Practicing Skills to Become Skilful

Abstract

This Final Master’s Thesis proposes a didactic program for the subject of First Foreign Language: English, for the third course of compulsory secondary education, and designed under the regulations of the government of the Canary Islands. This program consists of ten teaching units that apply different active methodologies to ensure the complete acquisition of the contents, such as project-based learning and cooperative learning, and are combined with other traditional methods. The main strategy of this program is to give special importance to the linguistic skills that need to be mastered in order to be fluent in a language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Therefore, these skills are individually treated and assessed in separate units in which practice is the axis of the teaching-learning process. There will be different and realistic contexts in which English must be used naturally, so role play and gamification are very present in this program too. In terms of attention to diversity, the class that is described in this thesis is very heterogeneous in multiple ways, as many students are from different countries -especially from Asia and Latin America- and there are three students with educational needs, like ADHD, TEA, and INTARSE (late entry to the educational system). The response to it will be the one determined by the current regulations, based on the individualization of the learning process, the personalized assistance, the organization in advance, and the establishment of stable routines. Regarding the evaluation of the class, it will be continuous, summative, formative, and integrative. The ten evaluation criteria collected in the curriculum of the 3rd course of CSE are indispensable to determine the level of acquisition of the contents, and therefore, the scoring, which will be set with the help of the government’s rubrics.