Teaching context

I'm doing my practicum at Instituto Maritimo in a 3ero medio class.
The students here are studying cooking, so the english here follows a communicative line. The teacher works with "ready to order" longman book, so all the contents are related to the special course that students have selected.
 There are like 36 students both men and women and their ages are between 16 and 17 years old. The students are very interested in learning english because they know that not learning it means not be able to apply for important jobs.

Talking about the sources that they had at school I have to mention that there's not so much use of the library, but I have to remark that each classroom has a data show so the teache ris able to use technology and platforms related to teaching. The bad thing is thta the internet connection is too slow, so the pages aren't alow to charge, it means that we are not able to use internet platforms to make the class more atractive to students.

In my opìnion the use of internet is not a good key to imprive classes., but if the teacher has a mobile connection like those that are like routers, could be usefull. We have used prezi in the classes and the students sseemed very enthusiastic because they don't know anything about prezi.

Extensive Reading program

In my opinion in order to start an extensive reading program we have to take into consideration if the target selected is interesting in reading, because in our country there are very low interest in reading even in Spanish. So the thing is the we have to begin like an step by step program. We have to begin with short stories first, then sort books, pre intermediate level, intermediate and finally advanced readers.

I decided to create this program with only one type of book, the ones from Sherlock Holmes.

Short Stories: Sherlock Holmes Short Stories.

This book has 38 pages. I totally recommend this book to starters readers. You can download this because is in PDF format.
http://www.os-orebic.skole.hr/upload/os-orebic/images/static3/759/File/Oxford-Bookworms-stage-2-www_frenglish_ru-Sherlock-Holmes-Short-Stories.pdf

Short books: Sherlock Holmes and the Emerald Crown.

Here we have a play, is also good to train our reading skills.
 http://elt.oup.com/elt/students/smartenglishitaly/pdf/sme2_play.pdf?selLanguage=it

For pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced level you can choose a book from this website, the books are in html version so you can opy and paste to word and change the file into pdf so it would be easy to share with classmates and friends.

http://sherlock-holm.es/html/

How do our kids learn English?

As parents we are always expecting that our little children can communicate as good as we do, but what about if we are Spanish speakers and we wanted that our children speak Spanish and also English. Maybe for English pedagogy students could be a little bit easy, but what do we have to take into consideration?

There are many factors that can make our goal a completely succeeded step or a totally failure. 

Here I will share some links that I found out very interesting in order to teach our children English as a second language.

Allow your kids to use the computer and try this page:

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/

The Effect of Age on Acquisition of a Second Language for School:
http://thomasandcollier.com/Downloads/1988_Effect-of-Age-on_Acquisition-of_L2-for-School_Collier-02aage.pdf

This is a very interesting book that I'm going to download when I can be able to download it, but now at least we have the name an it's very interesting:
http://www.questia.com/library/2981683/second-language-acquisition-in-childhood-preschool

children learning English, other interesting book to download:
http://bookmoving.com/book/children-learning-english_80695.html


some presentations about second language acquisition:
http://www.slideshare.net/mivettepr/second-language-acquisition-631

Assignment One

Here I post a list of different books and interesting websites for teaching resources that my classmates and I found out on the web.

www.englishtips.org

Here you can download complete works for free. There are a lot of books, course books, novels, graded readers, magazines. Some of them even include audio files so you can both read and listen.
You need to create an account and then search the material you need or the topic. Then, just click on the link of the material you want to download, roll down and hit “mirrors” to display a menu with the links to download the files.
There are some really high quality things, but also some death links. However, that’s not usually a problem because there are comments describing the state of the links (working or not) and the quality of the material.

http://fliiby.com/file/832802/t7mwssk79l.html

Here you can find the book “How to Teach English” by Jeremy Harmer. This book is being used in Methodology 2. It’s a free site so you can download it without paying anything. You have the chance to read it on Scribd. You can also embed the file. It’s also useful because you can share it on different social networks like facebook and twitter, google +1 and send it by email to your friends.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/

On this website, you can find a lot of different material and also teaching resources, like full lesson plans, short activities, articles related to aspects of teaching and free teaching development, and also a forum where you can contribute with new resources for teaching kids and adults. It’s free and only you have to create an account to log in.