UNIT PACKET

In almost all my lesson plans, I struggled to prepare more learner-centered classes making great effort to employ the inductive approach rather than the deductive. Proceeding according to many of the theories we learned throughout the course, I was really determined to follow them for I thought it was the great opportunity to apply everything we saw theoretically. For that reason, I did not lose the time, I idealized all the excellence that was passed to us, and with a daring courage, I risked everything to test if it could indeed work in a context that was not propitious and favorable at all to all that pedagogic language teaching theories, such as in Brazilian Public School.

 

I may say that almost everything that I planned had its way to be accomplished without mentioning the fortuitous circumstances that used to assault me daily, such as: students who missed the classes frequently, students who never studied at home and never did their homework activities, students who missed the classes and arrived the next day without seeing the previous content and then I had to review over and over again. Because of all those obstacles, I developed a useful sense of flexibility that challenged me every day and that helped me to widen teaching perspective, and in spite of all that, I could apply many of the theories whenever I had the chance to be with them in real classes. Thus I would say that in most of my classes, the basic structure of the plan that I planned I could apply, yet, I had to make a few changes. With respect to fitting all the class stages with the timing, in the first classes I had some problems, but in the third week onwards, I learned how to manage that as I started to perform all the stages I planned in due time. 

 

As most of the classes were planned to be learner-centered where I made enormous effort to work with the inductive approach as I was always aware to elicit and enable students to infer the meaning by themselves. But of course, unavoidably in some circumstances, I had to mix with the deductive approach for it would be impossible to give a lesson without some direct explanations, where the teacher explains directly rather than eliciting students to infer by themselves.

 

The classes were varied in the sense that I focused on many aspects of teaching, given that I had the brief chance to work with reading texts, with grammar content, with listening and speaking skills and hence I tried to work with as many methods and approaches as possible. The methods I most used in class focused on Communicative Language Learning, constructivism and inductive teaching; for the grammar content and for all the other skills and aspects of the language worked in class, I could mingle The Communicative Language Learning with the constructivism, in view of the fact that I focused on the communication function acting more like a counselor and facilitator rather than an authoritarian leader,

 

I also applied The Natural approach whereby I tried to provide some inputs when I uttered and wrote sentences inviting them to participate in the class dynamic. I mixed features of The Grammar translation method with The Direct method for I used the target language as much as possible working with vocabulary and grammar and also with The Audio-lingual method since I focused on the pronunciation as well.