Teaching Large Classes

I wouldn't be so comfortable working with large classes; as a future teacher, I'd go more for "personalized" or "individualized" teaching since for me it'd be difficult to manage to teach more than 15 students; in very large classes classe I think the most difficult is to keep them all the students' attention on learning, and to reach positive outcomes. But as teachers we have to be adapted to any condition and at the same time doing a great job while teaching.
The video shows useful hints that we could use to manage large classes: pedagogical planning can help us to have well organized and motivating classes; by doing diagnostics tests can give us a sign of what students need and how to teach them. In addition, to help them set up personal goals regarding learning a new language can be greatly motivating. There are many factors that we must include to shape and adapt the classroom environment for large classes; we must have our students actively working in or out groupworks, and they have to move around so that they don't get bored and keep being motivated. Checking their own and others' job also help them to learn a lot. Besides, our activities must be carefully planned as well as carefully followed; of course, they must be free to choose some kinds of activities they'd like to do and freely give their opinions.
As we studied since the very beginning, we must respectfully treat our students so that we have the same back from them. We must avoid discipline them in front of all the class since it must embarrass them, and we can provoke some kind of dislike towards us. The most appropriate way to treat misbehaviors is talking personally to the students privately, and to look for the possible reasons for those misbehaviors. Establishing from the beginning how we expect them to behave, would be really helpful. All these strategies are really important when teaching large classes; besides, they can work with children as well as with adults, but with adults it can be necessary to make some rearrangments to adapt these strategies to their age.
According to my experience learning English, I guess all my teachers were aware of all these issues even though they weren't that large classes.

The use of Internet tools to teach English

Definitely, Internet tools are really helpful, and I see a huge importance to use them while teaching English. When we were working with Internet tools I didn`t feel so lost as I used to feel before; it is because with time we get use to it and we learn to like it. The VOXOPOP is highly helpful to improve speaking and listening skills, so it is a great tool that worths including it to teach EFL so that students won´t have the excuse that they don´t have the opportunity to practice English outside the classroom; in my personal case, I guess I´ve always said that I don´t have the chance to practice my English outside the university, but I didn´t know about the existence of this sort of pages in Internet. Besides of all the benefits that Internet gives us, we should include this kind of tools to teach English because we must help our students to become sophisticaded persons as our society demands it every day.
Some students with certain type of intelligences as the interpersonal, would appreciate a lot that a teacher uses these tools to teach them English, and as a result the outcome is going to be really positive; in the other hand, there can be students who won´t enjoy it either because they don´t like to talk too much or because they don´t like to use computers so much, so the teacher has to be clever enough to motivate them to do it.

Teaching under the idea of contextualized language

I believe that contextualized language helps a lot motivating students to learn since it involves aunthentic and high interest topics for students. Besides, contextualized language includes real situations; in other words, it teaches students how to use the language in their daily life outside the classroom, or in the real world. It is highly important because if students don´t find a real purpose on what they are learning or on the topic/theme being taught, they are not going to be motivated at all, which could result in negative outcomes. Contextualized language keeps students aware and active learning a foreign language; it also provokes students´autonomy or independence, and there´s nothing better than students building their own learning with freedom and love for what they are doing, which can only be achieved if the teacher includes themes or topics of high interest for them and if the teacher has a an active, creative and positive attitude towards creating a teaching English class that involves contextualized language. In our reality, to teach under these notions can be a challenge for teachers since we may not have the resources needed for those situations, but the teacher´s creativity can play a important role at the moment of planning his/her classes. I think that students would work and react positively with contextualized language classes because they provide an active, dinamic environment suitable to learn a foreign language; in my opinion, teachers are not so well prepared to teach a foreign language under these notions since there are some techers, especially in public schools, that just have their students copying from the board. It only gets students bored; consequently, students don´t learn anything.

The teacher as the creator of pleasant environment in the classroom

I believe that accomplish a positive classroom climate is not easy. Every attitude from the teacher will contribute to build either suitable environment for learning or an environment lacking of motivation.
Stablishing a based on trust and respect relationship with the students is highly important so that the students reach a real learning. The teacher must respectfully get along with his students by listening to their ideas or feelings; it will lead the students to develop their creativity and abilities, and showing interest in each student as a person makes them feel confident and capable, which results on students giving their best to truly learn the language. Another important factor is that the teacher must respect everything the students say and think; otherwise, it can diminish students´self-steem and confidence.
Besides, giving students praise and criticism adequately, provides a constant learning, and it also contributes in stablishing a good rapport.
For me, energy in the classroom is how well and comfortable the teacher and the students feel interacting with each other during the learning process; and it is like a "motivation" that keeps students and teacher giving their best.

teaching advanced levels

To teach all the proficiency levels has its difficulties, but a teacher must be prepared to teach students at any level.
Teaching advanced levels seems to be the easiest one since the students at this level are supossed to know a lot about the target language, so the teacher is just checking students' performance while they're improving their fluency and accuracy by talking and practicing the foreign language. But the teacher's role goes beyond this. He must challenge and encourage his students to reach, if not perfection, a daily improvement in their spoken production. The teacher must look for topics that cue students' talking, but also topics which lead students to know more about their surroundings. At this level it's crucial that the teacher corrects some flaws that may appear while students are speaking so that they don't make the same mistakes over and over.
About the authencity of language, it's really nice because at this level students are ready to read and talk about more complex readings. Reading a book, which they thought it was so hard at the beginning, is now something that they can manage really well.
At this level students are very creative using their "new" language, they are now able to use it for real purposes inside or outside the classroom, you've got to challenge them to speak by asking them to do complex rol-plays, presentations about certain topics, impromptu speeches, or discussions about problems that concern to our society, etc.
We have to remenber that although we're teaching advanced students, there could be children, teens or adults, and each of them require different techniques to learn.

To teach the three age levels must be quite challenging since it involves being an skillful and a very patient teacher. A teacher must love what he does, if not, he will fail and he won't do a good labor at all.
I'd definitely like to teach children although it seems to be one of the most difficult of the age levels because it's a huge responsability having ten or fifteen children in your hands. In kindergarten, the teacher must love and take care of all the children; I've even heard that a teacher becomes like a "mother" for them. So, teaching children in kindergarten involves being a patient, happy, dinamic and skillful teacher. I think I still don't have all those characteristics, but hopefully I will acquire or develop them through my career. As we were discussing during class, activities to teach children must be very creative, funny and active, but most of all, they must stimulate children five senses since children achieve a better and real learning by doing, playing, touching, etc. For example, to teach them the colors and shapes or forms, fruits can be very helpful. We don't have to forget that they love being active all the time, so singing or dancing a song (for children) in English, doing some TPR activities, or playing some games are excellent techniques to keep them involve in the class so that we take advantage of that big capacity of retention that children have at this age.
One important thing not to forget is that we must be careful at the moment of treating them because their feelings may be easily hurt, and it can interfear negatively in their learning.
To teach children must be a wonderful experience, but also exhausting.

The last activities were really nice, I think that all my classmates did it great. Xavier´s activity was really nice even though it was kind of hard to listen to him because of the rain, but it seems to me that this activity is very useful and it can work with any level. The CLL activity was nice, but as a teacher I wouldn´t use those kind of techniques since students don´t speak naturally speaking to a recorder. Now, we have plenty of useful activities that we can use to teach in the future, but I believe that there is a bunch more left that we still have to learn and know about.