Flowers in the Classroom. A Personal Approach to EFL Teaching

Abstract

[eng] Adopting a holistic approach to learning empowers teachers, enabling them to go beyond the purely academic and explore alternative means to promote learning among their students. Although the curriculum dictates the English content to be covered in Spanish public schools, teachers seem to be increasingly opting to think beyond the coursebook and search for or even create their own resources. As a result, this newfound autonomy offers a superb opportunity to provide content which is not always within the reach of every student and which can help them to discover or further develop alternate areas of interest and knowledge such as creativity, which is slowly disappearing from the curriculum around the world. In response to these developments, this dissertation aims to illustrate the benefits of a hands-on approach to teaching combined with cross-fertilisation between language teaching and original learning tools and content. The result is a didactic proposal which offers a sample of resources, materials and methodologies which can be used to teach English with and through flowers, a world that is able to connect with teenagers more than one would initially suspect.