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Hello everyone! I´m Natalia Rodrigues from Rada Tilly, Chubut. I have been teaching English for 13 years and I´ve always wanted to be a graduate teacher. That´s why I decided to start this great and challenging journey at Lenguas Vivas. The aim of this blog is to show you every step and experience of each period of my Practicum. Hope you enjoy it!

As soon as I finished studying at Secondary school I decided to study “Tourism” at university. When I was in second year I started teaching English in a Primary school. Soon, I realised how important was to have a high level of English either if you work as a tourist guide or you give English lessons. That is why before I finished studying Tourism, I entered a public institution to become a teacher. Then, I graduated at university and I decided to continue studying to be a teacher at “Lenguas Vivas”. I am sure it was the best decision taken!

I started teaching when I was 18 years old and at the beginning I followed what the institutions’ authorities or coordinators told me to do. However, as soon as I started studying to become a teacher at a public institution, attending different seminars, workshops, lectures, cogresses, and gaining more experience, I realised that the communicative approach was the one that I was mainly in favor of.

Following Larsen – Freeman (2000), “communicative competence is the goal of language teaching”. In order to be able to communicate learners required more than mastering linguistic structures. It is important that students produce sentences accurately in the classroom, but it´s much more significant that they can use them appropriately when they authentically communicate outside the classroom. This is what I could understand little by little and so I always try to make my students communicate as the central aim of my classes.

As I know the importance of teaching language in context, I usually start my lessons with an appealing and effective context, such as a story, a dialogue, an article on a specific topic or a real life situation.

Nunan (1998) highlights the idea of teaching vocabulary and grammar in context. We should not teach words in isolation, we need to present meaning through different techniques such as realia, pictures, modeling, mime and gestures. Besides students need to learn how to form structures, but also how to use them to communicate meaning. They need to be provided with a real context, considering their motivations, desires and individual characteristics.

Other authors that I would like to mention are Ausubel and his Meaningful Learning Theory, and Piaget and his Cognitive Development theory. According to their theories, learners acquire new knowledge by relating new information to previous knowledge established in their cognitive structure. I apply these theories in my teaching practice by presenting students activities in which they can relate what they have already learnt to the new information, taking into account real context.

The approaches and methods that I adopt when I teach depend on the students’ age. I like applying TBL (Task Based Learning), considering the three main stages in the class, which are: before the task, during the task, and after completing the task. PPP (Presentation – Practice – Production) method and Total Physical response method (especially in Kindergarten) are the ones I mainly use.