Category: GRETA Journal — 2013, Volume 21

GRETA Journal — 2013, Volume 21. Historical author guidelines. p. 45

Thomas H. Schmidt; Elena Ayala Tello. GRETA Journal — 2013, Volume 21. Interview. pp. 7–14

The present paper offers a three-session teaching proposal aimed at developing learners’ listening skills in the FL classroom by means of a video from the well-known American sitcom Friends. The theoretical background underpinning the design of our proposal stems from Lund’s (1990) taxonomy for listening instruction and Vandergrift and Goh’s (2012) metacognitive approach to listening. The proposal presented is intended for students of English as a FL in their post-compulsory secondary education.

Duolingo (www.duolingo.com) is a language-learning website that draws upon successful examples of good research and practice from CALL and applies them to a freely accessible, gamified learning platform. Language learners can access it either on the web, mobile or tablet. Gamification, the application of game elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al, 2011: 9), has been widely criticised as a cynical take on the effectiveness of games to motivate and captivate players (Bogost, 2011). However, the key to the success of Duolingo’s use of gamification is that the game elements are there to motivate learners on the site (Zhang, 2008: 145). The result is a user experience that feels light, fun, and ‘gameful’ (Deterding et al, 2011: 9), and that allows participants to share in their learning experiences. We use a taxonomy we have devised in order to analyse the site in terms of its gamified aspects.

GRETA Journal — 2013, Volume 21. Editorial. p. 5

This paper reports on work carried out as the result of a UCM (Complutense University of Madrid) collaboration with the FLAME (Film, Languages and Media in Education) Research Group of the Manchester Metropolitan University. In this context, an inclusive multimodal framework for the implementation of literary works with film adaptations was developed as part of a video/literature workshop designed for one of our Master’s courses aimed at the training of EFL/ESL secondary teachers in the UCM. This multimodal framework was motivated primarily by the fact that literature has recently become an essential part of the curriculum in Bilingual Secondary Schools in Madrid. The reality that the use of film adaptations of literary texts facilitates the implementation of literature in the EFL/ESL classroom was also a key factor. The lines following not only describe the framework developed, but also provide one example of implementation of the model for the teaching of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath (1477), among the best known of The Canterbury Tales (1478); without any doubt, one of the hardest texts to tackle in the EFL/ESL classroom out of the literary works recommended for the bilingual official curriculum.