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HOW TO MAKE TEACHING UNITS |
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A didactic unit is a teaching planning that includes a sequence of activities or tasks with a final goal and common contents, objectives, methodology and evaluation. Many of the didactic units that we can find are designed around certain topics (food, clothes, hobbies, etc) but we know that the real use of a foreign language involves much more that the knowledge of some lexical fields. For this reason I support the task-based approach: a didactic unit is a sequence of activities or tasks that make possible the achievement of a final task One example: We choose the final task: to write an e-mail to a key-pal in english language. (It is an activity in which the students have to use the foreign language in a real situation with a specific purpose). We have to analize the knowledges and skills that the students will need in order to perform that final task: conventional expressions, introducing oneself, organization of ideas, textual cohesion and coherence, cultural references, etc. Then we have to design the activities that will promote all those learnings and acquisitions. Those activities must be sequenced in a way that allows our students' learning process: from comprehension to production, from clearly structured activities to real language use. There is another idea that we have to take into account: many didactic units include a clear temporalization of sessions and activites. Well, surely most of us have heard about "learner-centered curriculum", and we are eager to teach english focusing on our students' needs and personal characteristics. One of the main ideas of the "learner-centered curriculum" is to follow our students' learning rhythm, and we don't know if they will need one or five sessions to achieve the objectives of the unit. Therefore, this idea is not compatible with clearly temporalized didactic units. What is the use of a planning that doesn´t follow our students rhythm? Bearing all this in mind, I propose to make didactic units following this model:
1. Choose a final task that involves real use of english language. This task must be chosen taking into account the objectives and contents of the course.
2. Analyse the final task and find the knowledges and skills that the students will need to perform it successfully.
3. Establish the steps that the students will have to follow. In the previous example the steps could be: 1- Read and distinguish various types of e-mails (friendly, formal, commercial, etc). 2- Find the general idea of an e-mail 3- Extract specific information from e-mails 4- Write an e-mail.
4. Choose many activities for each step (you don't know if your students will aqchieve the goals in one or more sessions).
To sum up, a clearly structured didactic unit is not useful, from my point of view. We have to take decissions in real time. If one activity doesn't work properly we cannot just go ahead to the next "session", we will have to choose another activity with the same objectives. For this, you will find that topenglishteaching.com is very useful.
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