Page 5 - @ccess 1 Teacher´s Book

For many pupils, learning from teachers must appear to be a mysterious and arbitrarily difficult
process, the solution to which may be to concentrate on trying to do and say what appears to be
expected — a basically ‘ritual’ solution. A greater emphasis on the importance of language and
communication in creating a shared conceptual sense of the meaning and significance of experience
and activity may help to make classroom education a more open and explicit business and, therefore
a less mysterious and difficult process for pupils
(D. Edwards & N. Mercer 1988: 169)

Dear teacher:

Learning a foreign language within an environment where students’ voices are heard
while making decisions, as well as feeling safe, valued, respected and happy are
necessary conditions for learning and for becoming increasingly autonomous. Thus, it is
important to emphasize:

“…what people do and say (or do by saying) in a classroom. This becomes not only
the physical setting of school learning, but also the communicative setting where
speaking, listening, reading and writing takes place. A setting where some get
amused and some get bored, where some become friends while others become
rivals, where some skills, habits and concepts are learned, while many other things
are forgotten. At the end of the day, it is the place where some talk, where the
different forms of a teacher’s pedagogical discourse interact with the ways in which
those who attend our classrooms — on every workable day, like it or not — have for
speaking and understanding the world”.

Most of a student’s lifetime is spent at school. Thus, it is essential to make their stay
there a significant experience for learning to live together harmoniously. The base of
forming responsible, critical and self-confident citizens is sharing students’ worries, likes,
interests, as well as classroom work, planning and decisions about what to do and how
to do it. With the aim of helping you in the aforementioned tasks, we conceived of the
didactic pack for first grade of secondary of this @ccess series.
From our perspective, it is you who make English learning and the formation of your
students possible. Thus, we have created a proposal different from those you already
know of. In this series, we offer the necessary resources to enable your students to acquire
ten social practices of language set in the current English syllabus. In order to do so, they
will engage in communicative exchanges while creating their own language products,
enabling them to learn-while-doing, by means of carefully-crafted models. These were
devised with the aim of demonstrating the actions involved in the different steps and
stages (starting, development, closure) of the process of developing a language product.
This proposal focuses on the interaction between your students and between your
students and people within and outside the school. The didactic proposal envisioned by

4 Teacher’s Book