Page 5 - @ccess 3 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 feel safe, valued,
respected, happy and involved in the decision-making process is indispensable in
their quest to increase their mastery of the language and their autonomous production
thereof. 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 or 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 teachers’ pedagogical discourse interact with the ways in which those who
attend our classrooms — on every workable day, like it or not — have of seeing and
understanding the world". (Lomas, 2016).

Most of a student’s lifetime is spent at school. Thus, it is essential to make their
stay there a significant experience in learning to live together harmoniously. The base
of forming responsible, critical and self-confident citizens is the sharing of worries,
preferences and interests, as well as classroom work planning and decisions about what
and how to do it with students. With the aim of helping you in the aforementioned tasks,
we conceived the didactic pack for second grade of secondary in this @ccess series.
From our perspective, it is you who make English learning and the formation of your
students possible. Thus, we have crafted a proposal different from those you already
know of. In this series, we offer the resources necessary to enable your students to acquire
the ten social practices of language set out in the current English syllabus. In order to do
so, students 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 illustrating the actions involved in the different steps
and stages (warm-up, building, closure) in the process of developing a language product.
This proposal focuses on the interaction between your students, and between them
and the people inside and outside of the school.

4 Teacher’s Book