Capital Letter

Capital Letter No. 3 Publicada en Mayo de 2003 Click en la revista para ampliar visualización: Open publication -  More capital letter CONTENT EDITORIAL PHILOLOGY IN DAYS OF GLOBALIZATION By Jalver Uyabán WHAT STUDENTS THINK ABOUT THEIR MAJOR By Sonia Gamboa & Bruno Lovo A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INTERVIEW ABOUT OUR MAJOR WITH NORMA CHAVARRO, HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. By  Judy Villanueva PETRONA MARTÍNEZ: AUTHENTICITY AND RHYTHM By M. Claudia Nieto OBEISANCE TO JORGE LUIS BORGES By Juan Carlos Soto THE ALEX PROGRAM: SOME EXPERIENCES ABOUT ALEX IN MEDELLIN By Lucía Helena Estrada THE ALEX PROGRAM IN MANIZALES By Cesar Augusto Contreras WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH ALEX IN BOGOTÁ? By Lina Rodríguez & Leonardo Solórzano MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES APPLIED TO PEDAGOGY By Professor Sonia Delgado de Valencia SAN ANDRÉS: A LANGUAGE "MELTING POT" By Raquel Sanmiguel ACTION RESEARCH: A WAY OF TRANSFORMING OUR CLASSROOMS By Adr...

John A. Oyuela Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 A ll of us, in any time of our lives, have experienced sensations produced by contradictory and -in some cases- improbable situations. Recently, I have felt those sensations because of the current state of Colombian Literature's; and I want to summarize that situation in just two terms: Irony and Paradox. As an example of what I mean by irony, I will mention an Irish man named Jonathan Swift. After that, I will mention an English man named Terry Eagleton who defines paradox; finally, I will propose an idea that is both ironic and paradoxical. SWIFT AND IRONY Jonathan Swift wrote about the incoherence of the epoch he lived in. One of his most important, ironic, and well known writings is A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public. Here, Swift wanted to denounce the poverty and starvation of the Iri...

Juan Carlos Soto Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 O nce upon a time in a forest, walking through the huge trees, a fox was searching for something to eat. She had no eaten for two days and was starving. Suddenly, the Fox saw a beautiful vine plenty of grapes. She ran to a tree and jumped to reach some grapes but they were so high that the Fox could not reach them. The Fox continued jumping and one of the grapes said "I had not seen an animal as stupid as this one, look at it, what is it doing now? " The Fox then thought about a different way for reaching the grapes. She started climbing the tree but that was difficult. Meanwhile the grapes started to laugh because the Fox was very clumsy at climbing. But although the Fox was not good enough for climbing, this was a very clever animal. She waited during a few minutes and sat down. Then, the Fox started to think about a better way to make grapes come down. Ingeniously, the Fox said "Do you know that gr...

Vicky Londoño Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 Currently, news has registered the war USA - Iraq. Activists from many countries in the world have expressed their disagreement with this war. Many people have gone out to the streets with pamphlets in which they have shown messages rejecting it. Another way of demonstration was shown in the Oscar awards in which there were also expressions against the conflict among some of the winners. In spite of the fact that some singers and actors have expressed their opposition, they have been censured by some channels and some important members of entertainment that consider these reactions as a position against the country. However, it is important to remark that all that people do in favour of peace is more valuable, at least, this is a way to convoke reflection. If instead of inciting the war to resist terrorism President Bush had appealed t...

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 ACTIVITY (Beginners - 5 minutes per student ) Classmates call out questions until they guess what is being mimed. Preparation: W rite an action or a sequence of 2 or 3 actions on a card. Prepare enough of these for each student so each one has one. Mimes should be related to eating and cooking or tasks around the home, for example: - "You are standing in front of the cooker. You're frying a pancake in a frying pan. Toss it to turn it over" - "You have a loaf of bread. Pick up a knife and slice off 2 pieces" - "You are pouring milk into a glass. Some milk spills onto the floor. Find a cloth and clean up the milk" - You are dusting a table. You knock off a vase. It breaks, clean up the broken glass" Procedure: 1. Give a card to each student. If necessary, take performers out into the hall one at a time to demonstrate their activity, then send them back into mime. 2. One student at a time goes in f...

Publicado en capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 Melba Libia Cárdenas M ajored in Modern Languages, associated teacher of Universidad Nacional, editor of PROFILE magazine. She has been teaching the English Didactic courses since 1992 and the Action Research Seminar since 1999. Professor Cárdenas has been a teacher-researcher since she finished her undergraduate studies. As a teacher-researcher, she has covered different and useful topics as evaluation, teacher training, didactics and Action Research in Education. Some of her major concerns are: in-service teacher training to improve the English language teachers' performance, and teacher's involvement in research as a way of increasing their abilities and opening their personal views in the language-teaching process. These concerns can be seen in her written production (e.g. "Teacher Researchers as Writers: A Way to Sharing Findings" 1, "Teacher Research as a Means to Create Teachers' Communities in In-Serv...

Adriana Norato Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 Action Research( AR) is a new type of research based on what is going on in the classroom and in the educational environment in order to have an effective teaching-learning process. Action Research defines a 'problematic' situation observed within the classroom and, depending on the classroom needs, creates different strategies to explain it or improve it. The strategies are developed to explore the situation(s) -the teachers, the students or both-; and then, its idea is to explain or solve the identified problems with the aim of improving our daily practice as teachers. According to Gregory (1988), mentioned by Richards (1994), 'Action research is used to refer to teacher-initiated classroom investigation which seeks to increase the teacher understanding of classroom teaching and learning and to bring about a change in classroom practices’. As most of the research approaches, Action Research is based on obse...

Raquel Sanmiguel Artículo enviado desde San Andrés Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 A lthough San Andres is part of Colombia, when living here, it does feel like being in a different  place altogether…. especially if you move around, mix and have your eyes, ears, and heart wide open. As you enter our small campus, for example, if you open your ears you will hear our executive Secretary and some of our collaborators speak Creole to one another. If you open your eyes, you will see a sign inviting all people on campus to speak English and/or Creole on Fridays, as part of a pedagogical project. And, if you open your heart, you will feel great to see young native faces walking in and out of our classrooms, being prepared to be the first students to enter our University by areas of study. San Andres is as Caribbean as the ‘melting pot’ the whole region is. Cultures mingle, languages develop ‘in contact’ with one another, countless religions, lifestyles and beliefs co-exi...

Sonia Delgado de Valencia Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003    S ince the moment Gardner identified other intelligences different from the linguistic and mathematical ones, much has been said and written about this subject all around the world. The author of this new theory first thought in Psychology rather than Pedagogy for applying it. However, it has been within this last discipline that his theory has been used with more emphasis, and it has been proposed as an excellent tool for working in the classroom.    Gardner (1999) says that all human beings posses the eight intelligences and that our duty as teachers and is to promote in the learners the use of all of them to enhance the possibilities of both educators and learners to acquire knowledge relevant for their own lives. For an intelligence to be considered as such it has to fulfill eight requirements, otherwise it would be only a skill or a talent but not an intelligence: 1. It can be pot...

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 ABOUT ALEX IN MEDELLIN Lucía Helena Estrada W e started implementing this new program the previous semester and we have learnt a lot from this first experience. Last semester we had around 613 students willing to begin; many of them gave up for several reasons including academic obligations, not effective strategies to schedule their time and even misunderstanding of the project ALEX. Last semester some students did not understand the importance of working extratime in the lab and they found the ASESORIA useless, so they did not want to attend it at the beginning. This semester the teacher staff have been working on different strategies for students to have an effective use of the resource room and ASESORIAS. Nowadays, the resources room is full most of the time, there is even a space problem because the lab is not big enough for the number of students we have in this moment.  Students are more conscious so they are eager to visi...

Magda Rodríguez Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3 Mayo de 2003 A LEX is a program to develop learning autonomy in students so that they can apply the principles of this new paradigm to their learning of a foreign language. The first aspect to deal with is the concept of development. How would you define development? Take a few seconds and think of your definition of the term. Development comes from 'develop' - from the French développer - meaning "to cause to grow gradually in some way; to cause to become gradually fuller, larger, better." ALEX is a program that seeks to improve students' learning skills and strategies in such a way that they will become better students.  However, as the definition of development implies, this is a gradual process requiring patience and work. Patience because the final result is not obtained spontaneously, but step by step; work because all great goals are reached with constant effort, whether mental or physical. The great goa...