According to the reading "English as a Lingua Franca" many things are a difficult point for reflection. In fact , now-a-days , many schools are worried because the class plans they are applying are not working at all. Most of their students can say how to "build " a correct sentence, or how to fill the blanks with the appropiately words. Maybe they can recognize how to answer according to the proposed situation( shown in books or written exercises) , but what happened when some of these boys and girls went abroad and faced up real situations in English like going to a grocery store or visit historical places or in a typical situation like take the right bus or train route? Sadly, they can recognize that all that time at school or in a specialized institutes was wasted. In my personal opinion, learning a language is not just to follow several grammar or phonetic rules, communication goes further, it involves competence, fluency and the personal conviction of spread your ideas clearly and share opinions in spite of cultures or religions.
That is why we, as teachers, have an important responsability of change all this school plannings in order to make our students understand the importance of communicate with others in a functional way, forgeting to feel afraid of exposing their ideas or without thinking if they have incorrect patterns of pronounciation, the only important thing is to spread your culture and express your feelings .
Grammar and phonetic patterns are necessary but they are not the unique aspect you need to learn for a meaningfull communication.
Coments? Please let me know your opinion.
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2 comentarios:
Sandra,
I think you have a very valuable point of view and I would like to add a little to your comment, I agree with you when you say that we should teach our students to express themselves to expand their culture beyond limits but I would also say that it is important to do this as much as to get to know other cultures and their points of view,too. One aspect of learning a language is that it is not alone because it is also engaged with so much of each culture (sociocultural and sociolinguistic aspects)we can't teach a language with mere and plain grammar ideas to express what we want without a contextualization, with no culture connection at all, e.g: I have ten years old , when we really wanted to mean I AM TEN YEARS OLD, we need to teach our students in this case that for them the age is not a possesion but a condition of the body which ages with the time.
We as teachers have the responsability to contextualize our students in an effort to build a bridge between our colombian culture and the american culture, british culture, australian culture and so many others. We have to enrich our bounderies with the knowledge of the world and so also become ambassadors of our country to the world.
I see we three share the idea that teaching a language is not just teaching the structure of a system for language is much more. Language embraces ways of thinking and behavior and those in charge of teaching a langauge should be aware of its richness. "La lengua es el corazón de la cultura, el universo de expectativas de la acción, su esencia misma... Nada existe, culturalmente hablando, fuera del lenguaje" (Mancuso, H: 1999)
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