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         Working with secondary learners is completely a more complex and challenging level  than the previous practicum residences, given that it is a developmental stage in life in which teenagers deal with physical and psychological changes;  they defy adults because they believe that they know more of the world than the adults' eye can perceive.  They are much more analytical, involved and critical towards their learning. They can get interested in a theme of their own interest or they can get easily bored and demotivated if an activity is long to develop and answer.  

          Academically speaking, secondary learners require many factors to be analyzed carefully; such as thinking of their interests, selecting themes according to their age and relevance for the real world and also  being in their shoes when they feel like they cannot carry out an activity or do a performance. 

          The diagnostic  evaluation of a group of teens is essential to get to know them, individually and as a whole group; to analyze the group's dynamic of working in the subject, how they behave and how they react to each of the teacher's proposal, how close the bond among classmates is built up inside the group.  During my residence,  this fourth year was also the group I started working with as well. At the beginning, it was a tough process since nobody spoke a word or participated, the same students were always the ones who provided their answers while the rest remained silent.  I used the months of February until April to get to know them better,  how often they got used to work in groups, what skills they felt more confident or what skills they needed to reinforce a bit more.  Besides,  I could know what type of activities they enjoyed doing and I decided to use the element of surprise, not to tell them how I would introduce the topic of a unit, planning activities which were from less challenging to more difficult, in which they could develop problem-solving skills, collaborative work and negotiation skills.

            Apart from that, the English coordinator told the team to design a rule contract for the first day.  I prepared one to sign a contract of rules on how to behave and what requirements were essential to keep a good atmosphere. In that contract, I also added their duties but also my responsibilities and obligations; how flexible I would be and what things I would not tolerate, like bad language, bullying or mistreating each other.  That first day of lessons, I told them that, if they have some problems before my class or in the breaks, I was available to hear them and to help them go through whatever they could have been facing.  Teenagers need a helping hand, mostly at this stage when they think that nobody understands them. Hence, the affective factor is another key element to bear in mind when working at the secondary level.

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LEARNER'S GROUP

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          As regards this group of learners and how they embraced their learning process,  I believe that I did my best to make each class varied as much as possible, varied in the types of activities with a range of possiblities and choices for them to carry out a task. What helped me the most was setting clear and possible aims  in every class; having in mind what I wanted them to produce by the end of the lesson and what prior steps they needed to get to that final outcome. By having concrete aims, I did not find the planning as a difficult as I have thought at the beginning. However, I had to think over how to open and close the lessons, what type of  warm up could be effective and interesting for them and how to conclude the lesson in the last five/ten minutes to make the lesson dynamic, interesting and entertaining at the same time. I tried to mix the aims, procedure aims during the presentation or practice stages of my planning and achievement aims with the learners' production  of a meaningful outcome for their learning of the topic dealt in class.

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 CLASS DYNAMICS:  

 

MOTIVATION AND AUTONOMY 

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            In connection with this,  the class dynamics and motivation come together, which I truly believe that they go hand-in-hand.  If a class starts with students' active involvement and each activity  has a  measurable time and it is varied in the skills they should improve on, the lesson becomes much more energetic and motivating for students to keep working with the language.  In my case, I will not say it was easy because they were advanced learners, a few with intermediate language level  and most of the group with a B1/B2 linguistic knowledge.  The challenge of working with advanced learners was not focused on the grammar since they knew it  but  I had to design and prepare how to deliver the topic and content,  for instance vocabulary and some extra expressions shown in their coursebook to expand their vocabulary.  Also,  I had to forethink  if there could be instances in which they got in charge  of carrying out an activity,  playing my role as guide and clear instructor while they worked, either on their coursebooks or the extra and brand-new activities I had prepared. 

       After reading Scrivener's chapter on motivation, I could notice that I did most of the tips that he proposed, like rewarding students'  strenghts, asking them for feedback of the lesson and giving them feedback after finishing an activity,  offering choices of how to carry out an activity and being flexible with them as regards deadlines of assignments or written productions. 

       Concerning their autonomy, I played my role as guide during the introduction or presentation of a topic, then I gave them the instructions clear and short, most of the times with an example of how to do it.  There were also lessons when they told me that they wanted to try and carry out the activity without my help but to solve it in pairs or small groups of three/four members.  For instance, reading comprehension questions were challenging for them and they worked on them independently without my constant intervention, they got in charge of the questionnaires and, in that way, they not only developed their  problem solving skills but also their collaborative skills by working with their classmates.  Every lesson was different and tied to the main theme. In each of them, I guided learners through the first steps to encourage them to be independent in their learning and production of their final outcome.

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TEACHING APPROACHES

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                    As regards teaching approaches, it is pivotal for all teachers to  know all the different pedagogies and learning theoretical frameworks, given that teachers should adapt according to the school they are working or to the English department of an institution. 

For example, here in Bariloche, there are a few schools which centralize their pedagogical grounds on the preceptions and principles based on Waldorf and Piaget, among others. 

I think it is a general requirement to get to know all the teaching approaches and our working experiences will show us in time which one suits better in our teaching path.

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             Since I started working in the secondary level in 2017, my teaching experience has been shaped on the foundations of Vigotsky's learning process (promoting students' interaction in socio-cultural contexts),  and thus, I try to prepare my lesson plans following the premises of  the Communicative Language Teaching Approach proposed by David Nunan and William Littlewood, including the CLIL approach. I try to combine both, CLT with CLIL,  mostly in technical secondary schools because students need to understand and apply the language as channel of communication in the field of study they are working (Electricity, construction, hotel accomodation, etc). Therefore, promoting peer interaction and learning the language in meaningful and useful contexts for real-life communication.  This year, I am also working with adults, who mostly prefer to work on dialogues useful for their working environment, instead of the usual grammar booklets they have with isolated vocabulary and grammatical tenses.  

              During my practicum residence, I have implemented CLIL, in the sense that I wanted learners to pay attention to the content of the topics dealt in the course book, creating activities which had to be more focused on the theme rather than the grammatical items. Following this method, students can hardly notice how much linguistic items are used, adapting and creating material (texts, listenings, readings, speaking activities, writing tasks) on a communicative-based approach and integrating skills lesson per lesson. They were unaware of the integration of skills but I always gave them an explicit explanation of the purposes for each activity that they had to carry out; in that way, they could realize the importance of the activity and the outcome that they were asked to produce.

              Recalling David Nunan's principles of CLIL, I truly believe that I could cover most of them, implicitly in the production of resources, activities and the combination of the macro skills:

a. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.

(Within each lesson, there was always  an instance in which thet had to provide with their opinions on the themes or work collaboratively on a speaking task that encouraged them to interact and share their ideas in teams)

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b. The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.

(Mostly for the listenings, I had to look for authentic, real-life conversations connected with the themes of the coursebook to catch their interests, their motivations towards the topic)

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c. The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on the language but also on the learning process itself. (Feedback was also essential during each class, I used to give it to them once they finished and activity, firstly individual and then as a whole group). 

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d. An enhancement of the learner's own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning.

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e. An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom.         

              In  my own way, I tried to follow the steps of CLIL, starting each lesson from a general perspective to a more specific one (also from the general to the specific thinking order skills proposed by Bloom's Taxonomy, which have been a conceptual organised map to think of the aims that I wanted my learners to achieve by the end of the lesson).  

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MATERIAL  SELECTION 

 

As regards the selection for the resources and activities, particularly for this level, it is much more challenging to choose; given that you have to take into account different factors: the learner's linguistic level and needs, apart from the key criteria proposed by Tomlinson (2011), such as:

-Exposure to the language in use (in the case of listenings, I had to select the ones that were understandable for them, rich in quality and  valuable in variety according to the themes in their coursebooks)

- Communicatively authentic (Selecting readings based on true facts, choosing and adapting texts  to follow the topic of the unit)

-Material  which had to activate an affective response (promoting their emotions to encourage them to share their ideas and beliefs)

-Materials and activities had to foster students'  cognitive development (stimulating their Higher order thinking skills to be much more critical towards the resources and activities proposed).

-Apart from this, I have also implemented the uses of games (board games and puzzles) to activate students' collaborative work and interaction inside the group. Tomlinson ( 2015)  highights the importance of games, no matter the age or linguistic level, it also contributes to recycle language items and to stimuli their cognitve and affective engagement in their learning processes.  

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DISPLAYS AND EXPO 

   After the practicum residence 

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              Fortunately,  I could work and cover each of the twenty-four lessons planned, covering the thematic units from the coursebook, which were: "Discovery and first explorers",  "Love and friendship" and "Fragile Earth"; using a wide variety of different materials (authentic listenings,  real-life like texts to read and debate  on the topics dealt, games to foster vocabulary and interactive games to encourage speaking and social skills).

            After the last eight lessons, I had to hurry to start working on the English Expo Day, in which students worked on a film and each teacher should distribute the roles and productions of each group.  From an objective perspective,  I think I could have done something much more dynamic and more oriented towards communication and interaction between learners and the people who came to see each of the stands.  We as teachers should always be analytical in relation to our own performance and the results of the outcomes we want our students to achieve. That also is connected with the materials we implement in our classroom and the way we plan and prepare each of the activities we want them to achieve.

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ASSESSMENT  

 

As regards the way in which students have been assessed, it was carried out through informal (observing their performances and providing them with written feedback) and formal assessment as well (judging their performance through integrative testing by means of  project-based activities connected to the units, collaborative and group work tasks which consolidated the theme, the linguistic items dealt within the  unit and a production created by themselves). 

            During an activity, they wanted to do it on their own first, then an instance for them to do peer-correction and then to make a general correction as the entire group.  To guide them through tasks like questionnaires, I taught them the technique of finger sentences for them to recall the organization and distribution of constituents, to compare a question and an answer (number of constituents, analyze the meaning and the purpose of the question).

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          Given that they have an accurate level of the language, they typically made mistakes related to misspelling, mixing-up tenses or order of constituents when they had to provide with their answers about a topic. As regards correction, in the case of form and meaning, I tried to guide them to be metalinguistically  aware of their learning and accuracy, through implicit and metalinguistic correction, illustrating samples on the board for students to be active participants and analysts of the form, the meaning and the use. 

  

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