Inglés y su Enseñanza II

Soria, María de los Ángeles

Draft 1

Pedagogical Essay

In order for the learning process to be meaningful and successful, the 4th-year students will
be presented with a narrative which will provide the cultural background that will be the basis
of the process. The linguistic item to be taught is the modal can, which will not be taught in
isolation, but within the context of the narrative. My objective is to generate the proper
environment so that the students can learn the linguistic item chosen by making relations to
a concept they are familiarised with - heroism - and to notice how they can realise such
concept by using the modal can. This linguistic item can be associated with the process that
Bickerton calls grammaticization. It is the process through which humans represent reality
through language. It is an endowed capacity of the humans’ brains that enables us to
predicate something about entities by relating them with behaviours and attributes. These
relations between pre-existing concepts create new units of meaning. Language has
gammaticised the most useful relations for the species such as location, time, direction,
familiarity, possibility, possession, agency, purpose, necessity, obligation, etc. Bearing all
this in mind is how the following activities have been planned: the narrative will provide the
cultural grounds so as the students can set new relations expressed through the modal can
meaningfully according the concept of heroism expressed in the narrative. The text is the
following:

1
Activity 1. On Comprehension.
During the ​pre-moment of the class, the students will be presented with some pictures from
the story:

By looking at them, they will have to make inferences about the story they will listen to later.
Some inferences will be written on the board. Once this is finished, during the
while-moment they will listen to the story. After this, we will check their previous inferences
by going over what is written on the board. Once this is done, in order to check their

2
comprehension of the story, they will be given some pictures which they will have to put in
the correct order:

In the ​after-moment ​of the class, they will have to write whether the following sentences are
true or false:
a- In the end, the farmer can’t come back home.
b- Shaun and the sheep can rescue the farmer.
c- The farmer hit himself in the head and he can’t remember anything.
d- The sheep can’t help the farmer.

Activity 2. On Linguistic Item.