1.

a)  Pots citar-nos una activitat on es treballi l’objectiu x de la teva unitat

didàctica?

This unit has been designed with two aims in mind (not just one). Firstly, introducing
the topic of ageing and dementia to high school students. Secondly, familiarizing the
learners with a simple kind of poetry, the tanka. Hence, I will present one activity for
each aim.

Regarding the topic of ageing, the unit displays different models of older
characters in order to make students conscious of the two opposite stereotyped
representations of ageing that have been spread through our contemporary society.
Indeed, Western culture has expanded a simplistic and dichotomic representation of old
age based on two opposing poles: as a period of self-reliance and vitality or as a phase
of sickness and dependency (Cole, 1992). ‘Bipolar’ representations of ageing –using the
terminology of McHugh (2003)– circulate parallelly in contemporary Western culture:
“images of old age have been split into positive and negative poles “a “good” old age of
health, virtue, self-reliance, and salvation, and a ‘‘bad’’ old age of sickness, sin,
dependency, premature death, and damnation” (Cole, 1992, p. 230).
The stereotype of successful ageing is presented through Edwina Brocklesby
(exercise 2.3), whereas the stereotype of old age as decay is found in the figure of Louis
(1.2) and in the poems “ICU” (5.2) and “Tears” (5.3). After having been provided with
these two different models of representation, students are asked to reflect upon them and
decide how they would like to portray their grandparents in their tanka (5.4). The
following exercises aim at increasing students’ awareness of the impartial
representations that our current society expands of older people. Students are provided
with some open-ended questions that they should freely debate with a partner before
sharing the opinions with the whole class. Students (especially the shy or the less
proficiency ones) may feel more comfortable to speak in a foreign language to just one
or two classmates rather than to the whole class. Hence, they may feel more relaxed and
self-confident exchanging ideas in small groups before reformulating their thoughts for
the whole class. The reflection should lead teenagers to discover that the vast majority
of their grandparents (or other older people they know) do not correspond to the
incredibly powerful archetype represented by Edwina (a triathlete of 76 years old) nor
to the exceedingly fragile image of Louis.
 Figure 1 Discussion activities on the representation of
older people

Regarding the topic of poetry, the unit culminates with the

final task of writing a tanka dedicated to one grandparent. The
completion of this final task has been planned with the intention to
promote a progression from Low Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to
High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), following Bloom's Taxonomy
(Forehand, 2010). The unit culminates with the final task of writing
an individual tanka, which corresponds to the highest thinking skill
in Bloom’s Taxonomy: creating. However, before reaching the top of
the pyramid, students need to do other activities from lower
typologies, which will gradually provide them with the necessary
tools for writing their own poem.

Indeed, students are provided with one representative model of a tanka, “The
Thawing Summer”, which is analysed following the “Formeaning Response approach”
(Kellem, 2009). According to Kellem (2009), form and meaning cannot be separated
when analyzing poetry “because to correctly describe and understand a language form
such as a lexical item or grammatical structure one must consider the form in a
meaningful context” (p. 14). The response component, derived from the Reader-
Response theory, is based on recognizing that if students relate their own experiences
and beliefs to a poem, the subject matter becomes more relevant, which enhances the
language learning process (Schultz, 2001).
The process of analyzing the tanka “The Thawing Summer” combines both
‘response’ and ‘form and meaning’ activities. An example of a ‘response’ activity is
found in the exercise 3.2.3 (see Appendix 6), in which students are asked to search a
picture that represents the poem. This activity helps students express what the poem
means to them, and it forces them to move from the linguistic to the pictorial
representation, which, according to Kellem (2009) “requires an understanding of the
poem’s language and themes” (p. 16).
The exercise 3.2.1 can be considered a ‘form and meaning’ activity, as it focuses
attention on specific linguistic items and pushes students to make choices based on a
limited context. This “alternative words exercise” (Maley and Duff 1989, p. 39) is a
multiple-choice exercise, in which some words from the poem have been erased.
Students must select from a list of three words the most suitable one, taking into
account that two of these words have been invented, while the remaining one is the
original. This exercise “gives students a chance to look at individual words in the
context of the surrounding lines, and to think about fine distinctions in meaning and
how vocabulary items work together in the poem” (Kellem, 2009, p. 15). Students will
work on collocations (“ice melts”, “frozen hearts”) and also will have the opportunity
to discover some rhetoric figures such as the epanadiplosis found in the first line
(“heat” is repeated at the beginning and at the end).

2. b)  Ens podries explicar una activitat d’avaluació formativa en la teva unitat?

Figure 1: Alternative words
exercise
3. c)  Quin és el paper de la llengua oral en les activitats de la unitat?

4. d)  Quina és la metodologia que diries que predomina en la teva unitat?

“Remember Me: Can We Help People with Dementia?” is a task-based unit that
intends to make language teaching more communicative. Ellis (2003)
distinguishes four main characteristics in a task. Firstly, it involves a primary
focus on (pragmatic) meaning that, in the unit, is reflected on the challenge to
incite readers to donate for Alzheimer’s research. Secondly, a task has some
kind of ‘gap’ that, according to Prabhu (1987) can be of three types:
information gap, reasoning gap, and opinion gap. In the present unit, students
must fill an opinion gap, since they are asked to articulate a personal response
to a given situation (writing their own literary piece dedicated to an older
person). Thirdly, the participants select the linguistic resources needed to
complete the final task, which means that every student will write a completely
different poem. In other words, students can freely choose the words they use
and, consequently, the attainment level is different for each one. Fourthly, a
task has a clearly defined, non-linguistic outcome: raising money for
Alzheimer’s research. Therefore, the task entails a direct relationship to the real
world (Skehan, 1996), since students take on the responsibility to help one of
the most vulnerable collective of our present society.

5. e)  Explica una activitat on es vegi el treball sobre una competència.

6. f)  Per què has escollit aquest tema?

On the one hand, the trigger that heightened my need to spread knowledge on
dementia is to be found on my last year of the degree in English Studies, when I
received a scholarship grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education. The grant
enabled me to work on a research project with the group DEDAL-LIT from the
University of Lleida and, hence, I had the opportunity to gain insight into the
field of literary gerontology (as ageing is the focal research of the group DEDAL-
LIT). That experience revealed to me the significant gap of knowledge among
our current society related to ageing and cognitive problems that might be
developed in the last stages of life.

On the other hand, my experience as a former student showed me that poetry is

hardly ever present in the EFL classroom. I cannot remember reading any poem
in English in the high school and, when we debated this issue in “Complements
per a la formació de llengües estrangeres”, none of my classmates had had the
opposite experience. Introducing poetry in the classroom might be one of the
most difficult aspects to tackle for English teachers in our educational context,
because students are not used to work with poems in the EFL classroom
 7. g)  Quina activitat i quin instrument d’avaluació avalua la competència de la
teva unitat?

As regards the assessment of the unit, five objectives1 adapted from the
Curriculum are being evaluated. The first three objectives are assessed through
the creation of an infographic in which students analyze their own tanka: the
linguistic competence is evaluated through the use of textual evidences that
justify students’ statements, while the digital competence is assessed through
the dexterity that students show on the graphic design platform. The fourth
objective is assessed through the creation of an indiv idual tanka at the end of
the unit, which should present evident signs of being dedicated to an old
person. Finally, the fifth objective, which corresponds to the competence
‘learning to learn’, is evaluated through a portfolio.

The knowledge gained in Aprenentatge i Ensenyament de Llengües Estrangeres

has been of great value when having to choose the most suitable types and
instruments of assessment for this unit, which are two rubric and the students’
portfolio. On the one hand, rubrics have been used as the instrument to assess
the two final products (the infographic and the tanka). The rubric used to
assess the infographic consists of three indicators: content, lexical accuracy and
visual design, while the indicators of the tanka’s rubric are: content, adequacy
to target reader, poetic language, syllable count and lexical accuracy. There are
many advantages in the use of a rubric, as it “clarifies criteria in specific terms;
shows students not only how their work will be assessed, but also provides
guidelines for what is expected; provides more informative feedback than a
simple grade; makes scoring more consistent [and] promotes reliability”
(Shasha and Spitz, 2002, p. 8).
On the other hand, the portfolio has been used to check students’ ability to
work on their own (‘learning to learn’ competence). In this case, the portfolio
gathers some of the activities that students have carried throughout all the
unit, as well as a final reflection on their process of writing a poem and creating
its infographic. Portfolios are a “tool for reflection and formative assessment”
(Trujillo, 2010) and a meaningful way of assessment (Hedge, 2010). This type of
evaluation is not as stressful as tests and it potentiates students’ creativity (i.e.,
they can include different materials and formats), critical thinking (i.e., they can
choose which ideas they prefer to develop) and autonomous learning (i.e., they
have more freedom to organize their time).

8. h)  Com s’integra la unitat en els continguts del curs?

1
1. Comprendre i interpretar poemes breus (tankas); 2. Crear, de forma guiada, una infografia on
s’analitza la tanka que l’alumne ha escrit; 3. Utilitzar de forma guiada els recursos digitals en la cerca,
organització i presentació d’informació; 4. Produir de forma guiada una tanka dedicada a una persona
gran propera, utilitzant un llenguatge poètic; 5. Planificar i organitzar les tasques.
 The English teacher uses the student's book and the activity book Mosaic 2, by
Oxford University Press. During my first practicum stay, we accorded with my
tutor from Lestonnac that, when I implemented my own unit in the second
stay, I would work with the key concepts of unit 5 entitled “Young and Old” 2.
The reason that accounts for this choice is that this unit deals with the topic of
“getting old”, which is closely related to ageing: one of the central points I
wanted to develop in my didactic proposal. As shown in the Appendix 2, the
structure of the unit consists of six different parts: vocabulary, grammar,
reading, listening, speaking, writing, culture and Community Language Learning
(CLL). However, the teacher was only interested in working on the grammatical
section, especially the modal verbs “can, can’t, could, couldn’t” (p. 61 3), which
is in fact thoroughly developed in the second section of my unit.

9. i)  Està en línia amb el currículum?

10. j)  Té les característiques d’una activitat competencial? Quines?

2
See Appendix 2.
3
See Appendix 3.