Story telling and theatre
Literature is a great avenue to exert language skills, to explore students creativity and to foster reflections upon human nature. Some may think literature's classics are old- fashion for today's learners, however, I belive this have a great value that must be explored by language learners.
Jenny E. Romero
My Teaching Philosophy:"The Unheard Music" I would like to play.
“Our teachers are those capable of inventing new techniques of thought and action correspondent to contemporary difficulties and enthusiasms, of palpitating an original thought in the style of an unheard music of summoning new themes and polemics for the permanent revolution of categorical orders” (Deleuze, 2004.p.77)
Teaching Goals
and Professional Expectations
I aim to become a teacher who provides learners tools to become critical 21st century citizens. To achive this goal I am working on my master thesis proyect based on Symbolic Competence (Kramsch,2015). This approach understands language as a symbolic system, which helps today's learners to comprehend how linguistic and extralinguistic signs are integrated to communicate. Learners need to know how this articulation works within multimodal texts: videos, cartoons, movies, songs. Most importantly, they need to position themselves (Davis & Harre,1990) in the discourses offered through these type of texts, the most relevant on the 21st century society.
MY STUDENTS' ARTIFACTS
Comics! Creating my alterego.
To question the "master realities" (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006) present on their identity, learners needed the change to imagine the possibilites of their own being, their other self.
Cultural Project: Creating our own cultural experince
Appreciation of Anglo Culture: Demystifying common beliefs
My students used to associate Anglo culture, especially American, to negative stereotypes. By allowing learners to identify the symbolic dimensions (Vinall,2016) through this cultural proyect, they were able to consider other Anglo cultural texts beyond the ones they used to define English speaking cultures.
Creating authentic communication:
Flea Market
My students held a free market in which they had to create a story behind the object: why is it culturally relevant? How can I read and appreciate an object? What are the feelings attached to the object?
These sort of questions make students to gain insight of the symbolic representations (objects) and actions (buying and selling) (Kramsch, 2015) that are taking place in these alternative markets. At the same time, they can see how the functional dimension of purchasing a product can be transformed by the economic-festive dimension ( Sherry, 2001).
Eating is an excuse
Learners were used to repeat conversation models without being aware of what goes on in the actual context. Then, they became aware symbolic action that takes place, for instance, in a restaurant, eating is an excuse to fulfill other communicative purposes that go beyond the linguistic domain.
Performative documentaries.
Eventhough it is pivotal to understand the second language communicative competence, language is also a symbolic creation (Kramsch,2015). Allowing students to experiment with the poetic and subjective dimensions of language makes them aware on how they can alter over the dominant narratives found on their identity. Performative documentaries (Nichols 2001) are the cultural artifacts that provide learners the possibility to develop their multimodal literacy (Kress, 2008) and to reflect upon their subjective construction.
Storytelling
Other way in which students can experience language' symbolic creation is through story telling and performance. By the same token, "story telling is one of the most useful techniques to attract young learners in the learning process effectively" (Izzah, 2015,p.1).
"There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become an original"