UANL

CONTEXT
Team #4
Angélica Natalia Medina Uribe
Samantha Lizbeth Viesca Gamboa
Sonia Nailea Perez Mondragón
Allison Gómez Gutierrez
Paule Sarai Fuentes Zúñiga
 CONTEXT
CONTEXT DOES MATTER
YOU CAN’T SIMPLY TAKE THE SAME
LESSON AND TEACH IT IN DIFFERENT
KINDS OF SCHOOLS – OR, RATHER,
IF YOU DO, THE LESSON WILL NOT
REMAIN THE SAME: THE PROCESS,
THE EXPERIENCE AND THE
OUTCOMES WILL ALTER ACCORDING
TO THE CONTEXT.
 CONTEXT
That is a point that professional education and
training, and the literature that supports it, often
does not give sufficient attention to. In practice,
the answers to all the ‘how’ questions – how you
would design a lesson, how you would go about
teaching a particular topic, how you would
manage the class, how you would assess the
students and so on – are always in part that ‘it
depends on the context.’
In the standard texts on teaching, contextual
variables tend to be reduced to a range of
general factors – principally socio-economic
class, ethnicity, pupil age and sex. Each of these
variables is undoubtedly important.
Aspects of
context is dynamic: it is formed by the
interplay of factors over time;

context context is always to some extent local.

(English Language Teaching) ELT is taught in a very wide

variety of contexts and so the professional literature tends
to be more explicit about the subject.

Kathleen Graves - discusses ‘what is meant by context’ by

developing a parallel between teaching and architectural
design.

Design a House – Design a Course

 Where do you start?
-What are its particular features?
-What materials are available?
-What is the time line?
In what ways does the consideration of
You need to have a lot of temporal factors affect your planning
information in order to design a and preparation?
structure that will fit the context’
The people (students and other
stakeholders).
The physical setting. What constraints would each space
The nature of the course and institution. impose on your teaching there?
Teaching resources. What opportunities does each offer?
Time.
 The most important consideration to decide how context affects
one´s teaching:

1 What is the context in wi h one

is teaching?

2 How does one respond to that?

Reflect on what you know

about where you are

Bringing it all teaching and ask yourself

what the implications are
for your teaching
together
 ETHOS
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
characterizes ethos as ‘characteristic
spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment of
a . . . community; the “genius” of an
institution or system’

How then to think about the role of the

institution’s ethos in one’s teaching?
1.

The first is to ask newcomers – new

pupils, new teachers, teaching students
and so on. Until they have got used to the
ethos of the place, they will be conscious
of the features that distinguish it and
able to articulate those features.

2.

The second way to reflect on the ethos of

your institution is to focus on one crucial
aspect of it, namely the way that people
around you see the relationship between
teacher and pupil.
 conceptions of the
teacher–pupil relationship

The first is distance.

Do the people around you think that the relationship should be quite close or should it be more
distant.

The second component is status.

What is the predominant view of the ideal relative status of pupils and teacher? Should they be on a
level? Or should one party have a higher status than the other? And if so, how much higher?
 Further reading

Andrew Pollard Kathleen Graves Trentham Books

Reflective Teaching gives rather more Thinking on context in relation to Publishes a number of books about
attention to the question of context than language teaching is given in Designing education in relation to social context,
do most textbooks on teaching Language Courses focusing on the education of particular
groups of pupils.
Appendix:Documents

Appendix:Documents

from three

three

institutions websites
1-Stantonbury Campus

2-Dulwich College

3- Hampshire College
¡Muchas gracias!