readers!

In today’s topic I am going to talk about syllabus  and how the courses were organized. I’d like to briefly define what is a syllabus and then talk about how my teachers organized their classes throughout my academic years.

What is a syllabus?

Syllabus is an outline statement of the main points of a discourse,the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc. According to CM university, Other functions commonly served by a syllabus include:

• To convey our enthusiasm for the topic and our expectations for the course
• To show how this course fits into a broader context (“the big picture”)
• To establish a contract with students by publicly stating policies, requirements, and procedures for the course
• To set the tone for the course, and convey how we perceive our role as the teacher and their role  as students
• To help students assess their readiness for the course by identifying prerequisite areas of knowledge
• To help students manage their learning by identifying outside resources and/or providing advice
• To communicate our course goals and content to colleagues

So basically, and to me more clear, syllabus is those pages at the beginning of the book or textbooks where it shows the plan for an academic year.

I remember, catalan and spanish books didn’t have that syllabus at the beginning of the pages. We studied basically grammar, such as subordinates sentences or medieval literature, such as El Quijote. I used to hate reading E Quijote, because i didn’t get anything due to the fact that it was written in a medieval spanish and the teacher did not motivate us to understand such complex literature.

 

English and German, on the other hand, it was completely different. They had syllabus at the beginning of the books. In fact, they were divided by topics. In every chapter, there were a little bit of grammar, followed by some small paragraphs which we had to read and then answers some questions about the reading. It was a good way to learn new vocabulary about different topics such as food, transportation, school, sports, etc.

In my opinion, and if I ever want to become a teacher,I would consider writing a syllabus as one of the most difficult tasks of the whole course, because you have to organize elements such as materials, objectives and calendars,  throughout all the academic course. Although I  have a few friends that are teachers and they say that at the beginning of the course, they must to meet the rest of the teachers and make an agreement to design the syllabus, so it’s more like a group project task, but I still think it is a very complex task.

 

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu

❝To have another language is to possess a second soul.❞
‒Charlemagne

 

·04· Methods for language teaching

Hi there!

As a language student, I have experienced a lot of different methods throughout my academic life, ones better, other worse. I’d like to list a few methods, explained them and giving my opinion and some examples on which methods I think are the best and the which are the worst).

Grammar–translation method. This is the classical method, in which students learn the grammatical rules and then they have to apply those rules by translating sentences or words between the target language and the native language. I remember when i was taking Latin back in highschool, and our latin teacher did their lectures (completely) in  catalan, and we had to translate some sentences or texts from latin to catalan or from catalan to latin. I don’t like this methods by the simply fact that after every latin lectures, i forgot what we translated or what we did in that hour. Plus, latin is not a language you hear in the streets or talk with your foreigner friends, so in my opinion it was a completely failure using this method.

The direct method. This method of teaching excludes 100% the native language and uses only the target language. I have experienced this method in different time of my life. I remember when i was 15 and my parents sent me to Canterbury, a very small city near London.There were a lot of kids from different countries in the same class, and even though our levels were a little bit different, the teacher tried to communicate manly in english, (sometimes using the body language), but it was a very effective way to learn a language, because you exclude your native language, therefore you need your ‘’target language’’ to communicate and to express yourself and your necessities.

Another time I experienced this method is when I went to Germany,for my Erasmus program two years ago. This method is also called as Language Immersion, which is a another kind method of teaching a second language in which the students learn school subject such as science, maths, history… in their L2.  I have great memories of my Erasmus. It did not only helped to improve my german, but also to have an open minded toward different cultures. I think culture is essential when you want to learn a new language, because language and culture they often go hand by hand.

So if I had to chose between those methods, I would surely choose the Language immersion, because it has so many benefits for the language student, it can really can help you to develop the communicative competences in the L2.

 

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu

 

❝One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.❞
‒Frank Smith

 

 

·03· Psychological theories

Hi readers! How’s everything going? I hope everything’s doing fine.

Today,I am going to talk about the psychological theories that I have been experiencing as I language student. There has been several psychological theories throughout the years, linguistics who wanted to improve the teaching and education. I am going to write down and try to explain briefly the psychological theories. At the end, I’m going to give my opinion on which one of those theories I have experienced throughout my academic years.

The first one is  Behaviorism, which assumes a learner is essentially passive, responding to learning stimuli, such as repetition exercises, work with fragments or partial units of the language target.This has been the most common theory in teaching.

One the other hand, we have cognitivism. Cognitivism is “the psychology of learning which emphasizes human cognition or intelligence as a special endowment enabling man to form hypotheses and develop intellectually”.Basically, this theory  involve examining learning, memory, problem solving skills, and intelligence.

Another theory is Humanism: Attention to learner’ emotions and feelings; emphasis on personal stories, cultures and points of view, attention to body language. This is the less common among the theories.

“I’m rooted in humanism but today was a rough day so for a little extra support in managing my class, I put on my intimidating face.”

Lastly we have Constructivism and socioconstructivism. The learner is most of the time active at classroom. It involves learner-centered activities, permanent teacher guidance, attention to previous knowledge. The learner has to work in pairs, as well as having dialogue  with the teacher.

As mentioned above, Behaviorism is the most common theory and the one most used. I have been studying for 15 years, more or less, and most of the teachers I had, they used this theory. To be honest, I don’t like it at all, I found it very archaic,  very old-fashionable and quite from the ‘’old-school.’’ I strongly believe, that a student should participate more in class, interactuate with the other classmates and with the teacher and have a very active role in the class.
That’s all for today. Write me below what do you thing about this topic, and what were your experience as a language learners!

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu

 

❝If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.❞

‒Nelson Mandela

·02· Linguistic theories

First of all, I would like to briefly make a point, which I forgot to mention on my previous post, about the reason I chose “ineffable’’ as my title blog. I wanted to show something that is incapable of being expressed or even described in words or sentences. Its translation in catalan would be something like inexpressable.

Back to the topic of today, which is quite interesting to read –and entertraining to write–, because I am going to talk about Linguistic theories, focusing on english as my main foreign language through as perspective as a language learner. On my first post, I mention I started to learn English at the age of 8, and I was very excited to start a new language, as long as I only knew catalan and spanish, and english was a new challenge. Back then, the method of the teacher was quite simple. We had to memorized and repeat very basic stuff, like greetings, colours, numbers and verbs. When I started highschool, thing got more difficult and complicated for me, because my vocabulary was very limited and  I found it quite stressful to follow the lectures, that’s why my parents decide to enrolled me in an english academy  outside school. I actually enjoyed it because the method was very different from my school. I remember very clearly how the first part of the class we started singing songs together, watching some shorts videos or educational documentaries in english and afterwards we had to give ours opinions so we were focusing more in our speaking and listening skills , and the second part of the class we focused more about vocabulary and grammatical stuff, which was more boring but we had to do it for a better understating in English.

 

Here are some books which I used in the last year of Highschool. As you can see, we had two different books: one was the grammar book, also known as students’ book, which focused on basically grammar, and the other one was the notebook or activity book, where you could found all the exercises. To give my humble opinion, I didn’t like that methodology at all, we didn’t learn that much and we end up repeating the same stuff all over again. I remember we never finished the notebook, and we only learned the first chapters of the grammar book, to sum up as a total failure. Perhaps, if the method of my school could have been more similar to my academy, things could have improved dramatically. And it’s not only mine opinion, almost all of my friends and now colleagues agree on that point.

That is a very funny or “meme” as some people called it on how english works. Obviously, it’s just an innocent joke and stereotypes, but as I’m growing up, I realized that english doesn’t work like other languages, and its a bit of “gramatic-free’’. I mean, there are a lot of grammatical structures where there a no rules at all.

 

Thats all for today.
And again, thanks for reading and do not forget to subscribe if you want to hear more about me.

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu.

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

 

 

·01· First impressions: My languages and I

Who am I?

My name is Carles Feliu and I am form a very small town in Costa Brava named Calella de Palafrugell, but right now I am living in Barcelona. Even though i was born there all my life, my parents have

My hometown

different backgrounds. My dad is half catalan  and half french and my mom is half catalan and half asturian, both of them born in Catalonia. The thing is, they always talk to me in catalan, and between them they also talk in catalan, and I have an older brother, whom I talked with him in catalan as well. So I can say that my mother tongue is catalan, which is the language that i feel more comfortable speaking, and I don’t like to say that I am a bilingual, because even though I learned Spanish at school, I don’t feel as comfortable as when I speak in catalan. I read in catalan, I watch tv [even though I only watch the news] in catalan, and when I watch a film or tv shows, it’s mostly in english, since I don’t really like the Spanish/catalan films or tv shows. To sum up, my mother tongue is catalan, since I speak to my whole family and most of my fiends in catalan and and my Language 2 or L2 is Spanish, which I only speak to a small portions of my friends, and occasionally at university, and my foreign language is english, and that is a long story of when i learned english.
Firstly, I started to learn english at the age of 8, which is quite weird, because i met so many people who told me the started at the age of 3. As I am writing this post, I wonder when did I learned Spanish, because since I remember the teachers talked to us in catalan at the age of 3 [ UPDATE: I asked my parents what age i learned Spanish, and they believe it was at the age of 3].

— Let’s get back with english. I remember it as a total failure. It was a very bad methodology, I just remember learning the same stuff until the age of 15. It was 7 years of my life learning the same stuff, over and over again, in other words, learning [memorizing] the verbs, formal greeting and some basic sentences and words such the colors or the hours. At the point, my parents were quite worried for my education, that’s why they sent me to England for about 2 months on my summer vacation. I was terrified, not gonna lie, but I am so glad they did it, because i started to felt more interested in English language and way more confident talking and even reading in a foreign language. Right now, and theoretically,  I have a B2 of english, according to CEFR, but sometimes I feel I have a B1, because I feel that I do a lot of unnecessary mistakes [ as you can see on my post] when i write and speak in english. Compared to the other languages I speak, which is catalan and Spanish, is much higher, which is C2. So basically I only speak english at uni and with my best friend. She is from Asia, and we met years ago, on summer 2009 and we connect in matter of seconds. We speak english to each other, since neither of us speak mandarin or Catalan/Spanish. And thats another topic Im going to talk right now.

Would you like to learn another language?

I forget to tell you guys what i study.I study Applied languages, and as many of you know, u have to choose a language, apart from English,Which is german, french or LSC. I was a bit interested in german, I actually have visited Germany so many times, so I thought it was a great change and a challenge to learned that language, but right now, I don’t really have motivation to keep learning that language, maybe in the future I change my mind, who knows..Oh i forgot, I would say I have A2 in german.

I only know one alphabet at the moment, which is latin language. But I would love to learn mandarin in the near future. I already knows some stuff in mandarin,vert basic though, and since my best friend is Chinese, she can helps me a lot. If I already knew Chinese ( don’t dream Carles) I would probably choose Korean or Japanese, and not only because i really liker their culture, but also because i really wanna learn a language which doesn’t use a latin alphabet. So I hope, in the next 10 years, I would be able to speak a language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet.

 

To get me know better…some curiosities about ME

On my first day of school

 
I think at the end of my posts  I will put some curiosities about me so you guys could know me better, and a inspirational quote. The first thing u should know about me is that i absolutely love animals, which I have a lot of respect for them, thats’ why at the age of 16 i turned vegetarian, which later on i realized I was not helping enough,so at the age of 19 I turned vegan, which is the best decision I ever made, not only for the animals, but for my health, because i suffered from a sever anemia since i was  a kid, and luckily veganism has cured it.
Thats all for today.
Thanks for reading and do not forget to subscribe if you want to hear more about me.

Best wishes,

Carles Feliu.

 

Quote of the day: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
― Nelson Mandela