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.