Page 13 - @ccess 3 Teacher´s Book

Components
The @ccess didactic pack contains four
different materials, which are described next:
1. Student’s Book. This is composed of ten
social language practices. Each practice
shows a didactic sequence organized into
three stages: warm-up, building and closure.
It includes the steps, activities, and linguistic
knowledge required to become more
proficient at participating in the practice,
while achieving the expected outcomes
and developing the language products.
Unlike their mother tongue, English has
little or no presence in the different contexts
of students’ social life. For this reason,
alternating social practices of the language
contribute to mimicking conditions similar
to those in students’ social life. This, in turn,
promotes learning English and the cultural
guidelines involved in social interactions. It
entails the development of communicative
activities that favor interpersonal exchange.
Each speaker brings his or her competence
in English to the conversation and learns to
overcome the challenge of communicating
in English through a specific social purpose.
Each stage has distinguishing features, which
are summarized below:
• Warm-up stage: Its aims are to retrieve
previous knowledge and students’
experiences with the language practice, and
to plan steps and activities needed to craft
a language product. A planning schedule is
included, so students can check on what they
will be doing. Thus, students will know what
is expected of them, and they will be able to
identify in which steps or activities they will
require more support and in which they can
act more independently. Also, planning the
schedule allows students to take control of
the steps for creating a language product.
That way, the steps can be completed in
the time allocated to each practice. In this
stage, students identify their starting time
and they can establish what they need to
know and what they need to know how to do
to become proficient users of the language
while producing a language product.
12 Teacher’s Book
• Building stage: In this stage, different
communicative activities take place, so as
to develop, widen and consolidate skills
and knowledge therein involved. Students
will carry out activities such as looking
up information, exploring, interpreting,
composing and checking the texts required
for a language product. These, in turn, will
trigger authentic communicative exchanges
where reflection upon formal details and
conduct, and behaviors and values for
successful communication are put into
play. At this stage, with your guidance and
support, students will need to self-regulate
their learning, that is, to recognize which
skills, knowledge and attitudes require
attention so as to solve communicative,
cultural and attitudinal challenges involved
in their language products. Thus, it is
essential to stop as many times as necessary
to assess their performance, which
scheduled activities they have already done
and which they have not. Check the activities
in which they require more support and
why there is or isn’t good communication
within teams so that they become more
autonomous and develop social skills. For
all these reasons, the content and form of a
language product are defined at this stage,
which is comprised of reaching agreements,
negotiating, giving rationales and sharing
ideas, among others.
• Closure stage-socialization: This
stage has a number of goals. The first is
comprised of reviewing and preparing
the final version of the language product,
so it can be conveyed to the addressee
established in previous stages. The second
is to assess the product itself, i.e., if it fulfills
the communicative, cultural and linguistic
conventions established, and what its impact
on the addressee is. The third is to assess the
learning process and its results with regard
to the social language practice in order to:
a) identify rights and wrongs in performance
and product; b) assess how to strengthen
what has been done correctly and how to
resolve any problems, so they can be taken
into account as soon as possible.