Unit 2 Task1 -> Students’ Needs

In  my opinion, in a curriculum focused on plurilingualism with the use of English as Second Language, Technology could be one of the less-impossible subjects to implement, due to its practical nature.
Giving a look to the curriculum of 2nd course of Technology, where 13-14 year students are supposed to learn topics like "Analyse production methods and properties of metals used in the manufacture of technological projects." it really looks  like the challenge could be, how can they learn this kind of stuff even in their own language?.

But coming back to our question, the subject of Technology on 2nd course has a limited specific vocabulary like:
 - Technical drawing (circunferences, angles, perpendicular bisector,...)
 - Metal and other materials (torsion, friction, hardness or tenacity...)
 - Structures and mechanisms (beam, pillar, column, forge, gear, pulley...)
 - some ICT vocabulary (network, web, Blog, multimedia presentation...)

In event that students came with a good general English level, I think it would be possible and a good opportunity to teach it in a CLIL context. Technology subject is composed of a lot of practice hours, where students work by groups so communication and interaction are always present on it.

Last year I could visit some Secondary Schools in Iceland, where most of students speak very fluent English, and I saw how this kind of plurilingualism works very well in subjects with a practical and technological nature like Technology, ICT or Computer Science.
But the main problem in Spain is that Secondary School students in 2nd course have very poor English level, and is very difficult even to have a basic conversation with them, let alone ask them to write a teamwork project.

This is my job

Let's play a game. I'll give you some words and you'll have to guess my job:

Visit Wordle to create your own "Word Clouds".

Corpora compilations

Dictionaries help you to translate words from a language to another, give you an explanation of the meaning and shows you synonyms and antonyms. They are very useful tools to learn/teach languages, but sometimes when we are writing texts (especially in a foreign language), we may doubt between two or more similar words. There is when Corpora compilations become the most useful tool we can know.

Corpora are a huge language databases of written and spoken texts. The idea is to look for coincidences in those texts and allow the user to see in which context they're used.

One of these Corpora sites is the British National Corpus. As an example, at the time I've wrote this text, I had the doubt to put "especially in foreign languages" or "especially at foreign languages". By searching "especially * language" in Corpora, we can see a list of results where appears the preposition "in" but not "at".

BNC works with English language only, but there are other Corpora sites like Linguee that, in addition, shows the correct translation of the sentence, helping us to situate the meaning in their correct context.

The Thesaurus searches

This time I will analyse www.thesaurus.com, a site dedicated to show synonyms and antonyms of searched words.

The way to use is very easy. We only need to write the term to search, and instantly it will show a list of synonyms sorted by relevance. Because of this, the next step we should give is to select the result which best fits with the meaning we want to use (2).

Thesaurus gives the user the option to filter results by complexity (3) or length (4), and by clicking on "common" option (5), it will show only the most used words. This is very useful if we want to avoid make weird writings with unusual words.

Below this first list of words, Thesaurus also offers a second list of antonyms words, but it is usually a shorter one, and won't give the filter and sort possibilities mentioned above.

Comparision of three online dictionaries

Hi again mates!

I this post I will do a small analysis of three of the best online English dictionaries, Oxford Dictionaries, Wordreference and Merriam-Webster . In order to do a good comparison, I've searched the the word "gato", trying to find the meaning related to automobile world.

According to the Spanish Royal Academy, a cat is "Máquina que sirve para levantar grandes pesos a poca altura, y que funciona con un engranaje y un trinquete de seguridad, o con una tuerca y un husillo".

When I try to translate this world to English (jack), the three dictionaries have shown correct meanings, but I found Wordreference more clear and easy of use than the others, giving sentence examples where it can be used.

Analysing the extra add-ons of the three sites, I can emphasize that, while Oxford shows only the translation, both Merriam-Webster and Wordreference offer synonyms searches and verb conjugation in the case of Wordreference.

Extra add-ons at Wordreference.

Reviewing the monolingual dictionaries, I would like to highlight the clarity of Wordreference shows the category of use of the definition (Mechanical Engineering), or how Oxford shows example images trying to simplify the understanding.

Example images at Oxford dictionary.

Category definition at Wordreference.

As addition, I've made the same search at Learnersdictionary, and I found the result very easy to understand for young students, but maybe too simple for academic usage.

Future of education

Hey! I saw this video about how could be the education of the future, and I'd like to share it with all of you!

Please, tell me what do you think about this way to teach. Would be great, wouldn't it?

What's a blog

Blog, or weblog, is a kind of online diary where the author shares information and thoughts about different subjects, but also it gives to readers the opportunity to write their own opinions about the topic addressed. Moreover, this sites gives to readers the opportunity to write their own opinions about the topic addressed.

There are several type of blog depending of:
- topics (political, IT, fashion...),
- taxonomy (weblog, videolog, photolog)
- personal / professional / educational use.
- single / multi (MAB) author.

For example, the English Language Teaching blog from Oxford University Press, focus its posts on news and tips about English teaching and learning. We can also find some Spanish educational blogs, like the Doctor Balmis Secondary School Drawing Department (where authors leave highly valued materials to use at class lessons) or political ones, like Perez Reverte's "Patente de corso".


I tried many times to have my own weblog, but I noticed that it requires to devote a lot of time if you want to make it useful for other people. Not only is needed to post on it  periodically, but also you will have to be very strict following certain rules in order not to commit into any delict. To insult, violate copyright laws by content plagiarizing, or give out personal information of other people can be punished by the law, so it's necessary to be careful with the stuff we write and to moderate other users comments. More information about how to implement a blog can be found at "Teaching Guidelines from the European Project LTE: Guidelines and Lesson Plans".


More information about blogs:
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/what-is-a-blog/
http://startbloggingonline.com/what-is-a-blog-definition/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog