FINAL REFLECTIONS OF THE COURSE

In conclusion, the Oral Expression and Comprehension course has been quite useful for me. Throughout the course, we saw several concepts that may seem at first glance a little complicated to understand, however, it is easy to understand them once you read and reflect on how important it is for teachers to know how to teach it. How to teach something is one of the most basic things that every teacher must master, and, thanks to the contents seen in the subject I can not only improve my skills as a teacher when designing and planning a lesson, but I can also apply them to my myself since I am still an apprentice of a second language.

I would have liked the second unit to cover more time and content since although I learned even more about how to promote and put into practice the speech skills of the students, I would have liked to practice my Speaking skills a little more since it is one of my weaknesses. To my mind, the Storytelling activity was quite good, but maybe doing some activity with the other colleagues would have been perfect, maybe applying a Lesson Plan (just like we did in Unit 1) and doing so by applying the strategies that Thornbury and Harmer suggest.

So far, I’ve mentioned that Speaking is just one more of my weaknesses (and I’m sure for others too). Something that I’ve been noticing is that all the strategies that we’ve checked in class to encourage Speaking are really fun not only for the students but also for the teacher. It’s all up to students’ attitude, there is no reason to be afraid of speaking in the class, once one finds the benefits it all gets much better and both the teacher and students learn from each other.

The most crucial thing I take away from the whole course is that the wide number of strategies that we can apply for our classes is what will let us as teachers guide our students to what is intended when one learns a second language: to communicate with others.