Where is all the fun?

Hi everyone! Okay, so first things first, we had to find out as much as we could about people’s attitude towards learning a foreign language as a whole.

After putting together a survey, we then posted it on social media sites in order to get as many responses as possible.

We basically wanted to find out about the experiences people have had learning languages. What they liked/disliked about it and why, as well as what they thought needed to be changed. The more feedback we got, the better equipped we would be in order to come up with materials that address the problems highlighted in the answers to our survey.

From the results of said survey, we came to the conclusion that people did not find learning a foreign language particularly fun in school. The information contained within the answers confirmed our thoughts on the matter. After exploring the reasons why people did not find language learning enjoyable, we found that a lot of people would have liked more of a focus on culture. Another point that was often raised was the fact that there were no native speakers in schools and that this was a serious flaw, although this falls outwith our jurisdiction.

After doing the survey, we could definitely make a case regarding the effectiveness of current material and methods in language teaching.

Where is all the fun?

This is when we started to focus on creating our own lesson plan that could be tried and tested in a classroom. Rather than coming up with bits and pieces here and there, why not create a structured lesson plan that could be easily implemented by teachers?

The question remained - what would our lesson plan consist of? There was a lot of work and research to be done!

In my next blog entry, I shall give details of some of the research we did and interviews we carried out, as well as the conclusions we drew from these in order to get a better sense of direction in our project as a whole.

I look forward to telling you more about this stage of our work.