Mind Map Elaboration

Mind map elaboration process description

In order to carry out this project, the creation of a mind map, we first gathered to organize our work plan. Taking a look at our schedules we considered three to four meeting would be needed in order to carry out the assignment.
We decided we would individually organize our class notes and study the documents that had been posted on Moodle thatcontained more information that would be useful to create the mind map. Having done that, we also agreed we would individually commit to pencil a basic sketch of how the mind map should look, schematically. We considered useful and most convenient having each of us to share our insight, bearing in mind three persons can contribute with three different perspectives, making the project much richer andcomplete. On our second meeting each of us presented their sketches, notes and the concepts we considered to be more important. We extracted what was more important and common to our three sketches and, pencil in hand, drafted a provisional mind map, combining all of our ideas and highlighting the most important concepts and divisions. In addition we also agreed to search for Cmaps tutorialsonline, whether it was YouTube or papers found in educational websites. On our third meeting, we brainstormed and added and removed concepts altogether until the mind map looked suited to our taste. The tutorials had been very useful and served their purpose, therefore, we started to translate our pencil sketches to Cmap Tools. In doing this we came across several recurring problems, the one with thelinking question marks being the most annoying. However, a fourth session was needed in order to complete the map, assign a colour pattern and verify all concepts and distribution altogether: there is the main idea or concept, Foreign Language Teaching and the rest of fields and ideas are placed around it. At first, we decided the main concept should be called Foreign Language Instruction, but afterdoing some research on the internet about the difference between instruction and teaching we decided that FL Teaching was more convenient as: "the main difference between teaching and instruction is that the teaching includes instruction but the instruction does not include teaching. Hence, the teaching is instruction but the instruction is not teaching."
Three main fields branch out of FLTeaching: Interactive Levels, CEFR and Historical Evolution. We placed the Historical Evolution branch at the left side of FL Teaching bearing in mind the horizontal timeline, the time continuum, which precedes and serves as basis for all subsequent studies. As the origins of time are on the left margin it should be read from left to right until the reader encounters the latest trends and schools ofthought in FL teaching.
The purpose of the course was to study language from the perspective of usage and action; that is to say, the study of language as a tool people use to communication according to their actions. The whole course was structured into four well-defined levels: teaching practice, educational dimension, conceptual dimension and research dimension. In the first dimension, theteacher taught us the features of teaching practice and its levels of organization according to projects, meaningful tasks, teaching techniques and non-linguistic curricular content. In the second dimension, we saw the characteristics of education, how it must be cooperative, autonomy-oriented, reflexive/critical, plurilingual and multicultural. In the third dimension, we learned the three maindifferent concepts in foreign language teaching: the teaching process, the acquisition process and language competences. In the last dimension, we saw the different approaches of teaching a second language through history and its characteristics. We analysed these dimensions during the first part of the course and then we focused mainly within the language competences branch, to be more specific the...