A proposal enhancement in innovation to encourage capacity, motivation and autonomy

Abstract

The following Master’s Thesis is about a proposal enhancement, which consists on my experience related to the Practicum following the methodology of action research. Firstly, I identified the area to improve during my first period observing the lessons and by a survey given to students to answer some questions about the subject (annex 1). As we can observe in annex 2 there are a lot of students who ask for a bigger use of digital resources. When the first period came to an end I started writing this Teaching Unit keeping in mind their requests, which I implemented during the second period. During this last period I have carried out a participation table following the humanistic methods emphasizing the active role of the student during his or her learning realizing about their needs to carry out the learning process. The sessions have been structured to follow the activities as tasks divided into pre-task, task and post-task. “A task is a piece of classroom work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and an end." (Nunan, 2004: 4).Besides, one of the most important tools used in this Teaching Unit is the WebQuest. This is “a research guided-activity, where learners use information collected mainly from internet resources. WebQuests can focus or be based on learning activities that offer the teacher the opportunity to integrate the Internet technology in the curricula, and thus allow learners to achieve their learning through knowledge construction” Girón-García (2013: 172). The use of WebQuests helps to encourage students’ autonomy. The main objectives of this proposal are to encourage students’ motivation, capacity and autonomy. The results have been more than satisfactory because the tables I used reflect a high level of participation regarding the first sessions.