It is with the utmost pleasure that we present this blog to you, hoping that it will be useful to show the activities we have been carrying out with our students throughout the year. PELE (short for Pla Experimental de Llengües Estrangeres) has been an amazing experience which has enabled our high school to take up the teaching of the English language a couple of notches, not only as concerns the results achieved but also, and, we believe, most importantly, to increase our students' motivation to learn and to improve their language skills.
All too often, English is taught as one more subject within the curriculum; throughout the year, we often worry that we will not finish the whole syllabus on time, there is an almost endless amount of deadlines to meet, exercises to prepare, exams to correct, etc. In this respect, PELE has been extremely useful in a number of ways: it has forced us to think out of the box, i.e. to devise activities beyond the usual syllabus range, activities students were often not totally familiar with; it has challenged our teaching skills, as it has made us assess the suitability of certain activities for our groups and to make them relevant to them when necessary; and it has helped us to stop and take stock of what we are doing and what we have done with a view to improving what we will do in the future.
All in all, an amazing teaching experience which has no doubt enabled us to slow down the sometimes frantic pace of our day-to-day routine, take a deep breath and ask ourselves: “OK, where do we go from here?” Asking ourselves and each other questions, and endlessly questioning what we do, and how we do it, has been paramount to this project, as has team work and the ability to criticise, and encourage, each other on a daily basis.
Whilst it is true that we have sometimes ended up with the feeling that the results may have fallen short of our initial expectations with certain groups, or we simply have not been able to carry out certain activities due to a variety of circumstances, we must say that, all in all, the PELE experience has been great from beginning to end. We feel sorry it is now coming to a close, yet at the same time we feel rewarded by what we have learned and, hopefully, by what we have been able to teach and, most importantly, convey, to our students. Contradictory though it may sound, we feel exhausted and refreshed at the same time, willing to undertake the next challenge, whatever that may be, and to continue walking along the neverending path of our teaching experience.
The PELE Team at IES Castellbisbal.