LESSON 3: TASK 2: INTERACTION IN CLASS

In this entry of this blog, I will discuss the type of interaction with students in the specific learning context of a class of both first and second year of a university degree.

I teach Statistics and Econometrics in the second year of the Economics Degree and Basic Bussiness and Economics Introduction in the first year of Event Planner Degree, where also an online version is available.

Regarding the experience in the Economics Degree, I use half of the weekly hours to explain theoretical concepts and the rest of time during the week is used to solve practical exercises related to the theoretical part. The exams and didactic units of this course are completely coordinated at departmental level. This subject is quite new to them; it is also quite quantitative and therefore those students without a strong mathematical background can be demotivated quite soon.

During the theoretical part, I try to connect the current units with those units previously explained or with some knowledge they should have as a background. I try to give them the intuition of the formulas or their origin. I always ask questions to random students (sometimes not so random and especially to those people that seem particularly lost) that try to connect with concepts that they must have. In this way, it is easy to get an idea of whether they are understanding and following the explanations. Many times, they help me to develop new formulas in the blackboard so that they realised that they could do it on their own with only a little bit of help.

I find this strategy quite useful because they can see that we do not made up the formulae but they have a meaning and a specific use. However, students do not like to be asked randomly. It seems to me that at the university classes they are used to attend classes where there is zero interaction between the students and the professor and sometimes they are annoyed if there is any because they want to feel there is total freedom about how they organise their learning process.

The way of solving the exercises has change in the last few years. Few years ago, teachers solve the exercises for the students in the blackboard. Students were asked whether there was any volunteer willing to solve an exercise and explain the solution to the rest of his classmates. This methodology did not allow us to check the actual level of students and by the end of the course we found much less students in our classes and a high proportion of failed exams. It was also a methodology that did not allow any room for interaction with students, apart from the office hours (which were used by a very small proportion of students and mainly at the end of the term and few weeks before the exam). The current method of solving the exercises implies that students solve the exercises on their own at home and they show how they solved them in the blackboard. Additionally, this is now part of the evaluation of each student and takes part of their final mark. Of course, the level of participation has increased a lot because this is a compulsory part in the evaluation.

In our opinion, the advantage of this little improvement in the way of interacting with students is that this allows them to improve their communication skills, they make the effort to solve the exercise as clear as possible in order to show the solution to his classmates. Additionally, this helps us to have more information about our students (which is not always easy in classrooms with 90 students). Students are forced to face an exercise without the support of the written solution, which is essential in order to develop their autonomy and creative thought. We have been experiencing much better results at the end of the term after this change, and the reason is that students read and understand the material along the whole term and not only at the end.

However, some of the disadvantages are that they copy the solution from other classmates without acquiring a full understanding of what they have to explain. Sometimes they are not even able to use the statistical software provided to solve the practical exercises. This is quite easy to detect by asking small questions or small deviations from the problem. These students are only motivated by the grade given to them. Collaborative work is allowed but no free-riding behaviours.

The methodology I used in the first year of the degree in a introductory subject on Economics is totally different. Here the class size is smaller and there are not so many mathematical concepts because I am more interested in few intuitions and applying few theoretical concepts to the real life. Although they have to hand some individual exercises in using a moodle platform, most of the times we work in groups in the class. They have to do case studies, read articles from the news related to the concepts covered in the didactic units and provide joint answers to practical questions and exercises. They also have to work in groups and create a (fake) firm as a final assessment in order to apply all the concepts covered during the course. At the end of the term, they have to present to the rest of the class their firm project. The rest of the students suggest changes to financial policy or to the marketing strategy. I have been teaching this course for 3 years and the results are quite impressive. I start the term with quite a few students without any knowledge of business and economics and the results are very good and accurate projects.

In the online version of this course, we have a two hours lecture in order to summarize the most important results, but then we interact using virtual office hours using Skype. I also record few videos to explain additional concepts that they find to be more difficult. I also post some debates on recent news in the moodle platform where students are expected to use the vocabulary and the knowledge given in the course. They find all these strategies quite useful because they feel in touch with the materials and the teacher during those periods of time with no class. 

LESSON 2. TASK 7: GLOSSARY OF ECONOMIC TERMS

    Market: A regular meeting of people where some of them sale and some other purchase the goods they want (provisions, raw materials, agricultural products, farm animals or any other products). The demand of a particular good or service is also denoted as a market.
    Price: The amount of money that you pay for something or that something costs.
    Supply: The amount of something that is available to be used. In economic theory, supply is a schedule of how much producers are willing and able to sell at all possible prices during some time period.
    Demand: The ability and need or desire of consumers, clients, employers, etc. to buy goods or services. In economic theory, demand is a schedule of how much consumers are willing and able to buy at all possible prices during some time period.
    Output: The amount of something produced by a person, machine, or industry in a process using inputs.

LESSON 2. TASK 6: WORD MAPS

LESSON 2. TASK 5: CORPORA

In the following picture, you can find the results that I found with my search of "ABOUT TO DO" in the British National Corpus. This website allows one to search for words or phrases by the exact word or phrase. Interestinly, this tool shows how this word or phrase has been used in a large data base of texts. Within those texts in the data base, it is easy to find the frequency of words and phrases in any possible combination of types of texts (spoken, academic, poetry, medical, etc) and compare whether one word of phrase is more common in one type of text than in other.

I also found Linguee a very useful tool. The main advantage is to check in a wide variety of language combinations, how the translation of a particular word or phrase has been done in a large set of translations between two languages. The results shown below belong to the search of "ABOUT TO"and how it should be translated from English into Spanish. 

LESSON 2. TASK 4: THESAURUS

The word I looked up in Thesaurus was INCOME. The information provided by Thesaurus is a short definition of the word and a list of synonyms. The number of synonyms can be sorted by order of relevance, by the complexity of the term, by the length of the word. It also allows to select those terms that are most common. One could also check thether some of these words are used in an informal way.
In order to select the right word to use instead of income, I would sort by relevance and select those common terms. In this case, the most appropriate synonym and the one most used instead of income is earnings.
Below you can find the results of using Thesaurus to look for synonyms of Income:

LESSON 2. TASK 3: COMPARISON OF DICTIONARIES

I have looked TRADE up in the three suggested dictionaries. 

This is the result I found in the Oxford Dictionary: 

Here we find 4 different entries for "trade" as a noun and 2 as a verb. We can find also some example sentences and synonyms and also differences between North American and British English. We can also find the sound of the word, the origin of the word, phrasal verbs with the selected word and derivatives.

These are the results one can found in Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Here we find 4 different entries for "trade" as a noun, 3 as a verb and 4 as an adjective. In this case we can find the whole definition of the word, including many entries that are obsolete or old. It also provides a link for the English-learners entry and for kids. In the case of the Learners Dictionary, the definitions are similar but many examples are given for each of the entries. In tried the Quiz of "Name that Thing" in this Dictionary and I found it quite hard, with very specific questions about vocabulary. I got 5 right questions out of 10 (and some of the answers were by chance). 

These are the results for Wordreference: 

Here we find 7 different entries of "trade" as a noun, 5 entries as a verb and 3 entries as an adjective. For each entry, one can find some examples of it. 

The dictionary I prefer is the Oxford Dictionary, because it is quite accurate and it provides many examples in the sentence. In my case I do not find useful the whole definition provided by the Webster Dictionary. 

LESSON 2. TASK 1: STUDENTS' NEEDS

        I will discuss the task of students' linguistic needs in the context of the subject of Economics. This subject is included in the modality of Humanities and Social Sciences as established in the Decree 102/2008 of 11th July by the Consell, which decides the curriculum of Bachillerato and the minimum contents at the Valencian Community. The contents of Economics (i.e. those theoretical and conceptual aspects of the subject that answer the question: What should we teach? or What does the student need to know about this subject?) can also be found at the Royal Decree 1467/2007 of 2nd November. In both laws, one can find the following 8 blocks of contents:
 
  ∙  BLOCK 1: Economic activity and economic systems
  ∙  BLOCK 2: Production, Economic Interdependence and Population
  ∙  BLOCK 3: Trade and markets
  ∙  BLOCK 4: Economic National Indicators
  ∙  BLOCK 5: Decision making and Public Intervention in the Economy
  ∙  BLOCK 6: Finance
  ∙  BLOCK 7: International Economic Context
  ∙  BLOCK 8: Actual Economic Unbalances

    Regarding the type of linguistic exchanges needed in a typical class of Economics in the first year of Bachillerato, one should expect students making questions about those aspects of the subject that are not clear to them. They should also be able to participate in debates on some economic aspects in a natural way, improvising their answers and comments. Sometimes they are also asked to solve the exercises in the blackboard so that they should explain to the rest of their classmates their process in order to get the correct solution. During the explanations given by the teacher, they should be able to understand them, internalise the definitions of new concepts, incorporate the new specific vocabulary and follow the procedures in order to solve quantitative problems. It should be taken into account that my explanations are both oral but with the support of slides and notes on the blackboard. I like asking questions to random (and not so random sometimes!) students in order to check whether they are following the explanations or whether I should decrease my own speed.
    Regarding the writing and reading skills they must use, students are also expected to read the news, solve some theoretical exercises, read documents and the textbook, analyse and comment on some economic papers.

TAKS 5: Video on ICT and Economics

This summer I heard about this iniciative of some lecturers at the Australian Business School, who have found that the fastest route to a student's brain is to use a computer game that plays out the theory of economics. It is an online game that sets up economic environments and allows students to interact with other agents, make economic decisions and analyse the outcomes. 

Students can play the game in their own time, on their own devices and can progress at their own speed. It uses both intuitive and academic concepts, which are accurately treated. The ideas arise from interestin laboratory experiments. 

Although is a very specific technique and very expensive to produce, I think that this type of simulation environments are quite useful when teaching economics where many variables are involved in a particular output of a decision. 

TASK 4: WHAT'S a BLOG?

    In this society where we are surrounded by any type of information in many different websites, the particular characteristics that one can allow with a blog is to find the information in a chronological order and, especially, to allow for comments from the readers. The role of these comments is quite important since it provides feedback to the author of the blog and it possibly allows him/her to gather further information on the topic of interest. Blogs are also quite capable to integrate lots of media files and share the information there in social networks.

        Looking up for the meaning of blog in the Oxford Dictionary made me remember that this noun is an abbreviation of weblog. It can be thought as a diary or a digital magazine. This definition emphasises that blogs are regularly updated, as opposed to a website where the content is quite static, and that they are usually run either by an individual or by a small group of people, but they barely used by organisations or institutions. The Blog for English Teacher is an exception to this since it is runned by the publisher Oxford University Press. This blog is dessiged to be useful to anyone involved in English Language teaching, mostly useful resources for teachers. I think that this blog is quite professional and extremely useful, with very well defined categories and available to be followed in many social networks.

    Another example of a blog that can be an excellent source for teachers is the blog on Literature "Poesia Infantil i Juvenil" in both Valencian and Spanish. Another advantage of blogging is that one can usually find other blogs closely related to the actual one we are reading.

        The application and use of blogs as part of the dynamics of the classroom, allows to improve the feeling of belonging to a community which can increase the closeness of the relationship between students, it also encourages shy students to participate in a discussion outside the environment of the classroom. The latter is more associated with the Class Blogs.

    I find particularly interesting the idea of using the blog of each student as a portfolio of the course work (Learner´s Blog) as we do it here. I think that a blog can be a very useful tool to access this type of information of each student and improve writing and reading skills. An example of this type of blogs can be found in the Learning Portfolio for Primary School teachers, where students of the University of Alicante share their work on ICT in Nursery and Primary Schools.
    Using a blog in this sense or by commenting in the Tutor Blog, students can share their works and thoughts with their classmates. I like the idea of thinking that a blog is a virtual extension of my classroom.

    Blogs used in the educational context can be also viewed as a tool to provide information to parents of students of early ages of the delevopment and path of the course. A very important aim of blogging is that provides students ownership over their own learning and they can articulate their needs and inform about their learning.
        For the content of this whole course, I found particularly interesting the blog on CLIL by one of the coordinators of the Bilingual Program in Madrid and a researcher on this important and interesting area. I think this can be a useful blog in order to start diving into this world of CLIL.

        Here you can find some additional websites where one can find information about what a blog is and how to use it for pedagogical reasons:
 
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/blog

http://edublogs.org/10-ways-to-use-your-edublog-to-teach/

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2012/06/ultimate-guide-to-use-of-blogs-in.html

Presentation

    Welcome to my blog for ICT and CLIL!
My name is Elena and I am an economist. I am a teacher at the University of Alicante and at the Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios de Protocolo (IMEP) at the University Miguel Hernández. I have been teaching Econometrics, Statistics and Business both at graduate and postgraduate level for the last 9 years. I did my PhD in Economics at the University College London and I lived there for 5 years, where I was also a research assistant and a teaching assistant at some PhD courses. Some of the courses during these last years were taught in English and that was a great experience, since I had a very motivated and self-selected group of students willing to both learn the content of the course and show themselves ( and the market) that they were able to follow a course in English.
    I intensively use English in my job as a researcher by reading academic articles, communicating to foreign coauthors or visiting professors in our department.
    Regarding my knowledge about computers, I use ICT in my role as a teacher: I have been using moodle in order to post class materials and to solve some questions from students. I normally use Skype to do some tutorials and to teach some lectures for online students. In my daily life, I use my PC and tablets to work and I also use projectors during my lectures.