Resources and Strategies for Teaching English

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

• 4. Quality education
• 8. Decend work and economic growth

Objectives

This subject aims at making students aware of several resources and strategies for the teaching of English at Early Years and Primary Education. The students will also have the opportunity to practise such resources and strategies in school and, thus, to acknowledge their own potential as future teachers and to be conscious of their own mistakes.

Students will be required to:

• Learn resources and strategies for the teaching of English at Early Years and Primary Education.
• Learn how to plan and assess teaching sequences at Early Years and Primary Education.
• Create teaching sequences to teach and learn English at Early Years and Primary Education.
• Implement their own teaching sequences in a school.
• Reflect upon their own practice as future teachers.

Learning outcomes

The student is able to...

• Plan teaching units that are adequate to the educational stage. (LO1, LO3)
• Create and adapt teaching units that are adequate to the educational stage. (LO3, LO5)
• Adjust teaching units to the students' needs from the educational stage. (LO3)
• Implement activities and teaching units or projects in the school context. (LO7, LO8)
• Analyse and reflect upon resources and strategies that have been taught in the subject. (LO8)
• Assess activities, teaching units and linguistic skills. (LO3, LO8)

Competencies

Specific skills

• Manage and promote teaching and learning processes through tutoring in the early childhood classroom in a climate of tolerance and affective communication.
• Manage learning spaces in contexts of diversity and inclusion, taking into account the needs arising from disorders and learning difficulties, in order to establish appropriate guidelines for intervention in collaboration with other services, professionals and families.
• Promote the development of global communicative competence in multilingual contexts by using different strategies and linguistic and literary resources.

Basic skills

• Students have developed the learning skills necessary to undertake further studies with a high degree of independent learning.

Core skills

• Exercise active citizenship and individual responsibility with a commitment to the values of democracy, sustainability and universal design, through practice based on learning, service and social inclusion.
• Use oral, written and audiovisual forms of communication, in one's own language and in foreign languages, with a high standard of use, form and content.

Content

1. Ice-breakers and getting started
   1. Learn children's names 
   2. Watch your language
2. Classroom management
   1. Establish classroom routines
   2. Linguistic Landscape
   3. Organisation
   4. Manage behaviour strategically
3. Teaching Sequences
   1. Focusing on learning outcomes and success criteria
   2. Thinking about the curriculum
   3. Integrating learning strategies
4. Storytelling
   1. Selecting suitable stories
   2. Making the most of the process
5. Materials
   1. Collecting material
   2. Creating material
   3. Adapting material
6. Assessment
   1. Formative assessment
   2. Formal assessment
7. Corrective feedback
   1. Formal feedback
   2. Informal feedback

Evaluation

Process evaluation

The subject will be continuously assessed, with evaluation of personal work, directed work and two exams. The students will be required to develop their communicative competence in English language, both in spoken and written form.

The assessed pieces of work will be done both individually and in groups. They will be performed in the university. 

Evaluation of results

• Written exam: 35%
• Project: 30%
• Compulsory class activities: 35%

Attendance is compulsory in all activities related to the subject.

Students are required to obtain a mark of 5 or more for each of the assessed tasks and exams. All assessed pieces of work must be presented in accordance with the established deadline. It is not possible to resit any assessed work that was not presented on time.

Some of the assessed tasks can be presented again, with the appropriate improvements made, during the final week of the subject. The 2nd sitting exam will be done during the resit week.

In the event of any doubt regarding the authorship of a written assignment, the teacher reserves the right to orally question the student to verify their understanding of the content

Resits are only for those students who failed the first evaluation. It is not possible to hand in again pieces of assessed work that obtained a mark of 5 or more, or retake exams that were passed, in order to try to obtain a higher mark.

If one (or more) of the assessed pieces of work fails to obtain a mark of 5 or more after the resit period, the whole subject will have to be repeated.

If the percentage of the failed tasks and exam is more than 50% of the totality of the subject, this will be failed without an option to resit any of the parts during the resit week.

Both content and language will be assessed in all the tasks and exam. The language will be assessed in accordance with the document called Criteria of Evaluation which will be presented to the students at the beginning of the course.

Methodology

The subject aims at working on theoretical and practical knowledge about the learning of English in Early Years and Primary Education. The methodology is active and participative. In order to acquire the required competences and achieve the aims of the course, students will be expected to attend all classes and to have done all the work requested.

The course will consist of five parts:

• The students will learn about resources and strategies for the teaching of English at Early Years and Primary Education.
• The students will learn how to plan, assess and evaluate teaching sequences at Early Years and Primary Education.
• The students will create their own teaching sequences to teach and learn English at Early Years and Primary Education.
• The students will teach their own sequences in a school.
• The students will reflect upon their own practice as future teachers.

Bibliography

Key references

• Byram, M (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Multicultural Matters Ltd.
• Barrett, M. D., Huber, J., & Reynolds, C. (2014). Developing intercultural competence through education. Council of Europe Publishing.
• Generalitat de Catalunya (2015). Competències bàsiques de l’àmbit lingüístic: llengües estrangeres. Retrieved from http://ensenyament.gencat.cat/web/.content/home/departament/publicacions/colleccions/competencies-basiques/primaria/prim-linguistic-estrangeres.pdf.
• Read, C. (2020). 101 Tips for Teaching Primary Children. Cambridge University Press.
• UNESCO (1). Intercultural Competences: Conceptual and Operational Framework. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002197/219768e.pdf.

Further reading

Teachers will provide complementary bibliography and compulsory reading throughout the course via the Virtual Campus.