This didactic Unit is aimed to reach the A2 level of proficiency in English as a foreign language, according to the National Standards proposed by the Ministerio de Educación Nacional (MEN); and seeks to reach, also, second, third and four stratum students of public as well as private schools of the city of Cali.
In this sense, the Unit seeks to develop together the four skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing); to boost the communicative competence (in its four aspects: linguistic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic and discursive); and to strength strategies use (according to Learning strategies and Learning styles proposed by Oxford 1990); all these in order to empower the student to be able to:
· Enhance the development of the communicative competence within the use of the four skills.
· Discover and boost the learners’ styles and the way they learn better.
· Use learning strategies within the learning process.
· Take part in short dialogues or conversations with understandable pronunciation.
· Understand simple dialogues, songs, rhymes, interviews and short texts according to topics of their interest.
· Produce simple oral descriptive and narrative texts.
· Produce simple written descriptive and narrative texts.
· Understand and follow instructions.
· Take part in cooperative activities.
· Identify some representative elements of the own culture and the one of the target’s language.
In few words, students will be able to deal with simple and straightforward information to begin to express oneself in familiar contexts[1].
In addition, this didactic Unit aims to help filling the practical and theoretical breach between the teacher and the computer’s programmer. It means that, little by little, with attempts of this kind[2], foreign language teachers would get all the tools to prepare meaningful and context-sensitive materials to their students according to their social and linguistic needs and likes.
[1] The Common European Framework in its political and educational context. Page 250
[2] To know more about this kind of projects, see the articles and monographic papers developed and guided by professors Marta I. Berdugo T. and Nancy Pedraza A. in the E.L.A.C.’s (Enseñanza de Lenguas Asistida por Computador/Computer assisted language teachign) course of the Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia.
