The Friday before last we started our lesson as if we were in a pre-primary classroom. Our teacher even chose a helper to go over the daily routines and we sang and danced to a good morning song. Our teacher linked this first song with another one asking us if we felt happy after having started with a song, so we sang and danced to another song on what people do when they are happy.
It felt great to go back to the pre-primary classroom, and it was interesting to watch some reactions. The pre-primary education classmates that I had around were as thrilled as me, whereas I thought I heard someone saying "pathetic!" behind me among primary education classmates. I have the feeling they are not as used as we are to playing silly. By the way, playing childish was one of Suggestopedia's principles; this method argues that infantilization is a good resource for language learning, as it frees our mind and takes away the hurdles we put in our own learning path.
Obviously, our teacher reminded us that although there are tons of materials available in the Internet nowadays, that doesn't mean they are all equally valuable. So, we need to be able to discriminate, always bearing our educational objectives in mind. This coming week we will have a chance to see how developed our discriminating skills are, because we will present our mini-English lessons in groups. Sticking to your objectives isn't easy at all; one can happily lose track while getting carried away with very attractive materials or flashy ideas for tasks. Besides, building your own criteria on education is not something you can improvise; it takes time and thinking.
Well, going back to our lesson that day, after feeling refreshed and full of energy acting childish, we split in small groups to talk about the Basque official curriculum, and its contents regarding language, especially English. I had read the goals and contents for pre-primary, and my groupmates had read the ones for primary. The main difference that we noticed between both was that pre-primary children will be working almost exclusively in their listening and speaking skills, while primary children will practice all four skills.
Like any other policy, the curriculum is a text open to a wide range of interpretations. For instance, it states that beginning to use a foreign language orally to communicate within usual situations in the classroom is the skill that should be developed in the 0 to 6 years stage. Therefore, we know that pre-primary children should only be expected to use the foreign language in its spoken form (although we cannot forget that beginning to know about the uses of written language is also a general aim for this stage), and that we should only expect for them to be able to communicate in situations very familiar to them where they will have a lot of support from the communicative context, what does "beginning" mean? where do we draw the line between having begun and not having so? how do we assess if the goal has been accomplished?
There is a wide controversy around the interpretation of the curriculum when it comes to reading and writing skills. The "beginning to know about the uses of written language" in pre-primary curriculum is interpreted as being able to read and write their name and surname, plus the names and surnames of all classmates, plus the names of each of the three courses they have for meal everyday, plus... So, the curriculum is stretched further and further away, and not because a teacher assesses the zone of proximal development and the motivation in a group and reckons that those learnings can be achieved in that particular moment, but because in that school (and most other schools) children are expected to know how to read and write by Christmas in their first year of primary.
The interpretation of "beginning" should be flexible enough to embrace all children who go to school, enable them to progress in their learning and make them feel good about themselves.
iruzkinik ez:
Argitaratu iruzkina