From theory to practice

Hello everybody! Last Monday we were present at Amanda and Anahi's special class. In my opinion, it was very useful and it made me think about new ways of creating and using interesting material for tasks in our classrooms. The example of Les Luthiers’ poem was an excellent way to illustrate how we can use the Systemics method in texts for teaching purposes. So, it’s time to think of new ideas, videos, stories, songs and web pages as resources to plan our classes. For example, we can compare Paul McCartney’s song “We all stand together” with High School Musical’s song “We’re all in this together”. Students may judge if both songs have the same message, find differences about the contexts in which they emerged and many other different activities that are much more authentic than fill-in-gaps exercises or grammatical rules.

Asking for students’ opinions on different topics, working with a song they like, or actually with a poem they have never read, will make our lessons more genuine and motivating. Much material is available and ready to be used, decoded and analyzed in our classes. Let’s do it!

Jackie

Hi! On September the 19th, as you know, we had a guest in our class; Amanda Zamuner, our teacher`s friend and also an English teacher. They two together gave us a talk, and the topic was:  Systemics.  To deal with this, they developed a work called: Humor y poesia: anàlisis de las transgreciones a la coherencia  desde una perspective lingüistico cognitiva . They analyzed a Les Luthiers`song called La bella y graciosa moza marchose a lavar la ropa interpreting it by looking at the use of the pronouns. Then we saw Rupert and the frog, a cartoon with songs by Paul Mc Cartney. I really liked this last one. The class was amazing!!! I will try to put all this into practice as soon as possible. Thanks Anahi and Amanda. Your class was inspiring!!!

Zoe

Hi everybody!   Today I·m writing about something that you already know,and perhaps your knowledge about it ,is better than mine,but anyway here it is! Last September 19 th as you know we had a different class with Anahi and a friend of hers, Amanda,both teachers gave us a  speech of Systemic Method.The theme was very interesting; they did an analysis of a poem from Les Luthiers called ,·La bella y graciosa moza marchose a lavar la ropa·. It was amazing how they interpreted the lyrics of the poem,discovering that the significance of the stanzas could suffer from variables in meaning with the use of the pronouns in certain position. I do hope that my interpretation of the speech ,is not far from the one they tried to convey. I realize that I need to do more reading to accomplish a better understanding of the Systemic Method.In other words,the teachers·intention was to show us the importance of putting into practice the theory  that we are learning in the course.

Ambar