GRETA Granada

DIGESTED READ

A conference truly focused on the pressing current concerns of local teachers, particularly the implementation of CLIL/bilingual programmes in schools.

THE EVENT

Moderator: Antonio Vicente Casas Pedrosa

Participants: María Jesús Fregols, Diana Hicks, Marisa Pérez Cañado, Victor Pavón, Natividad Martínez Marin

María, who is a professor at the University of Alicante, began by asking the participants whether they had had explicit instruction in genre during their schooling. The answer for everybody was no. At school, we tend to have experience only of essay writing, with no awareness that there are many different genres of text, nor of how context and purpose shape the structure of these.

(Photo: Greta president Charo Reyes - right - introduces Diana Hicks) Diana began her thought-provoking session with the observation that, although education involves preparing people for the future, many pronouncements on the topic of education are dressed in nostalgic references to golden times past – phrases like “Back to Basics”, a reference to a British programme of putting more e

Simon posited that, by comparing traditional and ‘newer’ course book series, we can identify a tangible shift from what he termed ‘classical communicative language teaching’ to ‘post-communicative language teaching’.

Christopher opened the session by imploring management to make sure that the spirit of an institution is behind its teachers so they know they have supported when it comes to issues of discipline. He then gave an entertaining and thought-provoking plenary on how to deal with challenging teaching situations and defuse tension in classrooms with primary, teenager or adult students.

Victor began by projecting articles from the press highlighting the benefits of multilingualism.  Articles quoting research showing that bilinguals are smarter, for example. He pointed out that the benefits can be classified into two kinds: a. social advantages, b. cognitive advantages. Victor went on to list 8 types/models of bilingual education, one of which was called “Transitional”.

This was very much a participative workshop session, based on classroom research material being developed by Mª Jesús. We began with group discussions on the importance of vocabulary and the most effective methods of learning it. Suggestions included relevance and motivation, repeated exposure, visual support, richness of context and test washback.