English Seminar Meeting

Wednesday, 28th November 2007. On Wednesday afternoon at four o'clock I held my first seminar meeting. It was a good opportunity to get to know all the English teachers of the centre. There are six teachers in general, one of whom is an auxiliary teacher, who helps the other ones in speaking lessons or supports a particular English teacher in the same class (especially in groups A and B, where there are troublesome teens or immigrants who have difficulty in learning skills). My tutor, who is the head of the English department, addressed the meeting, where they talked about the following agenda. First of all, they commented the development of the programme in the different courses and groups. They talked about some specific arising problems when implementing a lesson and they agreed that this year it would be really important to strengthen the oral, writing and reading skills. They also talked about including CLIL activities in the class because these tasks make students think and learn a topic throughout the English language. They also made reference to the fact of buying necessary material in order to get to the great diversity of students (for example, audiovisual material mainly focused on students belonging to groups A and B because they don't feel like learning and it is a good way of motivating them through the image by showing them a variety of documentaries and other kinds of interesting facts happening around the world). Another point they talked about was the Pla Experimental de Llengúes Estrangeres 2007-2010 (PELLE- Teaching and Learning curricular contents of a non-linguistic area in a foreign language).
Since the English department has decided to take part in this plan where the subject implemented in English will be Physical Education , the government has given them 2,000 Euros to invest in necessary materials. In fact, two teachers are in charge of this project and they have to attend weekly lessons in order to work on the curricular contents of this subject in the English language. It is a tough but rewarding task, though. The meeting took about an hour and fifteen minutes and we, the CAP students, felt really involved in the meeting because the rest of the teachers required our opinion as well. It was certainly a nice experience!