To create a blog, doing different activities that permit the students to encourage their second language. (Readings, videos, written...)

Students age: 11-12
Grade: 6-7
People with high affective filter will lower their intake whereas 
people with low affective filter allow more input into their language acquisition device. Affective filter hypothesis is 
first proposed by Dulay and Burt (1977), and is incorporated by Krashen as one of his five input Hypotheses in 1985.
 
The methodology suggested by Krashen to reduce the affective filter hypothesis is basically focus on activities and tasks aimed from the collaborative teaching model. Interaction, cooperation, the inclusion of activities accompanied by movement are highly recommended especially.
 

Critiques of this imput hypothesis:

•It may not be utilized by L2 acquirers if there is a “mental block” that prevents
•them from fully profiting from it
•The affective filter acts as a barrier to acquisition
•The filter is up when the acquirer is unmotivated, lacking in confidence, or concerned with failure
•The filter is down when the acquirer is not anxious and is
•trying to become a member of the group speaking.
 

Motivation

•Most researchers and educators would agree that motivation "is a very important, if not the most important factor in language learning", without which even 'gifted' individuals cannot accomplish long-term goals, whatever the curricula  and whoever the teacher. In terms of the definition of motivation, recent educational theory has tended toward the interpretation of Gardner (1985) defining motivation to learn an L2 as "the extent to which the individual works or strives to learn the language because of a desire to do so and the satisfaction experienced in this activity". So the motivation of SLA refers to the desire and impetus of the acquirers.
 

Attitud

Collins Cobuild Student's Dictionary explains that: "Your attitude to something is the way you think and feel about it".  

Psychological theories on attitudes refer to an evaluative, emotional reaction (i.e. the degree of like or dislike associated with the attitudinal object) comprising three components: affect, cognition, and behaviour. How attitude influences the SLA are shown as follows: 

•The acquirers with positive attitude tend to learn L2 easily and with rapid progress; while those with negative attitude make slowly progress.
•Attitude decides the commitment. Those who give up halfway are probably passive with lower commitment whose achievements are lower than those positive and persistent learners.
•Attitude influences the class participation. The students with positive learning attitude perform actively and can have high grade. 
 

Anxiety

•From the SLA perspective, Gardner & MacIntyre (1993) see language anxiety as "the apprehension experienced when a situation requires the use of a second language with which the individual is not fully proficient", this apprehension being characterized by "derogatory self-related cognitions ..., feelings of apprehension, and physiological responses such as increased heart rate"
 

Test anxiety

•Test anxiety is a psychological condition in which a person experiences distress before, during, or after an exam or other assessment to such an extent that this anxiety causes poor performance or interferes with normal learning; worrying about how anxiety will affect you can be as debilitating as the anxiety itself. This kind of anxiety can build as the testing situation approaches, and can interfere 
with the student's ability to prepare adequately. Lack of preparation is another factor that can contribute to test anxiety
 

Activities to Promote interaction and Communication:

What are Communicative Activities? 

Communicative activities include any activities that encourage and require a learner to speak with and listen to other learners, as well as with people in the program and community. 
Communicative activities have real purposes: to find information, break down barriers, talk about self, and learn about the culture.
 

To make these activities as useful as possible there are a few things to remember: 

• Keep teacher talk to a minimum. Explain as much as possible by demonstrating the process, explaining in different ways, and repeating. Don’t worry if every learner doesn’t understand every part of an activity. Move on when the majority of the learners get the idea, and then circulate and help as needed—unobtrusively. One way to gauge the success of a class for English language learners is to observe how 
much or how little the students are depending on the teacher
 

Construction activities: 

Or contextualized, real, collaborative that promote meaningful learning. Pastor (2009), in dynamics of work and free time, suggests channeled towards more constructive activities leisure time.  In this case we will use the social media. 

social media: is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.

Activity 1. The students will select a literature text. They will read it and select the part most important for them. Then they wiil public their thoughts in the blog and on the Twitter account that they will create for the group.

 

Interactive activities:

 Such as games that foster cooperation among students as the dynamics of groups to encourage an exchange of ideas and positions, allowing to build knowledge working for common goals and participating in the preparation and development of projects in the group away from the anxiety that produces work alone. For this case we will use the Multimodality.

 

Multimodality:

Multimodality is an inter-disciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to be more than about language. It has been developed over the past decade to systematically address much-debated questions about changes in society, for instance in relation to new media and technologies.

Activity 2.

From a text, the students will select the character that impact them and they will pretend the part of story most important for them, and then they will put it on the blog.

 

Self-paced activities: 

Proposed a progressive range of learning and the development of Metacognitive skills. In this case, wi will to use the intertextuality

Intertextuality:

In a broad sense, intertextuality is the reference to or application of a literary, media, or social “text” within another literary, media, or social “text.” In literature, intertextuality is when a book refers to a second book by title, scene, character, or storyline, or when a book refers to a social “text” such as a media, social, or cultural story.

Activity 3: The students will see a movie and then they will change the end of story.

 

The whole language model, emphasizes the learning of literacy developed in communicative situations, reading and writing for pleasure, which is beneficially acquired learning. Power of reading (Krashen, 1993) after more than 200 studies since the early 1990s so far, says that reading for pleasure, even if they are comics, develops a level of proficiency much higher than traditional academic learning on comprehension of texts, lexical wealth, writing, grammar, and reading speed. For this case we will to use the Digital literacy
 

Digital literacy: 

  • The ability to use digital technology, communication tools or networks to locate, evaluate, use and create information.
  • The ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers
     

    Activity  4:

    After read a text, the students will interpret what the author want to give the reader.

    Then they will select the words they do not know and they will search the signify tryin to give an interpretation to story and then put it on the blog

    Then, they will write a story about that interpretation on the blog.