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Teaching / Learning English in the Language Room - CY
Language rooms were established in Secondary Schools in Cyprus in 2000 after a proposal by the English department of the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture. After a research was carried out it was proven that the institution of the Language Room was one of the best innovations for the Unified Lyceum . They are user-friendly rooms which exclude the traditional class-facing method of teaching and thus develop skills that will lead to the joy of learning and will prepare youngsters for life-long learning.
A modern language room is a multi-functional classroom that accommodates appropriate equipment, organised and easily accessible resources which satisfy the student's diverse needs and interests and facilitate the teacher's work.
Language Rooms encourage autonomous learning, active participation, student initiative, negotiating ability, creative and critical thinking. As well as that, they cater for all students' learning styles, minds and intelligences, diverse needs and abilities.
In the language room there are four corners: the viewing corner, the listening, the multi-media and the reading corner. There, the students are divided into groups of five to six students each by the teacher and are asked to work with their classmates. Thus they learn to cooperate and co-exist with others.
A viewing corner consists of a TV set, a video / DVD player and headphones. A listening corner consists of CD players / tape recorders and headphones. A multi-media corner mostly of computers and printers. A reading corner consists of course books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, and readers.
The teacher, who becomes the facilitator of the students' learning, gives clear instructions, sets the tasks and helps students to form groups according to their interests and needs. After that , the teacher supports and monitors the students while they work within their groups.
All groups work on the same topic but they do different activities: Students of the Viewing corner group watch films, interviews or documentaries, the Listening corner group use the mini-lab for listening activities, the Multi-media corner group work on computer database-authentic multimedia and the Reading corner group read authentic material or from their course books accordingly.
Students are given time limits to finish off their work and choose spokespersons to present the outcome of their final product to the rest of the class. Presentations are done with the help of transparencies or Microsoft Powerpoint. During the presentation phase students are asked to take notes with the help of a handout prepared beforehand by the teacher. In this way they are given a reason to pay attention to presentations and collect material to work on later in the classroom or at home.
Working in Language Rooms opens the road to the introduction of plurilingual and multicultural dimensions of languages and the development of the active European citizen who knows his/her rights and limitations. They aim at developing in the student a plurilingual / pluricultural competence as the result of the process of language learning.
This is what the students of B3 Class of M. Koutsoftas - A. Panayides Lyceum in Nicosia district in Cyprus said about their experience in the Language Room.
Elena Paraskeva
English Teacher Trainer
Cyprus Pedagogical Institute
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