Improving the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary making use of virtual environments as support of the Communicative Approach MODALITY 1: Proposal for improvement

Abstract

In the last years, the English language apogee at the international status has supposed a change inside the educational sector, increasing the importance of the enlightenment of English as a foreign language in Secondary Education. Nonetheless, the speaking competence is still in the shadow of the reading, listening and writing competences, which are the most taught in the Secondary Education centres. The theoretical framework of this paper comprises a chronological summary of some teaching English methods, and an analysis of the Communicative Language Teaching, its evolution throughout the last decades and its recent implementations and results in different countries. Therefore, this paper aims to demonstrate the improvement of the acquisition of vocabulary and past simple while practising oral production. For that purpose, and taking into account the Communicative Language Teaching methodology and the specific characteristics of a group of secondary education students, a proposal of improvement combined with particular digital tools was designed. The results obtained after the implementation demonstrate the advantages of using this methodology with specific digital tools.