Topic 21

21. FOREIGN LANGUAGE AREA PLANNING: DIDACTIC UNITS.

CRITERIA FOR THE SEQUENCE AND TIMING OF THE CONTENTS
AND OBJECTIVES. SELECTION OF THE METHODOLOGY TO USE
IN LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES.

1. FOREIGN LANGUAGE AREA PLANNING: DIDACTIC UNITS.

1.1. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE AREA

1.2. WHAT IS LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE?

1.3. LEVELS OF CURRICULAR SPECIFICATION

1.4. CONCEPT OF TEACHING PLANNING

1.5. DIDACTIC UNITS

2. CRITERIA FOR THE SEQUENCE AND TIMING OF THE CONTENTS

AND OBJECTIVES

3. SELECTION OF THE METHODOLOGY TO USE IN LEARNING AND

ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES

4. CONCLUSION

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY

6. LEGAL FRAMEWORK

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In a global and constantly changing world like ours, the mastery of foreign languages is
fundamental. The Communicative Approach emphasises that students must learn to use
language to communicate, and that the teaching-learning process must be centred on
their needs, interests and previous knowledge. In order to ensure a teaching of quality,
teachers must plan what is to be done in the classroom considering these aspects.

Based on this view, we will start by concentrating on the reasons that justify its
inclusion of the Foreign Language in the curriculum. After that we will focus on the
planning of this area, paying special attention to the didactic unit and its components.
Then we will explain how to sequence and time the contents and objectives. To finish,
we will explain the different types of activities and how to select the methodology to be
used in them.

We deal with an essential topic since the teaching of a foreign language must be
carefully planned and personalised to the characteristics of our pupils. The Education
Administrations emphasize the significance of this topic by providing schools with
autonomy to adapt the prescriptive curriculum to their students.

1. THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE AREA PLANNING

The teaching of English as a Foreign Language is one of the subject areas of Primary
Education, as it is reflected in the existing legal regulations: the Education Act (LOE)
2/2006 of May 3rd, the Royal Decree 1513/2006 of December 7th, which establishes the
Minima Teaching Requirements and the Basic Competences for Primary Education and
the Decree 22/2007 of May 10th, which establishes the Primary Education Curriculum
for the Autonomous Region of Madrid. Therefore, it will contribute to the full
development of students’ personality and skills. Now, we are going to concentrate on
the importance of this area.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE AREA

Nowadays, international barriers are breaking down and people can easily come into
contact with other cultures and languages through travel or Information and
Communication Technologies. One aspect of this globalization is the growing trend for
using English as an international language. There are several reasons for introducing
English as a foreign language in the official curriculum.

Foreign languages allow students to access a wider range of professions, to improve their
channels of information and to communicate with people from different countries. The
success in business and international relations is closely linked to the mastery of foreign
languages, particularly in the context of the European Union, where people and goods can
move freely through the member states.

Learning a foreign language and its culture develops cognitive and social abilities. It
helps children to overcome their natural egocentrism, as they realise that there are other
ways of living and thinking. At the same time, this contact will foster tolerance and
respect towards the foreign culture and people, as well as a better understanding and
appreciation of their own language and culture.

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Children are less distanced from the age in which they learn their first language than
teenagers or adults and they are still good at understanding and imitating what they
hear. Besides, they realise that the same functions and notions they have just learn in
their native language can be expressed using a different language.

WHAT IS UNDERSTOOD BY LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE?

As it has been demonstrated, learning a foreign language is essential for our pupils in
Primary Education. But, what is understood by learning a foreign language? Nowadays,
it involves being able to communicate.

However, communicating is more than making correct sentences, it requires having

communicative competence. This term was coined by Hymes in the 1960s and refers to
the ability to use and interpret language appropriately in a variety of situations.
According to Firth, the social dimension of language is taken into consideration,
because “language is interaction; it is interpersonal activity and has a clear relationship
with society”.

According to Canale and Swain, communicative competence includes four areas:

grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence. These four sub-
competences were later on complemented by socio-cultural competence.

LEVELS OF CURRICULAR SPECIFICATION

The Foreign Language curriculum has been designed to guarantee that our pupils
acquire communicative competence. The curriculum is open and flexible. This involves
three levels of curricular specification. The first level includes the minima teaching
requirements established by the Spanish government, which are specified by each
Autonomous Region to fit their cultural, linguistic and traditional characteristics.
Schools, which have pedagogical and organisational autonomy, will adapt the
prescriptive curriculum to their own socio-economic and cultural environment. This is
the second level of specification. Finally, teachers will elaborate a Teaching Planning,
bearing in mind the particular features of their students.

CONCEPT OF TEACHING PLANNING

The teaching Planning is the last and most specific curricular step to provide pupils with
an education adjusted to their particular characteristics, needs, interests, knowledge,
likes and, in general, personal distinguishing features.

According to Jeremy Harmer, ‘the best teachers are those who think carefully about
what they are going to do in their classes and who plan how they are going to organise
the teaching and learning’.

The Teaching Planning must fulfil a series of conditions. First of all, it must be adapted
to the school’s socio-cultural and economic environment and to the characteristics of the
particular group of pupils it is designed for. This will allow attending to diversity and
dealing with specific educational needs which students may have.

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The Teaching Planning will specify the teaching-learning process, including the
objectives to be acquired, the basic competences to be developed, the contents to be
taught and their sequencing in time, the assessment procedures and criteria, the
methodology to be used, the appropriate usage of the Information and Communication
Technologies and the attention to pupils with Specific Educational Needs.

When planning all these aspects, teachers must be aware of the frequent need to adjust
plans and carry out changes; therefore the Teaching Planning must be a flexible
document.

Finally, it must be feasible. This implies that the teacher has the space, time and
materials necessary for the activities that s/he has designed. In addition to that, these
activities must be within the learner’s capacity in order for them to experience a feeling
of success that will motivate them to continue learning.

DIDACTIC UNITS

The Teaching Planning is organised in didactic units. A didactic unit is a plan of work
that sequences and times the learning and assessment activities that have been designed
in order for our pupils to achieve the objectives and basic competences that it specifies,
through the teaching of the contents.

The didactic units must be connected and organised in a cyclical way to allow recycling,
since children Primary Education have a short-span memory.

According to Krashen’s Natural Approach, teaching must progress from the simplest to
the most complex. Therefore, the topics, objectives and contents of the didactic units
will respond to the criterion of progressive complexity.

The first element to include in a didactic unit is its description. Teachers will indicate
the topic of the unit, which must be close to learners’ interests; the pupils’ previous
knowledge, which will be the basis for new language acquisition and the year, term,
number of sessions and connections with other didactic units.

After that, the didactic objectives will be established. They refer to what the students
will be able to do at the end of the unit. They must be based on the general objectives
for the Foreign Language area.

The teacher must also specify the basic competences or key skills that students will
develop throughout the unit. These skills must be developed by all our students to
achieve their personal fulfilment, be active citizens, incorporate themselves into
adulthood satisfactorily and be able to develop a permanent learning along their lives.

The contents refer to what students must learn in order to achieve the intended
objectives and to develop the basic competences. They will be organised into four
different blocks that deal with oral and written communicative skills, reflection upon
language knowledge and learning and socio-cultural aspects.

The contents will be worked through different tasks and activities, which are the centre
of the didactic unit.
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They must develop the four linguistic skills through the incorporation of different
interaction patterns and they must be closely related, meaningful and varied.

The teacher must include the material resources needed for the activities and the space
and time management, which will be organised to create a secure atmosphere in the
class.

Finally, the assessment will enable to teacher to evaluate the effectiveness of both the
teaching and learning process. S/he will establish a several evaluation criteria which
will be the reference to assess the degree of attainment of the objectives and the
development of the basic competences. S/he will also design a series of evaluation
strategies and instruments based on the corresponding assessment criteria.

Now, let’s analyse the criteria to sequence and time the contents and objectives.

2. CRITERIA FOR THE SEQUENCE AND TIMING OF THE

CONTENTS AND OBJECTIVES

As we have previously mentioned, schools must personalise the prescriptive curriculum

to their pupils. This is done by means of the School Educational Project and the School
Curricular Project. The Curricular Project is a document in which the teachers of a
particular stage reflect a series of decisions about the strategies that they are going to
use to ensure the coherence of their teaching practice. It includes the specification of the
objectives, contents, methodological principles and evaluation criteria.

Teachers will decide what must be taught, specifying the general objectives and
contents of the area. To do so, they must take into account the socio-cultural
environment of the learners and their particular features. Once the objectives to be
achieved and the contents to be taught are established, the cycle teachers will plan their
sequence and timing.

The term ‘sequence’ refers to the organisation of the objectives and contents throughout
the cycle, in order to ensure continuity within the learning process.

The sequence of the objectives and contents is based on two theories that have
influenced Foreign Language Learning. The first one is Krashen’s Monitor Model. In
the ‘Natural Order Hypothesis’, Krashen explained that learners seem to acquire the
features of a language in predictable sequences. The natural order is independent of the
order in which rules have been learnt. The reason why this happens is that we always
learn from the simplest to the most complex.

According to Cognitivism, learners create mental pictures or prototypes of their

surrounding environment when they are acquiring their mother tongue. When they learn
a foreign language, they compare the new reality with the prototypes that they already
have. If the elements introduced in class are connected to students’ prototypes they will
be learnt easily.

Bearing in mind these two theories, we can say that general aspects that are easier to
learn and connected to the students’ real life must be introduced before others that are
more complex and distant from students’ reality.
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In addition to that, the learners’ psychological development must be considered.

According to Piaget, children in Primary Education are in the Concrete Operational
Period. At this stage they gain a better understanding of mental operations and start to
think logically about concrete events. However, it is still difficult for them to understand
abstract concepts. Therefore, it is essential to start with topics based on pupils’ concrete
experiences.

To finish, the objectives and contents must be connected and arranged in a cyclical way
to allow recycling, since children have a short-span memory. This constant recycling
will allow them to connect new aspects to their previous knowledge, helping them to
learn in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, timing refers to the amount of time needed to achieve the objectives,
which will depend on the characteristics and capacities of each student, and to teach the
contents.

In Primary Education, contents are arranged into four different blocks. Blocks 1 and 2
deal with oral and written communicative skills respectively. The four skills must be
worked in an integrated way, but not to the same extent. Reading and writing are
abstract activities, and children are not mature enough to deal with abstract concepts.
Therefore, they must be reached at the end of Primary Education. The current
educational law has kept this in mind and establishes that oral language is of prime
importance in Primary Education.

For this reason, teachers will devote more time to develop oral skills that written ones.
At the beginning, students will spend most of their time listening to comprehensible
input, because a language is learnt by listening. When they are ready, they will produce
oral output. Written input will be introduced more gradually with different types of
texts, and writing will be guided.

The other two blocks are of paramount importance. Therefore, plenty of time will be
devoted to them. Block 3 is concerned with linguistic learning and with a series of
strategies to learn better. In order to communicate in English it is necessary to master
some basic structures, vocabulary and their pronunciation. Block 4 deals with the
identification of some socio-cultural aspects of the English-speaking countries that will
foster tolerant and respectful attitudes to the people who speak English. Culture must be
incorporate to the English classroom since learning a foreign language means learning
both a linguistic code and cultural elements.

3. SELECTION OF THE METHODOLOGY TO USE IN LEARNING AND

ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES

Activities are the core of the Teaching Planning. We must remember that without their
specification, sequence and timing for each of the sessions, there is no real planning.

There are two types of activities. Learning activities are those that allow the pupils to
put into practice all the contents that they have been taught. Assessment activities are
the ones that help the teacher to check whether the intended objectives have been
achieved or not. Both learning and assessment activities must aim to develop students’
communicative competence.
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When selecting the activities to use in class, the teacher needs to consider a series of
aspects.
1. They must be exciting, interesting and motivating to this particular group of
pupils.
2. They must provide a suitable challenge for the age group, being neither too
simple nor too difficult. The most challenging activities are open-ended
activities, where the outcome or answers are not known.
3. Children must focus on getting the task done, rather than on practising a
language item. In this way they will learn in an unconscious way and acquisition
will be fostered.
4. The language input and output necessary to carry out the activity must be
adapted to the students’ level of competence.

Methodology includes the techniques, procedures and strategies used to carry out
activities. An interesting methodology to use in learning and assessment activities is the
‘Plan - Do - Review’ model. It consists of three stages corresponding to the typical
structure of most lessons, and represents the cyclical nature of learning.

The first stage, PLAN, encourages children to think about what they already know and
what they need to do the activities. They may review work from previous lessons and be
informed of the lesson aims.

In the second stage, DO, learners do the activities or tasks. At the same time, each
activity includes the three stages: plan, do and review. First of all, the teacher provides
the context for the activity and explains the purpose of the activity. The goal is to
motivate the students. Then, the students do the activity and use the target language.
The teacher monitors and helps if necessary. Finally, the children consolidate language
from the pervious stage and evaluate the activity and their performance.

In the third stage, REVIEW, children review and assess what has been done, and the
teacher sets homework.

In addition to this methodology, the teacher needs to bear in mind the following
methodological principles:
1. Teachers must take into account their learners’ needs, interests, motivation,
attitudes, psychological and developmental characteristics, learning styles and
previous knowledge.
2. Activities must be familiar to the learner. Games, dramatisation, stories and
songs are part of children’s real life.
3. Language is a means of communication. Therefore, learning a language implies
having communicative competence in that language. The classroom is not the
best place to develop communication; consequently, teachers must create an
atmosphere which is as similar as possible to a real communicative situation by
organising activities with varied interactions.
4. Students not only learn from the teacher, but also from their classmates. Pair and
group work foster cooperation and socialization in the classroom.
5. Students are the centre of the teaching process. They are responsible for their
own learning and have an active role in the classroom. Their autonomy must be
promoted through tasks that promote the use of different learning strategies.

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6. In order for learning to be meaningful, activities must encourage pupils to use

their previous knowledge and to discover things for themselves.
7. The four linguistic skills must be integrated since this is the way in which they
are used in real life. However, oral skills have priority over written ones, and
receptive over productive.
8. Children’s minds are not mature enough to deal with abstract concepts.
Consequently, visual aids like illustrations, objects or gestures must be used to
help them concentrate on the reality that they are dealing with.
9. Finally, errors must be seen as something natural and logical, since they are
positive evidence of the learning process.

Teaching practice must be constantly assessed to see if it is working and why or why
not. That is why action research is so important. If we constantly monitor our classes
and adjust what we do accordingly, it is likely that the methods and techniques that we
use are the best for the classes we teach.

4. CONCLUSION

In this topic we have dealt with the planning of the Foreign Language area. We have
justified the incorporation of this area in the curriculum and explained planning process.
Finally, we have provided some criteria to sequence and time the contents and
objectives, and to select the methodology to use in the activities.

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY

BREWSTER, J. et al. (2003): The Primary English Teacher’s Guide. Penguin English.
HARMER, J. (2003): The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.
LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (2003): Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching.
Oxford University Press.
VARELA, R. et al. (2003): All About Teaching English. Centro de Estudios Ramón
Areces.

6. LEGAL FRAMEWORK

- Organic Education Act (LOE) 2/2006 of May 3rd.

- Royal Decree 1513/2006 of December 7th, which establishes the Minima
Teaching Requirements and the Basic Competences for Primary Education.
- Decree 22/2007 of May 10th, which establishes the Primary Education
Curriculum for the Autonomous Region of Madrid.