The importance of a song in class...

 Today is the 28th of September of 2020. 

After a few days out of line because of an illness, it was a great feeling to be back in the online classes. And of course, as every morning, we started the class in an unusual way (or it is better to say a wonderful way)... a song!

A cheerful voice accompanied by a powerful melody was saying "Good morning!" to everyone. Although, this was not the only aim of listening to the song. We had to think about the function of playing a song at the beginning of the class. I said that I would use it every morning to create a comfortable and happy environment to begin the class full of joy and energy. But, at the same time using songs you promoting the understanding of English grammar, practicing vocabulary, and improving strong ties between the students as a group. Also, using as a reference to the SLA theories, the song will serve as an input for the students that once they have processed, they would be able to create their own output.

After sharing all our answered (mostly everyone came with the same idea, so we all agree on the use of a song beyond the joyful part), Dolores has expanded the idea and complement mine. Following the rest of SLA theories, this dynamic would be explained with the behavioral theory as a stimulus the student receives and, later on, a response they create (good feeling, more vocabulary, help in their acquiring process of the language, singing by themselves, etc.). The interactionist theory would explain this process as a need to play with others, to connect with their peers, with the teacher, feel part of the class, etc. They would use the song as a possibility to communicate and relate with others.

How many benefits and aims a song hides, right?

Once our own selves were connected with the class, we continue seeing more about the SLA theories. First, we saw a couple of examples of activities that were done in the past century to learn English. We discuss their structure and how were they formulated. The first one explained a listening task in Spanish, so there is a problem or disconnection in the learning process because if you use the L1 while you are learning an L2, your brain is going to get confused and won't force itself to practice the L2. In other terms, if your brain sees you can use your mother tongue to communicate, it would be harder to acquire an L2, because every time you feel you can not express yourself, instead of finding the words or using similar grammar expression to create a speech, your lazy brain would just use your L1. In summary, this exercise was not well thought. 

The second example was not really bad, but it could be better. It was an exercise of repeating a grammar structure of "There is" and "There are" by writing two sentences supported with two examples and a couple of pictures. From my point of view, this is not a successful way of learning a new language. Your brain will process that information as a simple task that you must do (repeat the structure of the sentences) but I do not think it fixed in the mind as a learned structure, it is more like something you can easily forget because there was no effort to understand by your side and you are not using the structure to create a thought or a speech, so it is not using your brain simply delete it. This kind of exercise is under a branch of education called Structuralism. 

These specific examples have served us to enter into the last century English education history. Today we have seen, for example, that in the 1970th they focused on the mistakes of the exercises and methodologies.

Today has been an intense class full of information, but quite interesting to mentally start thinking about our thoughts on how to teach English. It is more difficult to create an efficient process of L2 acquirement than I thought. But I will continue discovering and rethinking myself to get it. 

See you tomorrow!