Australia: A Wonderful Country!!! (Presentation)


Early this year, we made a presentation about Australia as part of our Culture class. Among the things we learned and share with the class about the contry, we can find aspects such as music, animals, slangs, traditions, curious facts and others. In order to make the class interesting and fun, we prepare different activities for each day - because this presentation was made in two days -. For example the first day we gave everybody their own Australian Passport, and whith the number in it, the next day we made a raffle.


In this picture, one of our classmates is receiving her passport from one member of the group.

After the people got into the classroom, we welcomed them to "Australia", showed them a video, and gave them some information about the country; then we divided them in 3 groups for a "tour around the country" we had prepared. In this tour, we took them through Sidney, Tasmania, and Queensland, while we were giving them information about this interesting places.

The Sidney station of the trip.

Also on the first day, we made a singing contest, with a karaoke version of the song "We are Australian" by Lo-tel, here is the performance of the winner!



And in that same day, we made a game named "Who has the Biggest Australian Knowledge". The game consisted in asking the participants questions about what we said during the presentation, and the one who correctly answered most of the questions would be the winner.

The contestants waiting for the question to answer it.

For the second day, we prepared games such as a memory game called "Keep Australia in your Memory" with a board where our classmates had to find couples of australian images, while we were explaining them what each one of those images represented.

One of the memory boards.

After that activity we made a game similar to "The Amazing Race" called "The Autralian Race", where our classmates had to build a puzzle of an australian place, and when they finished it we gave them some information about the place, in order for them to share it with the rest of the class - each group had a different puzzle -, then they had to paint their faces like australian aborigins and finally they had to perform an aboriginal australian dance.

One of the groups building their puzzle.

Some of the participants with their faces painted as an australian aborigin.

After they danced one by one and we finished this activity, we did the raffle with the passport numbers and we gave two prices one for girls and other for guys. After that, we gave everybody a meat pie - which is a traditional australian dish - whith coke.


Here we present the video of the song we ask our classmates to sing in the singing contest. We hope you like it!


Our Professional Practices, a Beautiful Experience!

As future teachers we often have a lot of expectations about how to teach, or what kind of strategies to use in order for students to enjoy learning English. In our particular case, to work with kids was an amazing experience, and a huge challenge.



At the beginning, we tried to think in what they wanted or would enjoy, and what they needed to learn about the language. It was obvious that they did not know anything of the language. Then, when we started to teach them, sometimes we felt frustrated because many techniques or activities we used in classes did not work the way we expected, but that helped us to be more creative, and improve our strategies.


The final result of almost six months in practices was one of the best memories of our life, due to the love that children showed us, their joy and happiness in each class, and their enthusiasm for learning English. Those were some of the aspects which made us gain experience and notice that hard work brings wonderful rewards.

Ascendent Up Method

This method consists in presenting a film or a song to the students in order for them to make a composition about it, and then share the ideas, and opinions they wrote with the rest of the class. It has the purpose of motivate the students to develop the four skills.

Regarding to the
presentation of the group, they did activities really focused in the method, but in some way the explanation about it (method) was not complete enough.


Communicative Language Learning

Communicative Language Learning seeks to bring students beyond grammatical competences to a point where they are able not only to decode a language, but they can begin to manipulate the language in private dialog. This is known as Comunicative Competences. It's an engaging development in the field of ancient language acquisition. It opens numerous opportunities for creative instruction, and may serve to captive students and teacher alike for years to come.
By Paul Overland


A global apreciation about this presentation is that the team maybe could have created more encouraging activities in order for us to be able to recognize and familiarize ourselves more with this. The explanation was good, but it could have been better if they had been more practical instead of theoretical.


The Audio Lingual Method

The Audio-Lingual Method is based on the behaviorist belief that language learning is the acquisition of a set of correct language habits. The learner repeats patterns until able to produce them spontaneously. Once a given pattern – for example, subject-verb-prepositional phrase – is learned, the speaker can substitute words to make novel sentences. The teacher directs and controls students' behavior, provides a model, and reinforces correct responses.

Taken from: http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/eightapproaches.html

It is worth to note the fact that we could not be in this presentation, but according to what we have read about the method, we can suppose that the group probably brought dialogues related to common situations and asked the group to repeat them in order to recreate a class based on this approach, because we think this would be the best way of present it.


The Grammar Translation Method

This method derived from traditional approaches to the teaching of Latin and Greek in the nineteenth century. It is "a way of studying a language that approaches the language first thought detailed analysis of its grammar rules, followed by application of this knowledge through the task of translating sentences and text into and out of the target language."

Taken from:http://articles.famouswhy.com/language_teaching___the_grammar_translation_method/

We think this group made a really good job at presenting the method. Because, at the beginning they explained the basis of this approach and then, they applied it during the rest of class by giving us a text in order to translate it. After that, they applied a sort of test about the content of the translation, and at the end they gave everybody an envelope with words and asked us to order them and form a sentence.