Word´s Power

Word´s Power

I have worked in two cities, both cities emphasize in the fact of the good results are a good education, but in my personal opinion there are not always this kind of relation, not necessarily good results meaning good education, the education implies much more than a test. But this much more is given in the teacher´s hands, the teacher has to face and bear a lot of life situation alone in the classroom. In Tunja this year, La Secretaría de Educación Municipal named a support team for each school, since February I have seen this psychologists, social workers and therapists in my school, walking around us but I have no seen a real interventions in our student´s lives, I do not understand what is their real job, I expect that they work with the students directly, but nothing it is happening in this way.

For this, and much more items in relation with the educative policies, we the teachers have to create a lot of strategies, activities, and projects in order to give our students a confortable and workable environment to learn, we need to start to think in the classroom like the perfect research laboratory in the way to consolidate this continuous creations in order to make better Colombian children.

Thus, I going to talk about the languages learning in a classroom, I pretend to portray some important considerations to take in account in our daily job with the learners in order to give them some real and functional knowledge to improve their whole education, not just a piece of the cake but the spoon to eat it completely, by their own rhythm and expectations according with their needs.

If we introduce the language through a real fact, which the students can take and use as part of their own context the language will have a real meaning in their lives. We can balance the human need of communication ideas with the languages as a live being that are working in our society as a constructor of ideas and relationships between human beings. The language is a being able to say its own history, its challenges and said our history as a society. In the classroom we have to show our students the real power of the language, which is able to change minds, ideas, attitudes and feelings. 

The power of the languages is reflecting in some theoretical issues, grammar as meaning:

Linguistic meaning covers a great deal more than repots of events in the real world. It expresses…our attitudes…towards the person we are speaking to, how we feel about the reliability of our message, how we situated ourselves in the events we report, and many other things that make our messages not merely a recital of facts but a complex of facts and comments. (Bolinger 1977)

The language pretend more than express some events in our lives, it is a very complex system that work in our minds, our bodies and our world with a big and strong force to make us intelligent beings.

When we talk about the system we have to take in account Saussure who mentions two faces in the languages, signifier and signified, I am talking about the meaning and referent in a fact action that make a relationship between them. They need mutually; a real thing needs a word that can represent it in the human mind and the human mind needs a factual thing to establish a meaning, this is the first concept that Saussure give us about the language as a meaning and we have to start from this conception to understand the meaning system.

“The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter in not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses. The sound-images is sensory, and if I happen to call it “material,” it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract.” Saussure (1915)

In our job practices we have to try to give our students the real meaning of the words presenting them in a factual context, for instance if I want that they learn vocabulary about the food, I try to show them the food to give them some of this food to try it, taste it, and eat it in order to make more meaningful learning. It is not enough to show them the words; we have to present the “material” thing to build the abstract concept since a real thing.

We have in the bookshops a lot of learning books, the most of them present the english as a foreign language that is so far from us, and the students can understand a real use of this or how they can use it in a real situation, that books show the language out of our context; for example in the case when we talk about the season the student book mentions four seasons but the students do not know any of this because in Tunja or Colombia we do not have seasons.  It is labor of the teachers give the students a close language that the students can touch it.

In consequence, the language system has to be presented in the classroom with its different components submerged in a factual context:

“The context in which grammar is embedded need to be generally useful and appropriate to the needs of the learner group. In this way grammar becomes generative and students can transfer it to relevant situation. Contexts can be created though visuals, through the teacher miming or demonstrating in the classroom, through a dialogue, a text, a song or a video, or through a situation set up by the teacher.” Hedge (2008)

One of the most difficult items in the English or language class is the grammar, so that we have to present it showing the use at the first time, in other case our student cannot understand and start to feel confused about the language, for this reason they lose the motivation to learn a foreign language. Nowadays we have a lot of internet resources that help us to make some tactile environments to our classes in order to show our students meaningful learning and a need to communicate with others people in their context using a foreign language. 

From this conception it arises another perspective of the learning grammar in the languages classroom, the discourse as a part of the communicative competence in order to construct the grammatical concepts, as I mentioned before the context is the main component in a meaningful class so that the grammar rules emerge from the real use:

“This is the perspective taken in A communicative Grammar of English (Leech and Svartvik 1975) which devotes one section to “Meanings in connected discourse” and looks at how meaning can be put together in spoken or written discourse”. Hedge (2008)

I think so this is the focus at the first moment of learning process, if we start in this way our students can understand the grammar as a part of the language not as a totality in the language, we can present this rules how a part of the system to help us to make a discourse in a correct way, with some useful uses in real situation.

These items are just some of the much that we have to considerate along our career, but I consider that it is a good point to start to become teachers…

   BIBLIOGRAPHY

·       HEDGE, T. (2008). Teaching and learning in the language Classroom. Oxford University Press. Oxford.

·       SAUSSURE, F. (1915). Course in General Linguistics. McGraw Hill book Company.