In this activity, a partner will evaluate my summarizing abilities.
Language Teaching for the Future
by Andrew Littlejohn
As teachers, we need to think on how the
world has changed, and how the world will change, since its[U1] social and
technological changes to come will affect our practice on language teaching.
A quite particular change is the effect of
the “McDonaldisation” process of “de-skilling” and “re-skilling” in favor of
globalization. This term and others,
have came to explain the similarity between the well known fast food brand and
globalization.
Decades ago, people faced a short of
optimist point of view to see life, but optimistic doesn´t mean that everything
it´s ok, it just means that you are fine waiting for solutions to be sent from
heaven. All the methods arose[U2] explain us
that people had the need for more and better teaching methods, therefore, we
also need to know what is happening and what we would like to happen since
education has a shaping role on students.
To know what´s happening we must observe
the key characteristics of social context from Western industrialized
societies:
1. Fragmented society.
2. Decline of national
governments.
3. Rapid
(dis)appearance of jobs.
4. Spread of “the
market.
5. Influence of
electronic media.
6. Endlessly eclectic.
Ritzer agrees with Littlejohn calling
these tendencies in human interaction the “McDonaldisation of society”, people
live in a control cage, efficient and totally predictable, interactions are
standardized and dehumanized, in the classroom, Ss do not need to think or
resolve problems, but to follow a routine to have fast effortless and
meaningless learning. Teachers also need
to adjust and offer “edutainment” seeing Ss[U3] as customers who
need to have fun. Textbooks are not the exception[U4] ; old PPP activities
about pop music, with explicit directions, so unskilled teachers can follow them
for tiny salaries.
Once
we are aware of our role as teachers of communication[U5] , we may consider if
“McCoursebooks” are really involving Ss in real decision making [U6] and real
contributions to the content of the lessons, developing Socratic methods to
make them analyze what they read[U7] , see and are told. To really help Ss to face the future in the
social context set by globalization, we must observe six principles to analyze the
curriculum:[U8]
1. Coherence.
2. Significant content.
3. Decision-making in
the classroom.
4. Use of student´s
intelligence.
5. Cultural
understanding.
6. Critical language
awareness.
Future is not predicted, we
shape it every day with our decisions and actions.
[U8]Punctuatio:n we need to separate
ideas.
Analysis of the summary:
1. Comprehensibility: The summary is comprehensible, is well oriented in the main idea of the
author, some of the ideas need to be separate, but it still a good
understanding of the whole text at the first reading.
2. Organization: It has a good organization, the
paragraphs express ideas clear, and also it respects the order of the original
text.
3. Punctuation: several mistakes, they are least.
4. Adequacy of syntax: Only a few mistakes, they’re not
so relevant to hinder with the comprehension of the text.
Scale for Assessing the
summary
4 Excellent – The summary is well-organized and coherent;
contains a range of grammatical structures with minor errors that do not impede
comprehension; good punctuation and vocabulary range.
Report to
your partner the following:
1. Explain
summary-writing experience
I like this activity because it´s not easy
for me to summarize, when I try to do it, I end with quite long text, because
everything it´s important to me and I don´t want to leave out meaningful
information, when I began this online course, I remember the long notes that I
used to take for each homework, they were quite helpful, I must admit, but they
could be much shorter.
2. Explain
what you learned about the experience.
I think
something like this is what happens to our Ss, when they search online they
face a lot of options, a huge ocean of related information, which they have to
select to pick up only useful sites or they would get overwhelmed. When we learn to observe for key words, we
acquire a helpful tool to get just what we need, the rest it´s additional.
3. Tell what
strategies you will use to solve the identified problems in the future.
Observe
punctuation, use references, continue focusing on key words and be more
analytical on my comments.
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