Histórias de sala de aula - Inicial — UFRGS

paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL • Porto Alegre • v. 8• nº 2 • 2018

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Who are the English speakers in the world? - a project about celebrities from

Anglophones countries with C21

Introduction

The following report aims to describe my project for the course Estágio de Docência em Língua Inglesa I. In the project, I worked with genres and activities inspired by the theme “celebrities from English speaking-countries” and it was applied with an 8th group, C21, of a city school in Porto Alegre. Planning the project and practices

Initially, the project was not planned to be about celebrities. It was supposed to be about English speaking-countries in general and celebrities were supposed to be just a part of the theme. However, during the development of the classes, celebrities were used to illustrate English speakers countries and I realized it could be more explored: there was a lot of interesting texts produced by or about those people that could be used in class.

Since the students received well this idea, I planned the following classes using those celebrities as a form to present people from different English speaking-countries, based on genres and texts that were related to these people. As the final production, students made a Powerpoint presentation of a celebrity of their choice. It is also relevant to point that I had a huge help from the school's official English teacher. She assisted me in all the classes by entering the classroom with me and helped me with the plannings by reviewing and giving suggestions. The assistance I had from her shows the importance that the tutor teacher can have during the internship in the training of graduating students who are preparing to be teachers. The classes

We started with a presentation dynamic to break the ice and then the students were handed a map (Image 1) and had to name all the countries and write its nationalities. They received dictionaries, atlas and were allowed to search on their phones as well. The idea of this activity with the map was to familiarize them with countries that speak English, find out the names of the countries and nationalities in English and also connect the language with a genre that is from “other disciplines”, since maps are more commonly used in geography and history classes. At the end of the first class, it was possible to see that C21 was an engaged group, but it was necessary to respect their time and not hurry them, otherwise, they would be tired and not really interested in the class. The second activity, which was planned to be in first class, happened on the second meeting. Students received a handout with some famous celebrities (Image 2) and had to search for their


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nationalities. Once again, they were allowed to search on their phones and could also ask classmates if they did not know from where was someone. After that, some cards with profiles and pictures of previous task’s celebrities were divided into groups. The groups did not have the profiles and the corresponding picture so they had to search to switch cards and match it. All the profiles were excerpts from the celebrities’ Wikipedia pages written in English and the students had to find the matching picture by trying to understand key-words in the text to get its meaning. After matching all the cards, each group had to create a table with the people of their cards, informing name, profession, and nationality.

Image 1: Map with the English speaking-countries


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Image 2: Celebrities’ handout


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Image 3: Example of cards with profiles and pictures. The texts used in the cards were adapted from https://www.wikipedia.org/. In the third class, I started to work with texts and genres produced by the celebrities that the group had studied until the moment. The class was about Queen`s song “I want to break free”. The objective of this class was to know a song by Tanzanian singer Freddie Mercury. After asking students if they knew any song by Queen and where they heard any of the band’s song, the group received two handouts, one with the lyrics (image 4) and other with images that represented some of the song`s verses. C21 watched the video clip twice to fill the spaces with verses that were not there, and, after that, they tried to get the meaning of the verses with the images.

Image 4: Handout 1: Lyrics of the song “I want to break free”

https://www.wikipedia.org/


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Image 5: Handout 2: Images that represent some of the song’s verses

The fourth class was the continuation of Freddie's song activities. As homework, they had to summarize what was the meaning of each strophe of the song. Most of they didn’t do the homework, so we decided to use a few minutes of the class to do the task. After that, students answered the question “why does he/she want to


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break free?” in English with some examples of sentences like “He/she wants to break free because…”, “he is tired of….” written on the board, and they got help from the teachers when it was necessary. To finish the class, C21 (students and teachers) made posters telling what they want to break free from:

Image 6: The posters by C21

The fifth class was about Mahatma Gandhi famous’ quotes. I prepared a presentation for that class, but unfortunately, I was not able to use it because the


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school’s technological resources did not work that day, and I could not manage to fix it in time. The only solution was to write on the board the tasks of the day.

Even though it was not ideal, I wrote the quotes from Gandhi on the board and gave the task showed below (image 8). Before working with the quotes in English, I used my cellphone to show Gandhi’s quotes in different languages in order to make students recognize the genre “quotes”, explaining that it is the same independently of the language.

Image 7

Image 8 and 9: Quotes from Gandhi and task. Quotes are not presented in PPT presentation format because that was not possible to do in class that day.


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Image 10: Question and suggestion on how to answer it.

In the end of the class, after the activities about the questions, I asked students why there were words underlined in the quotes and ask if they would underline any other word. I underlined the words because that was how it was in the original images I used in the presentation. The work with the quotes led to an explanation about grammar classes such as noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. At this moment, it was necessary to use English and Portuguese sentences to show students that these grammar classes were the same in Portuguese as well. As homework, they had to classify the marked words in the grammar classes. The sixth class started with correction of the homework, and it was followed by an assessment test about profiles. Since the trimester was ending, the official teacher required me to do an assessment activity to finish their grades. We did it together and she graded it alone, but she showed me her correction, and she asked me if I agreed with all the grades, including the participation grade.

The test was done individually, but they could consult the classmates and the dictionary. The procedure was more like a task in classroom than an actual test.


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Image 11: Assessment activity. The class number 7 was the report cards’ delivery day and the vice-principal suggested me to bring activities that would not require school material because it was possible that some students would not bring it to school considering that they would leave earlier that day. For that reason, I decided to make a game day in class. C21 was divided into four groups and each group received little pieces of paper with the strophes of the song “Diamonds” by Rihanna. The objective was to put the lyrics in order as they were listening to the song. The song was played twice and the group that put the papers in order first would win. In the second game, each group had to choose a strophe of the song and make a drawing to represent their choice. The classmates would have to guess what part of


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the song the classmates have chosen. These two activities were very nice because students liked it, and they already knew the song, which made them feel comfortable enough to say the lyrics out loud, some even attempted to sing along. In the last 10 minutes, we played Heads & Tails. In this game, every student would say a word in English and the next classmate would say a word that starts with the final letter of the previous one. The end of the project The three last classes were planned to prepare the final production. Since the official teacher of the group thought repetition was something important for the learning of that group, we decided it was not a real problem to work a lot with the same genre. For the final

production, we decided that each student should build a

Powerpoint presentation about a celebrity they like.

On the eighth class, I brought a text with tips on writing biographies. The text was in English and students had to answer comprehension

questions, also in English.


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Image 12: Tips on how to write biographies Before the text, we also had a little conversation to remember what we have seen since I started the project with them. Students mostly talked about the celebrities and brought back especifically classes we had: “we had that class about Freddie Mercury”, “we had that class about Gandhi”, etc. The ninth was reserved for building the Powerpoint presentation. C21 went to the lab and created a presentation of a celebrity of their chose after I presented Chimamanda Adichie as an example of a presentation (image 13).

Image 13: An example of a presentation While I was presenting, I wrote some sentences in the board to guide my speech and to give students suggestions of what they could say during their own presentations since it should be in English. The sentences I wrote on the board can be check in the image below:


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Image 14: Examples that were written on the board to help in oral presentations. The tenth class happened one week later than presumed due to the school’s strike against mayor Nelson Marchezan’s politics. On the last day of class, the group presented their PPTs about celebrities chosen by them. Considering the one week break, some students did not remember very well their presentation and it was decided that each student could have a moment to analyze their work before presenting it. In the first moment, it was difficult to convince the students to speak sentences in English (simple sentences simple like “He is _____/ He is from____/etc”) for the whole group, but fortunately, most of them got the courage to do it after the official teacher and I talked to them. For assessment and feedback, we used the table shown in image 16. The table was explained to the students before all the presentations.

Image 15: Example of students’ presentations


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Surely, letting the students decide the celebrities they wanted to present occasioned in a lack of different speaking countries, but at the other side, it made possible to them to present someone they can identify with and like. In other words, we - the official teacher and I - still think it was a positive work because it was not necessary to make a high effort to present someone since they were writing about someone that is, somehow, important to them.

Image 16: Table prepared by the teachers to give feedback on students’ presentation Final thoughts

Even though I had some problems due to strike at the end of the project, I believe it was a gorgeous experience in public school since I could overcome some “fears” I had about teaching teenagers. Again, I reinforce the importance of the help that I had from the group’s teacher, and I think my personal experience reveals the role that the teacher from regular schools can have on teacher in trainings graduation. Besides being sure that it is possible to make a lot of relevant projects to promote the learning of foreign language, I finish this internship believing it is very important to have teachers in schools that promote information and qualification on our profession.

In the final product, I wish it was possible to have different nationalities in the celebrities chosen, but it was a choice made by the official teacher and me to let students choose people they like to promote a work that is, somehow, meaningful to them. For that reason, in my perception, the product still had a positive result.

As the last task, I asked students to write me feedbacks about the project and the classes, and I received great answers. I believe the feedbacks were very important because students could use this moment to write (anonymously, if wanted) about what they liked and disliked about the project. It was surely helpful to make me think about my future practices.

Histórias de sala de aula - Inicial — UFRGS

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