Month: December 2018

 

 

 

AN INVESTIGATION ON THE LEARNING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN SCHOOLS IN CATALONIA/SPAIN AND BC/CANADA: The Art of Teaching Foreign Languages

 

I have always been interested in languages, sports and education. Taking the liberal studies program gave me the opportunity to make meaningful connections between my areas of interest.

For the last 3 years I had the opportunity of travelling to Spain and working as an ESL instructor in an elementary school in Catalonia. Considering my experiences in teaching and my natural inclination towards languages and pedagogy, I decided to begin writing about the similarities and differences between educational systems in Spain and Canada. My graduation project will explore and compare the Spanish and Canadian education systems while focusing on bilingualism and physical education.

After I completed my first tutorial exploring the Spanish educational system from the perspective of an ESL instructor in an elementary school in Catalonia, for my second tutorial I decided to complete a deeper analysis of comparative aspects of methodological strategies, curricula and lesson plans of teaching languages in Spain and Canada.

Additionally, my tutorial outlines the perceptions of foreign language teachers and the multimodal and inspirational teaching of languages. The tutorial also summarizes the differences of pedagogical approaches of teaching English/French in Spain and Canada and the particularities of teaching languages as experienced at the school level.

One of the unanticipated learning outcomes of this tutorial was the overlap between the attention teachers allocated to multimodal and inspirational learning strategies in Spanish and Canadian elementary schools.

The research methods I used for this tutorial were: literature review, direct observation, and interviews with language teachers at Llor and Lord Roberts Elementary School. Through literature review and discussions with teachers, I got a better understanding of the pedagogical perspective and methodologies of teaching foreign languages in two different educational systems.

This tutorial preambles the upcoming tutorial in which I will explore the role and inclusion of physical education in school curricula and its connections with learning a foreign language. The present and forthcoming tutorial will help me shape the comparison of the Spanish and Canadian education system, with a focus on foreign languages and physical education.

 

I am thankful to my advisor, Annabella Cant for her guidance, and her enthusiastic support through the course of shaping this tutorial. Her knowledge and creative pedagogical ideas have been the source of inspiration for me throughout this tutorial.

Never stop learning because life never stops teaching

I am Bianca and I was born in 1992 in Bucharest, Romania. I was three years old when my parents decided to move to Canada. I grew up and went to school in Vancouver, and ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a famous singer. The dream is still alive and even though I have taken many different paths along the way, singing is something that I am always working on. Here is my story, who knows maybe one day I will turn it into a song.

In 2004, my little brother was born and my parents decided to spend a whole year in Romania. We bought a little house in a small village on the outskirts of Bucharest. I was enrolled in the local school for grade 6. This was exactly how I would imagine living on the countryside would be. Life here was so different from the life that I had in Vancouver. The street that we lived on was not paved it was just a dirt road and in the fall when it would rain it would get all muddy, later on the mud would dry in crater like forms because of the cars that had passed through in the rain. Life there was adventurous, I would go to school in the morning and I would come back in the afternoon. I would meet up with the kids on my street and we would play hide and seek, play with toy cars, and run down the muddy road until the sun went down. School there was very different than school in Vancouver. The Romanian school curriculum was more complicated than the one in my elementary school in Vancouver. I was not used to having to do physics in grade 6 but this was normal in Romania. Physics and math were, and still are, my hardest classes. Geography was my favourite, and English class was the best, I was the most popular in English often helping my classmates with difficult questions. Overall, doing grade six in Romania was one of my favourite experiences and I think back to those times fondly.

A year passed quickly and next thing I knew we were back in Canada. Instead of going into grade 7, I skipped it and went directly into high school at King George Secondary. Being in high school was definitely different from grade 6 in Romania. Nobody took their toy cars outside or stayed out until 11 playing hide and seek, but I was back with my friends and glad that I would not have to worry about physics for a year or two.

My high school career went by smoothly. I was more of a sporty person rather than an academic one, many evenings were spent on the soccer pitch and many classes were skipped for more soccer. Being on the soccer team was one of the best things that ever happened to me I love the feeling of being part of something and knowing that as a team, we’re all working towards the same goal.

The summer after grade 11, my parents decided to give Romania another go. This time we lived in the city and I went to a high school that was super far from our home. I remember dreading waking up to take the metro and then a bus to get to school. Grade 12 in Romania was not like grade 6, all the kids were much older than I was, and I often found that I had nothing in common with them. Although I did not have to worry about physics, I now had grade 12 Latin on my plate, but with the help of my classmates, I survived Latin as well. This time around, I did not enjoy the experience as much and really wanted to get back to Vancouver and graduate with my actual friends. In February, my dream came true and we moved back to Canada. I was once again on my old stomping grounds and reunited with my friends.

Even though I did not enjoy it as much, I am thankful for the experience, I had in Romanian high school. It has given me a bigger view of the world we live in. It made me see and understand how cultures can differ from one another. The experience I gained by travelling and moving from one place to another, had a big influence on how I chose my career and over my formation as a professional sports coach and English educator. It has also inspired me to remember that are different modalities of learning and the fact that we are constantly learning all our lives.

I graduated high school in 2010 and I was accepted into Capilano University for human kinetics program. I still was not much of an academic person and suffered greatly with the workload of University. I successfully finished the program after three years and decided to go into liberal studies, which enabled me to approach a much broader field of interdisciplinary studies. I was still not quite sure what exactly I wanted to do once I was out of school and felt that liberal studies was the right way to go in order to test things out. I dabbled in many English courses, psychology courses, and language courses. I was obsessed with Spanish and anything to do with the Spanish culture. In 2015 I signed up for a program called CAPs which sent me to Barcelona to work as an English assistant, in a school and live with a Spanish family for nine months. I loved it, and after the program ended, I decided to remain there. I spent almost 3 years living in Barcelona working as a physical education and English teacher.

The experience of having to take care of myself on my own was eye opening. Until then I had never been apart from my parents and never had to worry about paying bills, cooking or doing laundry. In a sense, I finally grew up. Now I am back at Capilano and am currently working towards graduating from the liberal studies program. I am glad that my program it has allowed me to combine two of the subjects that I love the most, sports and languages, and to make me understand how they are connected. I am working on my graduate project, which I think is going to be quite special and unique, but of course on my down time I am going to continue working on becoming a popstar.

LBST 100 – Fall 2018
Reflection #1
Bianca Paun

Reflection # 1

What are your leanings so far about differing approaches to knowledge?
I consider myself lucky for having the opportunity to take a variety of courses at Capilano University and to gain a broader picture of how people acquire knowledge. I first explored this topic of different methods of learning during my Human Kinetics (HKIN) program in the Human Anatomy course, in which I studied the process of learning from a physiological perspective. Through the Human Anatomy course, I understood that learning is the mental process of using memory and which occurs through electrical impulses and imaging.
My second contact with the topic was while taking Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) courses in which I learned about a different approach to acquire knowledge form the perspective of a behaviour analyst (BA). The BA uses the principles of learning theory to apply interventions to improve socially significant behaviours to a meaningful degree and to assist the less fortunate students diagnosed with ADHD, ADSD or Down syndrome to acquire knowledge.
The Early Education (ECC), Psychology (PSY) and Liberal studies courses gave me the opportunity to explore the process of acquiring knowledge from the perspective of an educator who plays the role of facilitating the learning process. By taking the ECC and PSY courses, I understood the importance of knowledge development, and how this process is influenced by emotional, economic and cultural factors. I also learned about the importance of the inspirational, sensorial and multimodal learning strategies; and to consider how children acquire knowledge in the real world, to address strategies that can help build children’s knowledge bases in the classroom and beyond. The Liberal studies readings, in particular the ones for the present course has reminded me that acquiring knowledge is a complex process, which involves a mental exercise that is strongly influenced by our self-perceptions, beliefs, feeling, and behaviours.

Which readings have you most effectively engaged with, and in what ways?
The LBST 100 class studies evoked my experiences and the various ways I enriched my mind. It reminded me of my first grades in school as an ESL student, struggling with my English class and being bored of memorization or repetition of English grammar. It reminded me how I learned English from reading comic books or hiding in a closet reading English drama, or lying down under a tree listening to music composed by Western singers. Reading about approaches to knowledge opened my mind to the unlimited ways people can learn. The way of how Indigenous people use land as pedagogy, was one of the topics, which really resonated with me. The “Land as Pedagogy,” reading sent me back to the past when I used to learn from my experiences in nature. The class in the forest made me feel much more alive and focused.

How are you relating to people and conversations in the class?
Working and discussing with my classmates is awesome. Seeing the various approaches in which each person acquires knowledge fascinates me. Through conversations with colleagues, I identified similarities between my past and present experiences and others’ experiences, which drive us to thrive as students and as persons. In class, I attempt to move out of my comfort zone and find people to talk to in order to expand my own perspectives on how I see the world.

Do you find yourself thinking differently about knowledge in other contexts? in other classes? at work?
Yes, I think differently about knowledge in other contexts. For example in my profession as a swim coach, I worked with a various category of children, from competitive swimmers who compete in regional and national races to less fortunate kids diagnosed with ADSD whose parents want them to learn swimming. The strategies and purpose to facilitate learning for the advanced swimmers are very different from the ones for the beginner swimmers. The purpose for the advanced swimmers is success; they are motivated to stay fit, to execute the motor skill perfectly and to be in first place. The beginners purpose to learn swimming is to know how to swim, to not drowning and to survive when they are in the water. Their motivation is to be able to float and swim from one end of the pool to the other. For the advanced swimmers the learning strategies are more abstract and are based on inspiration, compared to the beginners for which the most appropriate approach is more practical, based on example. With the advanced swimmers I give the lesson out on deck, using metaphors, for example, I tell them to imagine having puppet arms pulled by strings. With beginners, I get in the water and provide them with support to float while giving them the confidence needed to move through the water and become comfortable in their environment.