- Dora and Fred are up to something. The Jeau de Pomme is also active! New strips. Always on the right hand side of this blog!
Rede Social Universidade de Vigo: http://redesocial.uvigo.es/
Apart from some strip work, I have designed another warming-up activity for the Grammar Friday class. I keep on recreating political cartooning, wit and double meaning by writing captions and editing public domain clipart and old illustrations from the web 2.0. I can use this activity as cue to illustrate some historical and/or cultural aspect of interest, to make some comments on vocabulary and expression and to use examples from the text of the presentation to do some practice on grammar and pragmatics. The idea is that the students find some extra motivation for self-study. For instance, they could do a search on the cultural or political topic at issue, they could do some vocabulary work, they would go deep into some grammatical difficulty. I tend to use 15-20 minutes for the activity. At the end of my comment I relate my comments in this activity with the subsequent lecture on Grammar by means of repeating the main characteristics of some of the examples and items of vocabulary. This means that I can never exploit the activity in full. Last Friday the class was structured in 4 activities: 1) This warming up presentation, 2) Some examples to analyze from another presentation, 3) The grammatical description of the Complex Sentence in the course notes (Unit 5), 4) A final practical activity in which the students classified a list of examples of subordinate clauses (Nominal, Adjectival, Adverbial, Finite-Non-Finite) in a table in Word to upload in the course page as an extra document. Everything went quite well. A little bit too late, but the students are getting into the routine of the classwork and things are looking up. Important external factors have prevented this course from running as effectively as I would have wished, but the structure of the course is much more satisfactory than in the past. It is very difficult to teach a yearly subject on grammar to students from different countries and interests with different backgrounds that are coming and going on Erasmus programs and/or need to combine this subject with other subjects from courses from other years that may provoke a timetable conflict. Further, this subject is by definition a comprehensive survey course on English grammar specially designed for the old degree in English Philology. As the official syllabus must remain the same and the original descriptor was based on the old teaching method based on a compedium of class notes plus exercises, any kind of innovation based on developing competences cannot be completely effective and it may produce in the students, especially at the beginning, a sense of dispersion. Attendance has been unfortunately highly irregular, specially at the beginning of the second semester and this has proved quite negative. I know that the students face a lot of problems and they know that I don't host any ill feelings against them -also that I will help them as much as I can. These years of innovation and change are a fascinating challenge and provide many personal satisfactions, but are also quite frustrating and hard in many respects. Of course, part of the responsibility is on the part of the teacher, but he (she) is not to blame of many external, structural, political and social factors that have played a crucial role in the last years. By July I will write my personal report on how things went during this year. There are still two weeks of classes left, then the presentations and then the oral interviews. The students have two chances in June and in July. I need to see how they do in their presentations to draw conclusions about the year.
Time to stop now on this Saturday evening. Hopefully, I'll find some time to put to dedicate to this blog tomorrow.
(Cartoon prompted by the UK election results in the context of the present European crisis and the educational reform)
- View more documents from Eduardo Varela.
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