Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 5; September 03

First things first- The importance of module zero in the learning process

Two and a half months' holidays. Sun-burnt. 16 years old. Five years of English. Little reading, not much writing. ' Can't remember having studied that, Sir!'

Mid-September. Here you are facing a group of young men and women, eager to know what is going to happen, looking forward to listening to you, to knowing what you have to tell them about the heavy English syllabus they have to deal with. But... this school year, something new has come up - Module Zero. With it some initial steps are supposed to be taken, namely to try to help the students to bring the most important and basic things they had learnt in the previous years back to their minds, based on effective and affective learning strategies. Module Zero is supposed to last 3 or 4 weeks, corresponding to 9 and/or 12 lessons.

How to manage all this? My view on Module Zero is that first and foremost it must be a unique time and splendid opportunity to get to know our students, the way they are, the way they organise their learning, their likes and dislikes, their needs and their way towards autonomy. In a word, their starting point in terms of both psychological references and basic knowledge as well as skills. So what can we do? As far as I am concerned, I visualise Module Zero as a time to develop the students' learning on 3 different levels:

1. Affect
2. Skills
3. Tools

Affect is seen as being more and more important in language learning and acquisition. Topic areas, language functions, exponents, macroskills, sociocultural issues and many other aspects of EFL are better learnt whenever affect is at work as a fundamental and indispensable element of their development. How is this possible? - Show your students you are deeply interested in them and/or involved with them by doing some activities like 'Who am I?', 'It's O. K../it's not O.K.!', 'Find someone who...', 'Guess what...', etc.

Based on my experience, I would say all these activities increase the students' self-esteem and help to develop their responsibility as individuals and their co-responsibility as a group or class. Affect also helps you to realise the kind of learners they are and the way they learn as well as their motivations and aims in learning English.

Don't do over much. Do something and do it well. Don't speak much. Listen to them and listen carefully. They get to know they can count on you and even those with low levels of language acquisition are ready to face you and your English lessons more positively and optimistically. That's why sharing feelings is so important in this part of 'The Module Zero' programme. I've always tried to teach my students how to share their feelings when facing different situations and/or towards people and facts. This approach has had lots of advantages and increases confidence in the classroom environment. Firstly, they learn how to know themselves much better, secondly they learn that sharing their feelings must be based on trust and consequently, they get to know that they must listen to the others more carefully and respect them the way they are and feel at a specific moment. Then on sharing their feelings they learn more vocabulary - excited, disappointed, bored, exhausted, interested, etc, become familiar to them. Finally, sharing feelings is a good way to teach some grammar items, such as -ed and -ing adjectives. After this basic approach it is only necessary to show them the contrasts with exciting, disappointing, etc. As far as skills and tools are concerned, my suggestion is the one shown below:

There are plenty of practical things you can do to work on the areas mentioned above. Let's see, for example, what we can do in terms of listening:

• Songs
• Cassettes or CDs with language recordings of a lower level than the one they are at
• and... why not motivate some of them to record something they particularly like and then use it in class? - Here affect works again because the students feel that their effort was rewarded and that it was worth doing .... or in terms of Reading, trying to give them texts of different levels from journalese to short stories (here class readers work beautifully).These are more examples, of course, but in each situation what is really relevant is that everything you do should correspond to your students' interests and they feel that their first lessons (the ones that correspond to Module Zero) are organised to make them 'ready and steady' since 'go' comes next.
• I' d like to refer to the tools mentioned in the diagram, especially the Dictionary and its use. I like and have always liked dictionaries very much. They are a tremendous help and always ready to give you a hand. I try to persuade my students of their relevance not because a dictionary is an important 'Mr Thick Book', but because they are friendly helps. And remember, if you are honest 'you are not copying from a Dictionary, you are consulting a Dictionary'. You may decide to teach some mixed ability lessons, obviously with differently graded materials and several activities, but isn't life a group of mixed-abilities and vivid experiences where everyone plays a different role according to their skills and capacities? So why not plunge into life and bring it to the classroom? I feel proud of being an English teacher and a teacher trainer not only because we can become protagonists of a complete learning process in which
• Being
• Having and
• Doing

play a role in the complete 'Building' of our students' personality, but also because English is responsible for at least half of the world communication and... you have it in your hands.

Conclusion

Based on what was mentioned above, I think Module Zero - as it is suggested in the new English syllabus in Portugal--, is an unforgettable and rewarding experience that helps you begin the new school year in a more refreshed and optimistic way because as Saint Exupéry said in the Little Prince 'the time you spend with your friends...'
Being an English teacher is more than anything else to be open to the World, to embrace globalisation in which English is the bridge that makes both sides closer. Don't you feel happy by being one of those lucky bridge-builders? I do, positively!