Week 7 Reflections

It is incredible but we are ending week seven.

This week we have learned something about the learner autonomy. There was an interesting article written by Thanasoulas who explains that learner autonomy does not mean that the teacher becomes redundant abdicating his or her control over what is transpiring in the language learning process.

It is important to understand that the learning autonomy is a perennial dynamic process amenable educational interventions rather than a static product, a state, which is reached once and for all.

The term autonomy has been used in different ways but it includes independence, language awareness, self-direction and andragogy. The autonomous learner takes a proactive role in the learning process. To develop the learner autonomy could involve: learner needs, motivation, learning strategies and language awareness. Autonomy does not mean teacher less learning. It means that the teacher must show the way to use or discover the mental steps or operations that learners use to regulate their effort to learn.

Then, I made a sample of one computer class plan. I followed the steps to make a class which involves a video from you tube called: Ten Things You Need to Know in New York.

In the sample I mentioned general information about the class, theme, duration, number of students, the materials used in class, the introduction to the class, the ABCD objective for this lesson, the procedure, the activities, the way I used technology ( computer, projector, internet, etc, and the final activity.

I made comments about my partners because it is necessary to read and discuss about what we write.

Finally I want to tell you that I made a little change with my students’ activities. First, I divided my class in groups.  Our general theme is Ecuadorian Culture. Every group is going to work about different aspects of our culture. It involves food in the highland region, food in the coastal region, clothes, carnival, folk parades, music, etc. Students created their own blogs and they are going to insert their profiles and some pictures in class about them. I hope to continue with our job the next week.