"It's raining, it's poiring..."

Good Tuesday morning! Today is the 20th of October of 2020. It is a rainy, rainy day, that is why we began the class with this beautiful nursery rime: https://youtu.be/RxbUjmVO5kc

The objectives for today were to share our homework of pronunciation and transcription, comment on the feedback from our last presentations, and to continue seeing UNIT 4 (CEFR) and a group task. 

We share our research of transcription, this is mine after checking my classmate's ones:

• Swished: UK /swɪʃ/ US /swɪʃ
• Swashed: UK:*/swɒʃ/US:(swosh, swôsh)
• Avoid: UK /əˈvɔɪd/ US /əˈvɔɪd/
•  Native: UK /ˈneɪ.tɪv/ US /ˈneɪ.t̬ɪv/
• Voice: UK&US /vɔɪs/
• Very: UK&US /ˈver.i/
• Stopped: /stɒpt/
• Wanted: UK /ˈwɒn.tɪd/ US /ˈwɑːn.t̬ɪd/
• Visited: UK [ˈvɪzɪtɪd] US [ˈvɪzətəd]

After checking this, we have to create a sentence with some of these words and read it out loud. This was my sentences:

"I met yesterday a native german guy, who wanted his voice to sound less swished, even though he can't stop being very loud every time he wanted to talk."

Afterward, we began to see a little bit about CLT activities. It was a great clue to see a small scheme about the difference between activity and task. A task is composed of a pre-activity, meanwhile activity, and a post-activity. 

Once we have this clear in mind, we have seen something about CLT activities. There are some key ideas I want to highlight:

1. These activities must evoke real communication contexts. Students need to discuss, to talk between them and the teacher is the one who has to provide feedback. 
2. The use of authentic materials.
3. Recreate a natural context (as real as possible) in class. This can be achieved through classroom management. 
4. We need to provide tools to the students, otherwise, it would be very difficult for students to complete the task required. That match with the structural activities (or pre-communication activities) of Littlewood. 
5. Language exercises are not the best ones to recreate real-life activities. They are good to create a base of language content but, referring to communication skills, they are not efficient enough. 

Before the class ends, we had to work in our small groups (in my case, group II), to do an analysis from a worksheet of CLT exercise basing ourselves in the Littlewood and Noun classification. And this is what we thought.

1. SNAPSHOT: Because the statement has no explanation on how the exercise has to be done, it could fit in two classifications depending on how to do it. On one hand, if it is a writing exercise it would be a structural activity, but, on the other hand, if the activity is a reflection and speaking activity, it would be a quasi-communication activity. 
2. CONVERSATION: It is a social interaction activity because it has a conversation. 
3. GRAMMAR FOCUS: There are two parts to the activity. Part A is a functional-communication activity and part B is a social-interaction activity.
4. LISTENING: Functional-Communication activity. 

For tomorrow we have to have watched two videos of CEFR to have a framework to start working tomorrow, this is a flipped classroom or flipped methodology because we are going to watch the videos and see the contents before the teacher explains it to us. It is a change of perspective!

See you tomorrow!