TASK-BASED LEARNING

The PPP approach has always been used to teach languages ​​at school. PPP means presentation, practice and production, and, if this model is taken, the learning content is given by the teacher, implemented by the students through exercises, and, finally, used by the learners in less controlled speaking or writing activities.

One of the criticisms that this methodology has received is that the contents, in the beginning, seem to fit perfectly, but, in reality, these are not suited to each child.

An alternative to the PPP model is the Test-Teach-Test approach (TTT). In this model, the production stage is the first and, after, students have to develop a particular task (a role play, for example). In addition, this is a process followed by the educator.

Task-Based Learning is based on three stages. The first of these is the pre-task stage, in which the teacher introduces and defines the theme and the students perform activities that will help them to remember words and phrases that will be useful to them during the performance of the main task.

The second stage is called the “task cycle”. It is when students do a task in pairs or small groups, and children prepare a report of how they did the task and what conclusions they reached. At the end of the task, they present what they think in front of the class.

The last stage is the language focus stage of approach to language.

The main advantages of TBL are that language is used for a genuine purpose meaning that real communication should take place; that it integrates all four skills and moves from fluency to accuracy plus fluency; and that there are many activities that can be performed and that motivate the students.

We think that this methodology is one of the best for the learning process, because it encourages meaningful, functional, globalized and cooperative learning. With it, observation and inquisitiveness are encouraged. Also, questions are answered by different stages of research, collecting and analysis of the information, experimenting autonomously and coming to conclusions.

This is the link of the article that has been commentated in this text:

http://ingles.ing.uchile.cl/otros/downloads/task-based%20learning.PDF

By: Anna Navarro and Alicia Sánchez

CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL)

In a CLIL program, learners gain knowledge of the curricular subject (for example, Science) while simultaneously learning and using the target language (for example, Italian). CLIL has the advantage of addressing all or part of one or more curriculum areas, and thereby extends the time on task for language learning.

However, there are important factors which need to be considered before a school commits to the introduction of a CLIL program. These include:

• The availability of qualified languages teaching staff with the required knowledge of the CLIL approach and the appropriate level of competence in the target language.

• Ensuring students can also understand the key terms and concepts in content areas in both languages.

• The need to manage parental perceptions.

• The resources and potential timetabling changes required to implement a CLIL programs (including curriculum planning time).

From here, we are going to explain an example of students at Coatesville Primary School, who usually learn French. But in this case, they were provided with four 50 minute introductory lessons in Spanish. For the six weeks of the project, the teacher focused on the skills of listening, and responding orally and in writing. Students could learn by demonstrations, gap-filling exercises, flash cards, opportunities to revise and rehearse, and providing summaries.

A POINT OF CAUTION

Adapting existing English units to be suitable in the CLIL context

Because CLIL works on the principle of matching content against what students would normally cover in the corresponding monolingual curriculum, it it understandable that existing mainstream units of work are used as initial reference points for developing CLIL adaptations on the same topic. It is also useful to identify key learning objectives and topics.

However, it became apparent that the most productive way of working with previous units of work is to see them as points for inspiration, and then attempting to follow them too closely as the basis for the CLIL unit.

For example, the unit of work in this case, when taught in English, introduces cause and effect through a storybook around social relationships: the person wakes up grumpy (cause), and then becomes angry at the supermarket attendant (effect). But the key conceptual point -cause and effect- need not be taught based on same materials or tasks, and it is often more productive to focus on other ways of arriving at the same learning outcome.

CHALLENGES

Sharing learning spaces

Where there is no dedicated language classroom, it is difficult to establish a culture and set of expectations where teaching and learning takes plane in another language. 

It would therefore be helpful for schools to commit a dedicated space for CLIL, where teachers can build a rich learning environment specifically for the target language and content. The fact of having materials only in one class would also be better than distributing them into the different classes where the teacher works with.

Isolation and impact of the wider school community

Even with considerable whole school support, there is usually very few other CLIL staff in the school to discuss problems or issues that makes it difficult to offer additional support or time.

In developing a CLIL program, it is necessary to think through these topics and if that is not possible, then the languages teacher will not have to rely so heavily on others to ensure the program can be delivered.

CONCLUSION

We live in a community that is constantly in touch with the entire world. It is therefore necessary that since we born, we start getting adjust to other languages.

Talking about CLIL, students learn by the same way as native speakers do. The language is used as a motivational tool to learn the contents of the subject, because lessons are based around highly familiar topics to them and multiple intelligences. So children focus on fluency and communication and have the opportunity to experiment with the language.

For that reason, teachers should have a good command of the first and foreign language. By this way, they would be able to appreciate the learners' language difficulties and have the ability to deal with them.

To sum up, this text is an invitation to reflect about what is needed to implement different methods so that students and teachers can succeed by becoming involved in academic performance, critical thinking, collaboration, and multiculturalism through interactions in the classroom.

We leave you an interesting video to finish understanding the CLIL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIRZWn7-x2Y




Text based on these links:

• http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/principals/curriculum/Pages/languageclil.aspx
• http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/principals/curriculum/Pages/clilcoatesville.aspx

By: Gemma Cuenca Casacuberta and Paula García Morán.

Education and Social Development/Quality of life By Yadiar Julián Márquez Sánchez

Education.

Talking about education and social development of the human person, lead us to a dynamic context about the action of educating towards individual, familiar and social development. In other words, Education must teach a person that their individual capabilities2 must be in constant equilibrium and relationship with everybody else, furthermore, this equilibrium gives as result such human and social development.
Education is, according to our judgement, the action and courage by which all persons may be able to get a better quality of life, and doing so, a good social development. “It is the development and permanent training of all potentialities, competences and capabilities of man as a human, conscious and free person. It is the embellishment3 of the person at their prime of the spaces in body and spirit, and as consequence of this transfiguration, an impact of the embellishment of their familiar, community, social, political, work, academical, etc., environment.”
It is in Education where a transformation in society can be made, and as such, to enrich the culture and to attain a true development with Ethics and suitability. There exist many points of view to watch and analyze institutions: Education and Social Development, Capitalism, Socialism, Comunism, Marxism, Positivism, etc., all of which defend their position about Education and Quality of Life. Whether good or bad, all of these positions look for the well being and perfectionism of men in society, the fine, just development, leveled and sustainable about what man does, coexists, produces and lives.

Education and Development Dilemma.
All these chapters, along with their indicators, express the utopy of a good personal and social development, but it exists a big dilema to understand more profoundly the concept of education and development.
Personal and social well-being are reflected in the happiness of the same man, and it is in this equilibrium and well-being where such feeling is expressed. Modernization, technology, big cities, politics, are not reflecting such response, and before such dilema, the concept of development expressed in family, organisms, culture, organization, nation, civilization, world, globalization systems and microsystems, etc., is misunderstood and confused. In that situation I say: What situation of man, or what social environment of man is considered as the achievement for development?, I do not know, what I do see and hear when I get off a plane: a huge city like a deafening turbine, that generates global warming, so technified and developed. A place where the persons are not persons anymore, and they have become individuals that only live for themselves. I see that they have forgotten the most essential part of being: “Living and look for the happiness of the community”.
Before such image, I recall myself in the same plane, when it flies at the highest, passing over many communities, and in such a show, I manage to see some poor towns and places that happen to get lost in the great dimension of the green or golden color, reflected by the vast dimensión of forgotten fields. Those towns, places or communities, how would they understand social development?
Forgotten communities, where migration has become part of their culture, where cosmos is still a fundamental part in their daily life. Small and poor towns so far away from technology and modernity, where there still exists the family value, fraternity, common help when the food becomes scarce, the sense of life, the respect and care for nature, a tradition that identifies them, and a set of values that makes them unique and different. Them, how would they understand social development? Them, have they lost equilibrium and have they forgotten living and looking for happiness?
I do not know, with this small reflection I recognize that education can be that hinge that may take towns and cities to find that equilibrium for a just social development. We still do not know what the city is lacking, or what that small community is lacking so they can reach that harmony and happiness. What I am sure of is, that an educated government would have a clearer sight about what to look for for the community. An illiterate government, poor in terms of education, would take the people to a social and productive underdevelopment . In conclusión, we can say that education must take the person, the community or the country into a social development within the frame of Ethics and suitability; living aside Ethics in development is to take man himself to a de-personalization, and therefore, to a senseless community away from what is looking for, equilibrium and perfection.


Finally, we offer to you a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmd1Kmjs7NE

________________________
2 The capability of a human person must be understood as a way to emphasize capabilities and to reach social development.
3 This term we can explain as a Good Deed, well done that produces some good which in turn is translated into an existing reality (Victor García Hoz).

The Benefits of Music Education

The Benefits of Music Education

By Laura Lewis Brown

A boy getting a piano lessonWhether your child is the next Beyonce or more likely to sing her solos in the shower, she is bound to benefit from some form of music education. Research shows that learning the do-re-mis can help children excel in ways beyond the basic ABCs.

More Than Just Music

Research has found that learning music facilitates learning other subjects and enhances skills that children inevitably use in other areas. “A music-rich experience for children of singing, listening and moving is really bringing a very serious benefit to children as they progress into more formal learning,” says Mary Luehrisen, executive director of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Foundation, a not-for-profit association that promotes the benefits of making music.
Making music involves more than the voice or fingers playing an instrument; a child learning about music has to tap into multiple skill sets, often simultaneously. For instance, people use their ears and eyes, as well as large and small muscles, says Kenneth Guilmartin, cofounder of Music Together, an early childhood music development program for infants through kindergarteners that involves parents or caregivers in the classes.
“Music learning supports all learning. Not that Mozart makes you smarter, but it’s a very integrating, stimulating pastime or activity,” Guilmartin says.

Language Development
“When you look at children ages two to nine, one of the breakthroughs in that area is music’s benefit for language development, which is so important at that stage,” says Luehrisen. While children come into the world ready to decode sounds and words, music education helps enhance those natural abilities. “Growing up in a musically rich environment is often advantageous for children’s language development,” she says. But Luehrisen adds that those inborn capacities need to be “reinforced, practiced, celebrated,” which can be done at home or in a more formal music education setting.
According to the Children’s Music Workshop, the effect of music education on language development can be seen in the brain. “Recent studies have clearly indicated that musical training physically develops the part of the left side of the brain known to be involved with processing language, and can actually wire the brain’s circuits in specific ways. Linking familiar songs to new information can also help imprint information on young minds,” the group claims.
This relationship between music and language development is also socially advantageous to young children. “The development of language over time tends to enhance parts of the brain that help process music,” says Dr. Kyle Pruett, clinical professor of child psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and a practicing musician. “Language competence is at the root of social competence. Musical experience strengthens the capacity to be verbally competent.”

 Increased IQ

A study by E. Glenn Schellenberg at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, as published in a 2004 issue of Psychological Science, found a small increase in the IQs of six-year-olds who were given weekly voice and piano lessons. Schellenberg provided nine months of piano and voice lessons to a dozen six-year-olds, drama lessons (to see if exposure to arts in general versus just music had an effect) to a second group of six-year-olds, and no lessons to a third group. The children’s IQs were tested before entering the first grade, then again before entering the second grade.
Surprisingly, the children who were given music lessons over the school year tested on average three IQ points higher than the other groups. The drama group didn’t have the same increase in IQ, but did experience increased social behavior benefits not seen in the music-only group.

The Brain Works Harder

Research indicates the brain of a musician, even a young one, works differently than that of a nonmusician. “There’s some good neuroscience research that children involved in music have larger growth of neural activity than people not in music training. When you’re a musician and you’re playing an instrument, you have to be using more of your brain,” says Dr. Eric Rasmussen, chair of the Early Childhood Music Department at the Peabody Preparatory of The Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches a specialized music curriculum for children aged two months to nine years.
In fact, a study led by Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College, and Gottfried Schlaug, professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, found changes in the brain images of children who underwent 15 months of weekly music instruction and practice. The students in the study who received music instruction had improved sound discrimination and fine motor tasks, and brain imaging showed changes to the networks in the brain associated with those abilities, according to the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that supports brain research.
Spatial-Temporal Skills
Research has also found a causal link between music and spatial intelligence, which means that understanding music can help children visualize various elements that should go together, like they would do when solving a math problem.
“We have some pretty good data that music instruction does reliably improve spatial-temporal skills in children over time,” explains Pruett, who helped found the Performing Arts Medicine Association. These skills come into play in solving multistep problems one would encounter in architecture, engineering, math, art, gaming, and especially working with computers.

Improved Test Scores

 A study published in 2007 by Christopher Johnson, professor of music education and music therapy at the University of Kansas, revealed that students in elementary schools with superior music education programs scored around 22 percent higher in English and 20 percent higher in math scores on standardized tests, compared to schools with low-quality music programs, regardless of socioeconomic disparities among the schools or school districts. Johnson compares the concentration that music training requires to the focus needed to perform well on a standardized test.
Aside from test score results, Johnson’s study highlights the positive effects that a quality music education can have on a young child’s success. Luehrisen explains this psychological phenomenon in two sentences: “Schools that have rigorous programs and high-quality music and arts teachers probably have high-quality teachers in other areas. If you have an environment where there are a lot of people doing creative, smart, great things, joyful things, even people who aren’t doing that have a tendency to go up and do better.”
And it doesn’t end there: along with better performance results on concentration-based tasks, music training can help with basic memory recall. “Formal training in music is also associated with other cognitive strengths such as verbal recall proficiency,” Pruett says. “People who have had formal musical training tend to be pretty good at remembering verbal information stored in memory.”

Being Musical

Music can improve your child’ abilities in learning and other nonmusic tasks, but it’s important to understand that music does not make one smarter. As Pruett explains, the many intrinsic benefits to music education include being disciplined, learning a skill, being part of the music world, managing performance, being part of something you can be proud of, and even struggling with a less than perfect teacher.
“It’s important not to oversell how smart music can make you,” Pruett says. “Music makes your kid interesting and happy, and smart will come later. It enriches his or her appetite for things that bring you pleasure and for the friends you meet.”
While parents may hope that enrolling their child in a music program will make her a better student, the primary reasons to provide your child with a musical education should be to help them become more musical, to appreciate all aspects of music, and to respect the process of learning an instrument or learning to sing, which is valuable on its own merit.
 “There is a massive benefit from being musical that we don’t understand, but it’s individual. Music is for music’s sake,” Rasmussen says. “The benefit of music education for me is about being musical. It gives you have a better understanding of yourself. The horizons are higher when you are involved in music,” he adds. “Your understanding of art and the world, and how you can think and express yourself, are enhanced.”

Conclusions
As we can see from the researches, benefits of music in children’s growing are multiples.
Even if the hours of music and art in schools are lowering every day, and their importance is not recognized, children that grow up in musical and art world have a different perception of life and they are more creative in problem solving.
Understanding how to play an instrument and sing is as important as hours of mathematics, and it can also improve the capacity of think smarter in other subjects.
With the possibility to paint and play something that they want, the children’s can express themselves and interact with the world around them in a easy and funny way.

By Anna Jané and Stefano Mussato.