Spain Bachillerato 1 - Core Subjects > Foreign Language (English)

This course is designed for students in the first year of Bachillerato (Humanities and Social Sciences) in Spain. It typically involves three lessons per week and is a compulsory subject. The curriculum aims to further develop communicative competence in English, focusing on linguistic, socio-linguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies. It also encourages intellectual development and the use of English-language texts for leisure and personal enrichment. The pedagogical approach emphasizes meaningful learning through communication situations that connect with students' prior knowledge and daily lives. Learner autonomy and linguistic reflection are central to the curriculum.

Curriculum Content

The curriculum covers a wide range of topics and skills, including:

• Language Functions and Grammar: Describing physical appearance, personality, likes, and interests; discussing past habits; expressing arrangements and making predictions; expressing obligation, necessity, and possibility; expressing real possibilities and hypotheses; reported speech; making deductions; expressing consequence, result, and cause.
• Vocabulary: Vocabulary related to personal experience, family relationships, physical appearance, news, leisure time, interests, new technologies, and expressions.
• Phonetics: Vowel and consonant sounds, diphthongs, semi-vowels, semi-consonants, silent sounds, weak forms, stress, intonation, and rhythm.

Sample Lesson Plans

The syllabus includes sample lesson plans covering various themes, such as:

• The Space Age: Focuses on present simple and present continuous tenses, adverbs of frequency, expressing opinions, punctuation, adjective formation, and vocabulary related to space.
• The World of Sport: Covers past simple and past continuous tenses, compound adjectives, linking words, vocabulary related to sport, and phonetics of -ed endings.
• Time for Travel: Includes expressing future plans, writing informal letters, describing places, and discussing ecological activities.
• Get Smart: Focuses on modal verbs, language of computers and communication, possessive adjectives and pronouns, reflexive pronouns, describing electronic devices, word order, and false friends.
• The Cyber Future: Covers future predictions, expressing opinions, vocabulary related to science and technology, prepositions of time, and phonetics.
• DNA: Includes hypothetical situations, expressing condition and result, vocabulary related to science and medicine, and phonetics.
• Out on the Town: Focuses on expressing free-time preferences, film reviews, second conditional, and linking words.
• Fame: Covers third conditional, expressions of quantity and degree, vocabulary related to fame, and clear writing.
• The Paranormal: Includes expressing beliefs, describing recent events, writing stories with descriptive adjectives, phrasal verbs, and modal verbs for deductions.
• Crime and Punishment: Focuses on vocabulary related to criminal actions, past perfect tense, phrasal verbs related to crime, and summary writing.
• Racism: Covers passive voice, vocabulary related to the topic, and storytelling.
• Artists: Focuses on reported speech, compound adjectives and nouns, and writing dialogues.
• Britain: Covers quantifiers, neutral and extreme adjectives, writing opinion articles, reported speech commands, and indefinite pronouns.
• Television: Includes modal verbs for obligation and advice, writing personal descriptions, expressing future continuous and perfect, and adjective suffixes.
• Internet Chat: Focuses on vocabulary related to internet chat, question forms, question tags, relative clauses, phrasal verbs, and writing messages.

Methodology

The methodology emphasizes active student participation, reflection, hypothesis formulation, and drawing conclusions. The teacher's role is to encourage and motivate students, create meaningful learning situations, and connect new concepts to previously learned material. The syllabus also addresses the treatment of diversity in mixed-ability classrooms and provides strategies for dealing with different learning styles and speeds. Error correction is treated as part of the learning process, with mistakes used as opportunities for reflection and improvement.