PDF superior The Development of the English Language Teaching in the High Schools of Ecuador during the last two decades

Before the year 1912, the English Language Teaching in high schools of Ecuador was completely strange. It was after that year that this language started to be taught in many schools of this country. It became mandatory all over in Ecuador in 1950, under the government of Galo Plaza Lasso. At first, there were fewer hours of English teaching and there were not enough English teachers, but with the course of time, this situation changed favorably. Twenty years ago, the English Language Teaching in Ecuador improved thanks to the project CLADLE, implemented by the Ministry of Education of Ecuador. Later on, the education experienced positive changes when Rafael Correa became the new president of Ecuador in 2007. His government also made some changes regarding teacher and student rights. Now English teachers have to take a TOEFL test and get a B2 level certificate or higher. Fortunately, over the last twenty years, the English Language Teaching in Ecuador has gradually developed, to such an extent that it is now taught in every school, either public, private or parochial schools.

Aduwa-Ogiegbaen & Iyamu (2006) based their study on three questions (a) Do secondary school teachers use instructional resources frequently in teaching English language? (b) Do the English Language teachers use appropriate methods in teaching English Language frequently? (c) Do secondary school students in Nigeria learn English language in an environment conducive to learning? The main instruments used for this study were a questionnaire and observation schedules. The researchers designed the questionnaire by generating a list of items, which solicited students' responses on teaching strategies, instructional resources/media used by the teachers and the teaching-learning environment. The specifications for each of the two data collection instruments used in the study were as follows: (a) Questionnaire: This instrument had four sections dealing with demographic. (b) Observation: Research assistants were trained to observe each classroom and some classroom proceedings during administration of the questionnaire noting the features or characteristics of the learning environment. Based on their results they claimed that the public secondary schools in Nigeria were far behind time in offering multiple pathways to the teaching and learning English as a second language. Public secondary schools in Nigeria should be provided with adequate and a variety of instructional media, technologies such as audio and video recordings, language laboratories and computers. These instructional media can be more effective teaching tools for English Language lessons as they offer an authentic learning experience when interwoven with existing curriculum.

About number of students, and seating arrangement; Philips and Walters (2009, p. 21) state: If the class has more than sixteen students teachers may be able to make a double horseshoe. If the teacher arranges the furniture in rows, it helps if the two halves are slightly at an angle. This kind of seating arrangement can be useful during a whole class interaction, in class open discussion. Nevertheless, if the teacher is planning a pair work activity and all the students are working together in close pairs outside of direct control, they need to be able to look at each other. So either get them to move their chairs slightly towards each other or lift their chairs and work facing someone other than their neighbor, depending on the amount of time the activity is going to take.

17 Snivicki, Rice, Chism, and Bickford (2002) claim that if the number of students is about 16, the position face to face is more advisable; on the other hand, there is another way to arrange the chairs: they can be placed around the tables which is called “café style”. The advantage of this type of organization gives a successful result because learners are in a comfortable position, since “café style” offers students the possibility to work in pairs or in groups. Also, the authors explain that during the ‘open pair work’ two students discuss some topics under the supervision of their tutor, while the other students can hear the discussion, they do not move from their chairs, which give them the possibility of establishing communication; moreover, the teachers could arrange the seats in a circle and learners can move easily.

Other authors have summarized a number of reports on dictionary use investigations and commented on them. Wiegand (1998) listed eighty six user studies. Hulstijn and Atkins (1998) reported over seventy studies from a pedagogical perspective. Tono (1998) categorised nearly one hundred and seventy papers and in a later work (2001) summarized more than forty studies. Dolezal and McCreary (1999) extended their annotated bibliography to more than five hundred publications on the topic. Cowie (1999: 178) used the organization proposed by Hartmann (1987), adding two more points of focus, to provide “an even-handed critical perspective on the field”, evaluating the findings of the studies. Nesi (2000) commented on more than twenty studies criticising several aspects of some investigations. Hartman (2001) briefly reports on publications organized around six perspectives on dictionary use: pedagogical lexicography, dictionary awareness, user sociology, reference needs, reference skills, and user training. Bogaards (2003) summarized surveys and experimental research on uses and users of dictionaries. Welker (2010) provided a useful summary of empirical studies on dictionary use, including those related to the teaching of dictionary use. Finally, Lew (2011) explains recent development in the dictionary use studies. We can conclude that the majority of the empirical user studies available today have been done in the last three decades or so.

This research “The influence of large classes in the English language teaching- learning process in Ecuadorian high schools” is aimed to determine whether or not large classes affect the English language teaching-learning process in Ecuadorian high schools. Three research questions were proposed to carry out the investigation; and, a questionnaire was structured and applied to two hundred nine students from three public educational institutions and one private high school in the city of Quito who were selected at random. They were attending to eight year of basic to third year of secondary and their ages oscillated between 12 and 18 years old.

The Ecuadorian Government expects that when students finish high school, they should be able to use the English language. Students have several problems to communicate in short dialogues and conversations during the English classes at public schools. And at Escuela de Educación Básica “Paquisha” which is located in La Esperanza neighborhood, La Libertad, there is no exception. According to the Ministry of Education in Ecuador (Illingworth, 2012) it is necessary to improve the English knowledge as a foreign language because Ecuador is in a process of development at educational area. The English Language Learning Standards which are based on the Common European Framework of References for Languages it notifies that the students are developing a functional level taking into consideration the communicative language components and the language skills as a core part of the program.

The importance of teaching- learning English as foreign language in Ecuador has been widely recognized in the last years due to its everyday use in all fields. Having an advanced level of English has become into a tool, which allows facing the accelerated advance of globalization and the galloping development of technology. The unlimited access to the countless educational resources published in this language, as well as, to the information available in internet, updated every day; furthermore, a great deal of scholarships offered abroad directed toward students who master English language are the strongest reasons for students to achieve a B1.2 (CEFR) level at the end of third year of high school.

CBLI is the last approach regarded before dealing with other topic. It focuses on providing content information through the target language and using academic subjects to acquire the foreign language (Chamot, Barnhardt, El-Dinary, and Robbins, 1999; Richards et al., 2001). CBLI has many advantages in a foreign language class but two are especially relevant. The students are able to improve their language competence into specific areas of their interest and the four language skills (speaking, writing, reading, and listening) are naturally joined (Brinton, 1989; Chamot et al., 1999).

Description: This search aims to improve TEFL strategies focusing web 2.0 tools, in virtual educative environments. In general, the level of English in Colombia is relatively low, and teachers training in one angle stone in the process of enhancing a better English level. This issue also generates an impediment to be hired in internationally interlinked companies. There are several influencing factors related to such a deficient English language proficiency in Colombia. Some of them are educational policies, scarce economic resources, a very mountainous geography, poor access to information networks, and little didactic material, among others.

With regard to the amount of class time devoted to the teaching of each specific skill included in the ET (Table 5), it was found that the three parts of the ET that received most attention in the present study (ET 2008) were as follows: ‘essay’ (98.1%), followed by ‘grammar section’ (96.1%), ‘reading comprehension’ (74.5%), and finally ‘true/false questions’ (15.7%) and ‘vocabulary’ (7.8%). The previous study (ET 2007) yielded similar results with the only exception that ‘grammar’ and ‘reading comprehension’ were equally ranked in order of importance, probably, due to the fact that both questions receive the same weight in the examination. As can be observed, the ‘essay’ was the question which was paid most attention in the two studies (ET 2007 and ET 2008). Since the ‘essay’ is the question in the ET carrying the most weight, these results were rather predictable. According to William (1996) and Cheng (1997), this outcome is perfectly reasonable since teachers rightly consider it their duty to prepare students to achieve the higher marks in the test. It seems evident that teachers teach narrowly to what is tested and focus on the aspects that are assured to bring about the best results in the ET.

“ Guess Who? ” is an activity in which students write letters and practice information questions, then they mingle the answers and when they find a person, should ask for that person’s signature next to the statement that identifies to the student. Likewise, an activity as “ mutual interviews ” is useful because the students can know what an interview is. Also, students can work in pairs and take turns to interviewing each other, for example, each pair joins another pair and introduces his/her partner to the foursome. In addition, the “ quick-write ” consists in dictating the sentence and the students cannot stop. When they cannot think, they may continue writing loops or write I do not know what to write, until the teacher stops them. Finally, in the groups, students choose and read the most interesting piece of writing. The last activity is names and adjectives in which the students form rows and they think of an adjective that describes them and that begins with the same letter of their names. After that, students say their names preceded by the adjective and all students will do the same in each row repeating the first students’ names and

Nowadays many people demand a teaching of English whose main objective is communicative competence. In the 1950´s Noam Chomsky defined communicative competence as abilities and dispositions to understanding and acting. Later on, in 1970, Dell Hymes widened the concept by saying that communicative competence involves linguistics, sociolinguistics, discursive and strategic aspects. This concept has to do with verbal and pragmatic aspects of language, but it does not take into consideration the process of meaning production. In 1980, Canale and Swain retook the aspects Dell Hymes dealt with and they considered communicative competence as a complex of competences that interact in daily communication. Communicative competence facilitates communication among people worldwide. The process of cooperation and friendship among countries, as well as the process of globalization, are growing rapidly and, because of that, to have a good command of at least one international language becomes a basic competence in the training of a professional. Hence the importance of developing reading comprehension skills as one of the basic components of communicative competence.

to develop speaking skills because students are usually afraid of talking in front of numerous groups of students. Thereby, a new technique is required to overcome this drawback. As to the setting of the topic or explanation teachers must implement a new strategy, but assigning them occasional tasks and giving them some time, so that they can infer the answers instead of just questions to the class and obtaining nothing more than silence and the subsequent waste of class time. From this point of view, the solution has been proposed under the following techniques: First, as you present the lesson topic in a graphic organizer, secondly, provide them with a brainstorm related to probable workable solutions, and request of them, further ideas, thirdly, give an argument with the way and the reason a given concept may be useful in real life and finally, discuss the reasons why a solution results to be correct or incorrect

The influence of the English language does not only affect the borrowing process, but also appears in the orthographical patterns of Spanish derivatives and neoclassical compounds. We will analyze the list of prefixed items and neoclassical compounds found in our corpus (see table 3). In fact, the use of some prefixes and combining forms in Spanish words followed by a hyphen imitates the English orthographical structure. The prefixes and combining forms used in the examples in table 3 do exist in Spanish, according to RAE, but the orthographical pattern does not follow the rules in the Spanish language. According to RAE (2010: 535), “no se consideran ortográficamente adecuadas las grafías en las que el prefijo aparece unido con guion a la palabra base (*anti-mafia, *anti-cancerígeno) o separado por ella por un espacio en blanco (anti mafia, anti cancerígeno)”. Similarly, RAE explains that the combining forms used in these formations “Si va antepuesto, se denomina elemento compositivo prefijo: biodiversidad, ecosistema; si va pospuesto, se denomina elemento compositivo sufijo: antropófago, neuralgia” (DPD) and the examples provided in the explanation clearly show that the hyphen is not used in the Spanish word-formation process, for example, biodegradable is recorded in RAE, but without the hyphen. Similarly, Fundeú 22 (2017)

73% The results show that 73% of the teachers answered in the survey that they apply whole -group activities to teach their lessons. Some of the reasons given were that it is necessary to get the attention from all the students, the students can cooperate and help each other and also give feedback to one another. Relating what it was said by teachers, the British Council (2003) states that thanks to whole group work, students who are not confident enough get the opportunity to put their knowledge of the new language into practice in an environment that is more flexible. Instead of being dependent on the teacher, students get used to helping and learning from each other. However, what it was said by the teachers does not coincide with what it was

81 pero, pero entender eso para cuarto, que es uno de los temas que uno tiene que ver ahí según el currículo que le dan a uno, eh, como que yo decía, no. Yo miraba videos, yo preguntaba a los compañeros licenciados en inglés y unos decían una cosa, otros decían otra, o sea las versiones se cambiaban, ¿yo a quién le creo?, o sea ¿cuál es la realidad? ¿Sí? Hasta que hace poco le pregunté al profesor del ILUD y ya más o menos comprendí, o sea no era como me lo decían. (Yes, “how much” and “how many”, that I don’t know if I’m even pronouncing it the right way, but, to understand that is part of some of the topics that they have to learn in fourth grade according to the curriculum that we are given, and I said like “no”. I would watch videos, I would ask some of my co-workers who are English teachers and some said one thing, others said another thing, I mean, the versions changed. Who do I believe? I mean, what’s the reality? Yeah? Until I recently asked my English teacher at ILUD and I kind of understood, I mean, it was not what I had been told.)

It seems that the natural delay for the appearance of the loanwords responds to a series of reasons: the lack of written records of this period; the fact that, as we tried to show abo v[r]

The importance of English language usage has been increasing in all over the world because it is considered as ¨The universal language¨. In Ecuador, teaching English has become a challenge as a result of the new requirements of the society and the modern educational curriculum. Nowadays, the government of our country has given much importance to teaching English. It mainly focuses on its importance by creating innovative projects which can improve the English level in public high schools especially for the less-educated and trained learners. Unfortunately, the lack of English teachers, a limited number of professionals with a good level of English proficiency, and the inadequate teaching methodology have made difficult to get good results. In addition, the physical conditions where the teaching process is applied needs to be renewed according to the necessities of the present time.

An important part of managing learning is giving instructions. Nunan (1996) mentions that giving instructions clearly is a vital skill for all teachers. In an English classroom where the teacher provides the directions in the target language, clear instructions are critical because students might get confused easily if the directions are unclear. The way teachers give instructions to the pupils will affect their individual or group performance directly, if the teacher is clear students will likely perform the task in the way he or she asked, but if the teacher is not clear, students will waste time trying to guess what their teacher wants.