L1 - ACTIVITY 1.2

L1 - Activity 1.2

a) How many languages do you speak, apart from your mother tongue or L1?

In our group we are lucky to have a high variety of language speakers. Among the members we can find different persons who speak: Spanish, Catalan, English, German, French, Russian, Portuguese and even the Spanish sign language.

b) Is your mother tongue your L1?

In my personal case it is, the Spanish is my mother tongue and it is also my L1. But in our group we find more combinations, especially when we include the Catalan into the game.

c) Are there things you find easier in one language than the other?
Normally, when we find something in a language that we can classify as “easy” is due to their similarities with our mother tongue or with the rest of language that we know previously.

The constructivist theory points that we can link our background knowledge with the new inputs in order to generate new outputs.

d) In language use terms, how would you describe the society you live in? Are the people in that society plurilingual?
The society where we live nowadays is one of the most heterogeneous of the history of our country. This 21^st century is being one of the important for the cultural plurality. In our big cities coexist people from very different countries, who speak different languages. 

In any case, the vehicular language that tries to make the people able to communicate each other is the Spanish language. There is a plurilingual aspect in the profiling of our society, with a lot of own dialects and foreing language, but the most important is the Spanish. 

Although, there are a lot of works and initiatives to push plurigualism in our country.

e) How would you encourage ‘bilingualism’ in your classroom?
An individual who can speak two languages is usually considered bilingual. In our case, in the EFL classroom we should be the kind of teachers who build bridges between cultures using the English language. But, how can we do this? There are a lot of methods as:

• ·         To give extra-linguistic cues such as visual, props, and body language.
• ·         To use linguistic modification as repetitions and pauses during the speechs.
• ·         To apply cooperative learning strategies
• ·         To focus on central concepts and not on details using a thematic approach
• ·         To develop reading strategies (mapping, write to think…)

f) Do you feel some languages have a higher status in the classroom?

When we talk about teenagers in the classroom, we should make a reference to the relationships of power. Normally, the most spoken language is view as the most important. In our country, Spanish the highest status language because is the most spoken of them all. That is one of the reasons of why the EFL is so important, it can act as an equalizer for all the students, independently of their origin.