Que horas preciso acordar amanhã? Quantos alarmes vou colocar para tocar? Acordo no primeiro, ou aperto o soneca? O que vou comer no café da manhã? Aliás, terei tempo de tomar café da manhã? E que roupa vou vestir? Será que precisarei levar um casaco ou não? Escolhas. Muitas escolhas, aliás. Escolher faz parte do seu dia quer você queira ou não e só aprendemos a fazer escolhas quando, bem, precisamos fazer escolhas. Ao optarmos pelo restaurante X ao invés da lanchonete Y, por exemplo, estamos pensando ativamente sobre nossas opções, levando em consideração os resultados possíveis e entendemos ..read more

Apesar de já ter inúmeros textos publicados em inglês sobre educação, resolvi que é o momento de também começar a publicar em português. Portanto, aqui na página (que será reformulada), você agora poderá seguir um blog em inglês e este recém criado blog em português. Como? Bem, basta clicar no link com o título Educação Reflexiva, que será onde os posts em português aparecerão. Já o Doing Some Thinking continuará a ser o nome do blog para os posts em inglês. Gostaria de iniciar com um convite para você conhecer um pouco mais sobre minhas ideias relacionadas à educação. Sinta-se à von ..read more

“But, quiet, my fair lady. I shall now tell the tale of the brave Sir Dante. This brave knight travelled great lengths to seek his justice and help his king defeat an evil wizard who had overthrown the king and sent the princess far, far away, to a land where no one had ever returned from. But brave Sir Dante was no ordinary knight, and he was certain he was the bravest of the brave knights in the real, and so he was adamant to make the king have his princess back and restore order in the kingdom. If only he’d known the hardships he was going to go through. I will tell you all, if you have ti ..read more

I’ve learned English as a foreign language. I only travelled abroad to put my English to the test after I’d been teaching it – also as a foreign language – for quite a few years. The large majority of my English teachers were also ‘non-native speakers’ (and I use the inverted commas for the same reason Holliday does) and, to be very honest, this has never been an issue to me nor to the people who were learning the language in my classroom or language institute. If anything, I’m thankful to each and everyone of them, who have inspired me to be the teacher I am today. I’ve never thought any less ..read more

Photo by Amaury Salas on Unsplash We are all able to learn what we want to learn and we will stay at it as long as it takes until we’ve developed our skills, or amassed as much knowledge as we want to. Regardless of lessons, if we want to learn, we will. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. We’ll manage to find the book that we need, to talk to the people we need to talk to, and eventually it will all fall into place. This doesn’t mean we will know all we want to. Learning involves effort, and the desire to be able to do something alone doesn’t necessarily entails a c ..read more

On my last post, I suggested that the best way to focus on students’ learning is by focusing on teaching. The rationale behind this is that we can’t control someone else’s actions or thoughts, but we can control our own. This means that if we pay attention to what we can actually do in order to make learning more effective, we’ll end up being a lot more helpful to our learners than by trying out many different techniques and methods just because they are (or have become) mainstream. We still can’t fully understand how we learn, what really happens in our brains apart from the synapses and all ..read more

Lately, it’s become mainstream to state that we should focus on students’ learning. By saying that, we account for the obvious expected outcome of a teaching & learning environment – students’ learning. Currently, with all the debate on the impact of technology in the lives of children everywhere, it’s pretty obvious that we’re more likely to read and witness the promotion of change in education by the advent of technology. If used properly, it allows us to put students’ on the driver’s seat of their learning. We can get them to actually do things instead of just passively absorb content f ..read more

It’s a given that learning words in isolation is not particularly helpful when it comes to learning a foreign language. Words rarely appear in isolation when we communicate, and ELT has come a long way from the days in which vocabulary appeared as single words in a vocabulary box to the presentation of manageable language chunks. Nowadays, I don’t think it takes a lot of convincing to persuade teachers about the benefits of chunks, meaningfulness and personalisation of vocabulary. However, is there any occasion in which presenting language items out of a context can be helpful? Maybe yes, and ..read more

Language is quite a complex system – one which we try to organise according rules and norms. One of the common ways for us to think about such organisation is prescriptively, the way many of us were taught a second or a foreign language. If we look at what David Crystal says about prescriptivism, we will see that it “is the view that one variety of the language has an inherently higher value than others, and this ought to be imposed on the whole of the speech community. The view is related especially in relation to grammar and vocabulary, and frequently with reference to pronunciation.” And he ..read more

The age of conversation | Photo on Flickr by Kris Hoet The short answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’, and I could base my answer on experience – mine and also the one’s from lots of colleagues. However, we should all be wary of such things as “it’s worked with all my groups,” or the converse “it didn’t work with any of my groups.” These comments per se should not be the sole reason for us to jump to a conclusion as we do not really understand what’s happened in each one of these experiences. This leads us to the step of reading and trying to understand a bit more about the things we ..read more