Two weeks ago, we visited La Guardia International High School. Due to the bad weather conditions, we arrived a bit late. Thus, we were only able to sit in on three classes instead of four, as it had been planned. The second class I observed was called "Spoken Word". Now, I'll come clean: I stayed in this class longer than expected, so I never sat in on the third class! The thing is that it was so fascinating to see all these students, whose L1 is not English, so engaged in the task.
In the "Spoken Word" class, the teacher makes students listen to a song or read something, and then she chooses an extract or phrase to trigger students' free writing. All of them must write. Afterwards, some students share their productions with the whole class. As this is free writing, there are neither right nor wrong interpretations, and I just love this! It is an engaging task, no one feels ashamed to share their work and on top of everything, all students are required to use English.
In the teachers' exchange after this school observation, some of us agreed on the fact that these students are intrinsically motivated to learn and use English, because they need it for immediate communication purposes. We consequently believe that this is why they responded so well in class. But to me, another key factor was the task and the project that task was part of. Once again, PBL seems to be working just fine :)
 |
| The sign at the entrance |
 |
| A mural made by the students in the "Spoken Word" class |
No comments:
Post a Comment