Day one

The day has come and, after a long summer, I'm in Scarborough.
I met my host at the weekend and today I started classes. The place where I'm studying is called Anglolang, which my colleague Marga and I found online before the summer holidays.

Scarborough is a beautiful coastal town by the North Sea, with fascinating sights and welcoming people. The academy is also beautiful, with nice facilities and teachers also seem to be good. As today was the first day, we were given the basic information of the course and the activities. We were given a timetable and we were also asked about our interests regarding the course. They want to make sure that we get what we really need. And that is good.

Most of my classmates are Italians. There is also a German, a Hungarian, a Finn and two Swedes. Fortunately, there are no Spanish teachers other than Marga and I.
According to the timetable, we have two periods of Language Development before the lunch break and then one more period of Methodology after lunch. As I see it, Methodology lessons are the most important and useful. In general, lessons are quite long (nearly two hours each) but there are short breaks from time to time. 

The first lesson today was a kind of introduction. We started with an activity to revise and expand vocabulary. The teacher displayed some pictures on the interactive whiteboard (IWB) and we had to talk about them in small groups. Then we discussed the pictures all together with the teacher and she provided us with some vocabulary related to the pictures. The idea is good and I find it a good way to revise vocabulary with students but, of course, I would need to adapt it to their level.

The teacher used some words of this activity as a link to the second one (Forming new words). She focused on blended words, which are so fashionable these days, but we started discussing other ways of forming words, such as prefixes and suffixes, phrasal verbs, compounds or loan words. We couldn't finish the activity and she asked us to finish it at home. As a teacher, I liked the activity but I do not find it useful for class, since in Spain secondary education students do not have to learn about word formation in so much detail.

The second lesson was about British culture and I found it more interesting. The teacher introduced himself with a typical activity we all know. He wrote 3 numbers on the IWB and we had to guess why they were meaningful in his life. It was a bit disappointing, as I expected new activities to get inspiration from, but the teacher was so fun and dynamic that we all enjoyed the activity a lot.

Then he gave us a short piece of paper with some questions to ask our partners. After fifteen minutes, he asked us about the people we had been talking to. Again, I found the activity a little bit unoriginal, in the sense that it was the typical activity students are so used to. 

But then he started the third activity, which I loved. He told us about the new 10 pence coins that the Royal Mint have offered for 2018. Then he explained that there are 26 different coins representing icons of the British culture. After that, he gave us a piece of paper with the alphabet in it, each letter being the first letter of the name of the icon represented by each coin. He had displayed pictures of the 26 coins on the walls of the classroom and the corridors so, in pairs, we had to go round the classroom and the corridors and try to guess the name of each icon and jot it down in the alphabet paper. Some of them were very easy and some others were a bit more difficult, but we enjoyed it a lot. When we had all finished, he played this video for us to check our answers:

I found this the most interesting and useful activity in the morning because it deals with British culture and I don't think I would need to adapt it to my students. I will definitely use it with them.
After the video, we were asked to invent the icons for a fictional coin from our countries. In this activity, I realised that we teachers still make use of stereotypes when thinking about other countries and cultures, even though we are supposed to have overcome this. Some teachers in my group asked me why I didn't choose bull fighting or flamenco as an icon for the Spanish coin.


Today, exceptionally as they said, we didn't have the

Scarborough from Oliver's Mount War Memorial

afternoon lessons because we were being taken on a bus tour round the town. I have also loved this activity. The tour guide was excellent. He told us about the history of the impressive sites we saw but he entwined this information with his personal experience as a local. It has been really interesting and we have learnt a lot.