Reflections on my learning in TESOL class

       

Since I become an English teacher, it's been more than two years I haven't studied any ELT teaching methodology and teaching theories. Thanks to the class, my memory about ELT methodology could be aroused. I much appreciate the teacher in the class triggered us come up with lots of ideas about practical teaching methods and create some ideal teaching plans. From the class, I also got lots of opportunities to analyze the strengths and weakness of each teaching design and journal studies based on the authoritative theoretical framework.  

    Besides, I much enjoyed the reciprocal group time in which I could have a brainstorming with my group members. During the discussion, I could always   gain lots of creative and new ideas which I haven't thought of.  The reciprocal learning changed my opinion on working in a group. I realize that "two heads are better than one". I contributed myself more but I gained much more.

       In the end, I have to admit I sometimes kept silent in the class since I lacked of some more points of view. However, I always tried my best to make our groups reach the communicative goal and discussion outcomes.

Effective reading instruction for struggling readers: the role of direct/explicit teaching by Rupley, Blair, Nichols

   The research first redefined the efficiency of explicit instruction and teaching    major components (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) in reading. Then, the authors stated the important keys to successful reading: direct instruction and meaningful practice to the point of overlearning and automaticity.  Following the statement, the authors claimed an important issue: provide students as more opportunities to learn as possible. In the end of the article, the authors also claimed the benefit of scaffolding learning to struggling learners.

 I much appreciate the three points the article presented which are very practical and beneficial for students in EFL context, such as Taiwan. First of all, explicit instructions give students a clear and supportive model to follow. Also, based on the explicit instruction, it would be more useful to stimulate learners’ learning awareness and engage students in guided practice. I much agree the quotation from the study “students do not become independent learners through maturation (p.126)”. For most of EFL learners, especially for struggling students, it’s usually too vague and inattentive for them to “pick up” new information implicitly. With the explicit instruction, it is more likely to foster students' learning automaticity. 

Secondly, the concept of “opportunity to learn” gives me a new teaching principle to follow. According to the study, opportunity to learn refers to “whether students have been taught the skills and cognitive strategies relevant to the areas on which they are assessed (p.129)” . Learning is not a behavior of rote memorization. Most of time, we should pay attention to the use of learning strategies and connect the new information with the prior experience. Therefore, I would teach my students make graphic organizer or mind mapping while they were reading. The, I would also provide them some prediction or guessing strategies from generally to specific parts. These are more meaningful for struggling students to learn.

Last, the concept of scaffolding to support students’ learning also inspired me a lot. I have understood the importance of scaffolding. However, I always forgot to adopt the skill in my teaching. In fact, learning should not a sheer independent work. The scaffolds from peers and teachers could help students bridge the gap. Actually, it’s impossible for a teacher to support all students in a class (especially in a large in Taiwan context), the rapport from peers is obviously essential for struggling learners. During the reading time, with the rapport from others and discuss with members, the reading activity would be extra pleasurable and beneficial. 

   

Teaching Writing to Low Proficiency EFL Students by Arthur Firkins, Gail Forey, and Sima Sengupta

           This article described an activity-based genre approach to teaching writing to students with learning disabilities. In this article, the authors briefly describe the theory of genre-based pedagogy and show how it was used to inform a very practical activity-based approach used as the basis of teaching plan for EFL students with a learning disability. At first, the researchers applied the activity-based genre approach to the teaching of writing procedural texts. They then evaluated the approach and revised it to provide students with the essential linguistic tools to support their learning of information report genres. In the end of this article, the authors stated that the findings are particularly suitable for educational contexts where the students are low proficiency English as a foreign language.

            The study provides me another useful perspective on teaching writing, especially for those who are low-achievers. Just as I know, teaching writing involves lots of focuses. I need to pay attention to learners’ proficiency, learners’ expectation, learners’ cultural background and the concept of teaching writing. Therefore, I used to teach writing form constructing a sentence, then move to construct a paragraph and, ultimately, students need to accomplish a composition with different rhetorical patterns. The teaching process is rigid and inflexible. However, I ignore the genre-based pedagogy for teaching low proficiency learners. For novice learners, it’s usually important to o engage students in learning by doing. The learning-teaching cycle in the study gives me an idea to assign students a real-life writing task. Learners get certain writing assistance from modeling to independent writing gradually. From such learning-teaching cycle, students can unobtrusively and implicitly “pick up” the certain sentence patterns and specific vocabulary in the genre-based writing activity.     

Moreover, based on the concrete and specific texts which are chosen by teachers, it could motivate students’ learning awareness and attention. In Taiwan, there is more and more obvious discrepancy of students’ proficiency levels in the same class. As an English teacher, it takes time and wisdom to design a writing lesson to mitigate such wide discrepancy. The study makes me keep an idea in mind: providing an authentic text and real-world task would be beneficial for both low-achievers and high-achievers. 

 

English for Specific Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined Futures in Worlds of Work ,Study, and Every Day Life by Diane Belcher

     

     This study gives an overview of the current state of English for specific purposes begins by surveying ongoing debates on key some key topics. First, it states that it’s important and necessary to implement need assessment for those learners who learn in specific contexts. Needs assessment is now more often seen as a matter of ‘agreement and judgment not discovery”, negotiated by learners, other community members, and instructors inevitably influenced by ‘ideological preconceptions”. Second, the review articles rescript the instructional roles in ESP context. That is to say, it redefines the role of teachers for ESP learners. From the study, I conclude that How much subject knowledge is enough for ESP instructors, especially when taking a narrow-angled approach is still very much an open question. The last, the role of subject knowledge in instructor expertise is emphasized in the article, such as the specific genre theory and corpus-enhanced genre studies and some critical pedagogy.

   

       To be honest, I much appreciate the article states we should redefine the implement of need assessment for ESP learners. Indeed, it’s important for teachers to meet learners’ need and waste no time. When it comes to ESP, the English teaching in vocational schools comes into my mind. English teachers in vocational schools not only need to teach students general English knowledge but also need to focus on some specific and professional terms and knowledge for ESP learners. Therefore, the profession and authenticity of specific genres, such as journalism, medical, business, or science and technology domain, are especially important for those teachers. 

       However here comes a problem. For many English teachers, who are graduated from English-major program, are not so familiar with the specific domain. On the contrary, those who got specific knowledge are usually not trained with professional English teaching. Therefore, how to balance the training of teachers’ profession and authenticity of specific domains and general English knowledge becomes a big and important issue. In my opinion, it takes teachers’ time to train themselves and accumulate the knowledge in specific domain. Also, it takes ESP teachers’ wisdom to find out applicable and useful teaching material to meet those ESP learners’ need instead of just focusing on general English knowledge. 

'Small Talk': Developing Fluency, Accuracy, and Complexity in Speaking by James Hunter

Small Talk, which is a student-center, student-initial communicative methodology, is used as as a way to increase students’ fluency, accuracy and complexity in speaking the language they are learning. In the "small talk" session, students have chances to utilize their communicative ability in conversation without intervention by the teacher and then receive feedback. Also, students in each small talk group would have chance to re-examine their errors after they received the feedback on the worksheet. Each student could take turns as a discussion leader to come up with a topic which they are interested. As a result , students in a small group gained more opportunities to negotiate their meaning and ideas. The result, undoubtedly, could facilitate their  fluency. However, based on the worksheets about metalinguistic feedback they could, students would eliminate some hinders while communicating, which could facilitate speaking accuracy.  

For me, I much appreciate the study could emphasize the speaking fluency, accuracy and complexity at the same methodology. Actually, I don't view fluency and accuracy as a dichotomy. As an English teacher, I always believe we could pay attention to students' fluency without scarifying the accuracy part. Therefore, I especially appreciate the grouping rationale they study reveals. As an English teacher, I am always worried about giving too much time for "improvise" in small talk would mitigate my teaching authenticity and lead to linguistic anarchy.  However, Taiwan is an EFL context for learning English. We need to provide students more chances to negotiate their utterances in English. Based on the importance of context at both the linguistic and sociolinguistic level, the small group methodology would lower learners' learning anxiety and motivate their speaking desire to express in English  since they are in a learner-center group . Also, they would receive some feedback if the mistakes they made are global and hinder their communication. I could anticipate "Small Talk" activity is beneficial for students’ speaking practice, both in fluency and accuracy.

However, since how much explicit instruction the students receive depends on the feedback on the worksheet, the study also reveals a drawback of the small talk group. The extent to which how much CF provided based on the quantity of students interaction. Basically, those who speak more tend to make more mistakes,and then, those who speak less miss the opportunities to get some meaningful feedback.  However, it doesn't mean the low quality of their talk for those who speak more. In my opinion, I should cultivate students a concept " errors and mistakes are parts of our learning process, and the mistakes are the learners' attempt to mean that pave their way for learning". As an English teacher, I am the only one resource for students to give them opportunities to interact and involve in an English speaking context. It takes teachers' wisdom to balance students small talk time and teachers' explicit instruction to provide mitigated feedback about their speaking.  

Teaching Practicum Reflection

Team teaching reflection

Teaching for a group of teenagers, who are in a junior high level wouldn’t be my hard time. However, I used to teach my students in their first language along with some speaking and listening practice in the target language, especially when I was instructing them the grammatical sentences and vocabulary parts. Most of time, I just need to follow my pace. If I was behind the schedule I set in the beginning of the lesson, I just needed to catch up the schedule while next class was proceeding. Then, I am familiar with my students a lot, so I would pay more attention to those who can’t follow what I taught. However, this time, Nicole and I needed to finish a lesson within an hour and we needed to design a whole new lesson plan, and a worksheet from scratch, which are not just “a piece of cake” for us to complete. Therefore, it’s natural to meet some challenge while we were proceeding the team teaching lesson.

    In the very beginning, we conducted the lesson with a warm up activity. To cultivate their motivation in the lesson, we asked students to guess what the landmarks are and where the landmarks are by showing them some real pictures around the world. However, we forgot that for some students, maybe some children, it would be also a hard time for them to know what they are in Chinese. For some children, they don’t have some much background knowledge about the world so far. It’s no wonder some students could just keep silent and seeing other peers raising their hands. However, some students were eager to answering the questions. From the little part of warm up, I could also found a hung gap of English proficiency between students, even though the cram school has already grouped the group of students.

Instructed Second Language Vocabulary Learning by Norbert Schmitt

    

    This is a review article which gives us overall perspectives on the current research on second language vocabulary learning. To facilitate adequate vocabulary learning, four vocabulary learning partners, which are students, teachers, materials writers, and researchers, need to contribute to the learning process. The review article first talks about the necessary vocabulary size for language users: 8000-9000 word families for reading and as many as 5000-7000 families for oral discourse. To reach the communicative goal in our daily life, it’s the necessary vocabulary size to reach. Then, the article further gives us overall ideas about enlarging the depth of vocabulary. It would be beneficial enough for teachers to teach the derivation, collocations, and some grammatical functions of each vocabulary. Then, from the review article, I got an idea which accentuates that vocabulary isn’t made up with a single word. We need to pay attention to the lexical bundles while learning new target word. Therefore, the knowledge of phrasal vocabulary is also worth to accentuating. Then, Schmitt provides two types of vocabulary learning: intentional and incidental vocabulary. In conclusion, the author accentuates that combination of intentional and incidental vocabulary learning is the best approach for teachers and students.

   

    From the past of my teaching and learning experience, I just instructed my students to foster the meaning-and-form link while I was teaching vocabulary with explicit ways. However, providing learners more word knowledge is worth paying attention to. For example, I could provide some grammatical knowledge, such as collocation, derivation or phrasal vocabulary to L2 learners. Moreover, extending learners’ opportunities for the incidental leaning of vocabulary is necessary for L2 teachers. I come up with some tips for teaching with incidental learning. First, ask learners to read simplied novels related to their interest per month. Second, assign learners some context-depended tasks to accomplish by using new target words. Third, foster learners’ vocabulary learning strategies. I usually believe the use of mind mapping which is finished based on semantic categories is beneficial to enhance vocabulary learning. In sum, it’s impossible to enlarge and extend learners’ vocabulary size and depth within a class in a short term. It’s essential to acknowledge the incremental nature of vocabulary learning, and to understand that an effective vocabulary learning program needs to be principled, long-term and recognizes the richness and scope of lexical knowledge. Fostering learners’ awareness of using proper word choices in an appropriate situation and meeting their need in their future are two essential aspects would be kept in each teacher’s mind.