THIS IS US

Hello, readers!! 

We are Carla, Esther, Angela, Zornitsa and Arantxa and we have been friends for many years now.We all have been studying English for many years, and we love this language and all the cultural aspects related with it. We all studied English studies, and we have been classmates for four years now. I think we all decided to do a degree in English studies because apart from learning about the history, literature and culture of all the English speaking countries, we wanted to be teachers in a future. So, after having finished the degree, we are now doing the masters of Secondary school teacher because we all love teaching and it is our goal to learn as much as we can to end up being innovative and funny teachers. We will now mention some of our most relevant characteristics:

                           
                                                  
This is us in Lisbon!! 

I am Carla (middle) and I am a very active person who likes to be occupied because if not I get really bored! and I am a talkative, funny, happy person who loves helping the others. I think I want to be a teacher because I think there are many things in our society that must change and I think teaching is the best way to do it because we have to start from scratch.

This is Esther (right) and I am a very curious person. I like reading, music, playing the piano and flute, I like languages, I like traveling, etc.; in short, I like whatever that stimulates my mind. I like learning, definitely. And I want to be an English teacher because I would like to provide the most useful tool to discover the world for students, that is, English.



I am Zornitsa (left), a language lover. I grew up switching between Spanish, Catalan and Bulgarian daily, and now I have upgraded to English, French and a little bit of Russian. I have just graduated in English Studies and now I am doing my Master’s Degree in Secondary School Teaching of English, since I am fascinated in the way that young learners acquire languages, and I will try to do my best in order to be the English teacher that I never had, but wanted to have. I want to make a small, daily revolution in my classes, and change the way in which language teaching is perceived. I am also a culture lover and feel the constant necessity to travel and get impregnated with local minority cultures in order to learn from them. I really want to share my curiosity with my students, and make their learning experience as complete as possible.

I'm Ángela (middle) and I love English because I love English culture and literature. Part from this, I love also music (I play the guitar) and photography. I don't know yet if I want to be a teacher or not, I'm more interested in translation but I'll find out by the end of this year, I hope. I love spending time with my family and friends because I love them.

This is Zornitsa, Esther, Ángela, Carla and Arantxa having fun!

This is Arantxa. I am reliable, honest, easy-going and a good friend. I consider myself to be a hard worker and a helper for people. I would like to be a teacher because I think I can help and guide students very well. Also, I am a shy person, but my confidence arises when I am in front of students. I like learning with them and I like feeling useful for people.

EDUCATION

                             

In our first class, we worked with the concept of education: what and how important it is, how people view this concept, if there are problems when we try to work with it and if there are, how can we manage to improve education. In short, we tried to deal with one of the most important things, in case it is not the most important one, in society.

Thus, education is the process of learning or teaching not only in the academic field, but also in outside the classroom, for example at home. It refers to the process of learning and teaching, the process of acquiring knowledge.

Regarding the problems around education, we think that students limit themselves at schools for many reasons. For instance, knowledge finds boundaries at school because it is limited in a strict set of subjects: maths, English, gymnastics, science, etc. Also, students at secondary education usually sit on a chair trying to listen to 7 teachers per day, who provide them a lot of information; unfortunately, learners hardly remember a few things of the lessons.

Where is the focus of this problem? We think the cause of it lies on, again, many factor. Firstly, on parents or students' background because people are commonly confused about the term of education: we live in a society where education is usually conceived as the results students get represented by numbers (marks). Secondly, on those particular teachers that are not motivated or do not like what they are doing and, in general, on teachers that sometimes forget their role as educators and act as simply workers just interested in students' results from 1 to 10. Consequently, all causes we can think of inevitably bring us to the action of the government. Education depends on governments: they take control or not of teachers, they design programs, subjects and timetables and they design aims and goals.

Videos: 

This is one video that we saw in class: Nash Euilibrium

This is other of the videos played in class: Ken Robinson. Do schools kill creativity?

Finally, this is a video that represents very well our opinion about problems on education. We hope you like it!

COLLABORATIVE PROJECT

In the first collaborative project each group of the class had to present information about a linguistic theory and its author. The groups basically explained very briefly the key points of these theories, giving examples and contrasting them with other theories. We think the aim of this project was to create a new atmosphere in the classroom, non-existent until that moment, in which all of us could act both as teachers and students. This way, we can observe which are the main problems that can appear at both sides.

This project also created a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere in the classroom and of course we learned about these different theories. Thanks to this project, we realized how important is to respect the explanation of the teacher because there is a lot of work behind this figure. This is crucial in our process of becoming teachers, so this collaborative project will be crucial for our future careers.

Our team working on the oral presentation of Chomsky's Universal Grammar to our classmates.

This project process was quite simple. We all decided we wanted to do Chomsky because we had already been learning about some of his main theories during our degree in English Studies and we all liked him. We met three different times. The first time we met we thought about the different points we wanted to include in the presentation and we distributed this points between the five of us. The aim of distributing them was to be able to work on them at home because we all live in different places and meeting is not easy for us. In the second session we shared the different information we had and we

Collaborative learning is really important for us because we think a teacher will never teach efficiently if there is not cooperation with its students and in the same way, students will never learn if they do not cooperate among them.

Lev Vygotsky was pioneer on this concept, which he called zone of proximal development. According to him, this zone of proximal development guides the skills a learner has throughout the process of maturation. This author highlighted the idea of learning through communication and interactions between people, learners, instead of independent work. 
Collaborative learning is based on the idea of equality between learners, adults and students, and teacher-student relationships. Also, it is commonly known that collaborative learning is very important in achieving critical thinking. 

The linguistic theory we went through is Chomsky's Universal grammar. This theory is crucial in the study of language acquisition because of many reasons. Firstly, this theory is pioneer in studying the acquisition of languages within the field of cognitive science. Secondly, it laid the basis for the scientific study of languages, placing syntax as the center of study. The universal grammar talks about innatism regarding the acquisition of a language: there exist principles and parameters in all human minds which are the basis of all existing grammars and their possibility of being acquired. In short, Chomsky is called “the father of modern linguistics”.

Our classmates investigated about several linguists like Saussure, Piaget or Hymes. The one who caught our attention the most was Hymes because he criticizes Chomsky and his Universal Grammar. Basically what Hymes proposes is that in the field of acquisition of languages we must take into account the attitude, motivation and social context, crucial factors in the language acquisition which do not appear in Chomsky.