REFLECTIONS

The promoting team which is formed by an Economics, Technology and English teacher decided to be part of this project in order to experiment how it would be to teach these subjects in English.

We created the requested two tasks and we decided to implement task 2 in both cases. After that we have been observing and reflecting over those sessions and below you will find out what conclusion that we arrived to.

Patricia and Roser 

First we faced rejection from the student's part due to fear of not understanding and not being able to communicate their thoughts about the subject.

Then once we started the session most of the class started to relax and see that they were able to follow the class without major problems. They understood the vocabulary presented thanks to the scaffolding provided ( visuals, questions that helped them to get the meaning the vocabulary and the handout that we gave them).

The following session already from the beginning we could observe that they were eager to continue with the activities. They were already familiar with the topic and the activities presented which were challenging. For example the vanishing word activity which they undertook with bravery and all together were able to complete the text with the missing words.

In the last session fear was present again because they had to write an opinion essay about the topic within 30 minutes, and even so they did a good job. You can find the written texts with the key words marked and underlined in light blue  in the evidence section. 

Overall we are really satisfied with the results obtained and this motivate us to continue with our work the following years of this project.

Xavier and Roser

Industrial Technology is per se a difficult subject so implementing it in English was a greater challenge. Moreover, due to the course planning we were forced to talk about a topic that the students had no seen in Catalan. The topic was transmission mechanisms. This topic was presented in two sessions in which the students were presented original Da Vinci drawings of different artifacts. After they guessed what the artifact was and could do we provided moving images representing those artifacts. They talked about them in pairs and we were surprised to see that they didn't have problems talking in English and were very engaged with the topic.

Gep Project has been useful to provide specific language to our students in an integrated way. The activities promote an active learning so they acquire this specific language without studying the words separately. We think they have achieved the Technology content, that is improve his engineering skills through discovering new artifacts, think about how they work and find some aplication for this artifacts. In addition to this, they improve English vocaculary, speaking, reading and writing.