Eng 345: pedagogy of the oppressed

When reading these chapters, Freire triggered a lot of memories of discussions on power relations throughout our TESOL classes.  Knowing that students need to feel that their home languages are not only valid, but appreciated helps the students connect with learning their L2.  Because we've studied this for so long, Freire's work helped solidify what we already know.

I can remember language teachers throughout high school that simply used the banking method of teaching.  We read units out of the textbook, worked on activities provided by that textbook, memorized idiomatic expressions and took a quiz or test.  After years of being taught like that, I learned very little.  Being in France is when my French language skills skyrocketed.  This type of situation shows what Freire was explaining; teachers need to establish an environment that encourages students to inquire and share opinions and ideas about topics.  Teachers, in this case, will learn just as much as the students do.  This learning community will serve everyone as well as decontextualize knowledge in terms of sitting in a desk in a classroom and transform the classroom into a place to inquire about the world.

ENG 345: ch 33, 34, 35

In our TESOL testing and assessment classes, we are learning about how important it is to have a mix of assessments for our students.  We decided it is best to include regular testing as well as alternative assessment to see where our students are at in terms of their language learning.  These articles helped me to see different ways of assessing writing and other means of language.

The two most important things I found in these articles was that (1) Students need to have practice and skills in self-editing and peer editing and (2) Students need to receive constructive and personal feedback to improve their writing.

Self-editing and peer editing needs to be taught.  This can happen with teacher modeling as well as worksheets that show students what they need to look for.  Even if the students do not pursue academic English, it is a survival skill to be able to proofread, and edit writing for grammatical errors, as well as content  errors.  However, students aren't born with this skill. By explicitly showing them what to look for, they will be able to make these connections and use this knowledge in the future.

Personal and constructive feedback is important for students to improve their writing.  Simple words such as, "elaborate" or "vague" may help an L1 student who is a more advanced writer, but typically ELLs and students that aren't as advanced in writing need more personal feedback from teachers.  Having the students double space their typed papers will allow teachers more room for examples and more personal corrections and feedback.

I thought that dialogue journals was an excellent idea to get the students writing without value judgments from teachers.  It allows the teachers and students to make personal connections with one another while the student practices writing in English.  Practice, as we all know, is a huge part of language learning.  These dialogue journals will help the teacher and student be on equal levels, allow the student to practice and the teacher to make a connection with them in a non-stressful environment.

Eng 345: Critical Culture Awareness

I completely agreed with Kuma when he argued that people have a cultural lens and becoming aware of others' cultural lenses will help us eradicate stereotyping.  I liked that he said it would enhance cultural awareness and not necessarily change the way you view the world.  No matter how culturally aware you are, you will most likely still see through your own cultures lenses, simply because that is what you were raised to see.

Kuma, in his article, portrays stereotyping as an easy way to blame someone's culture for expectations and failures.  This seems to be an almost ridiculous excuse from a teacher's point of view.  I'm sure we all read this thinking well I'm never going to blame someone's culture for their behavior.  But part of me thinks it's slightly unavoidable at certain points.  Think about it.  If we, as TESOL professionals are enhancing our knowledge on not only English pedagogies for ELLs, but also on incorporating and learning as much as possible about our students' backgrounds, it would be easy to mistake being culturally aware with being slightly stereotypical.  For example, past articles we've read in this class have talked about Confucius and the learning and teaching expectations coinciding with his work.  Say a student in your class is Asian (I now know all of the issues that are homogenized into this term...) and is less interactive than other non-Asian students.  Yes, we as TESOLers would be able to point out several other factors that might attribute to this.  But maybe the school (s)he came from was oriented around Confucius's methodology.  Knowing that we would never think "oh, well (s)he's just Asian, that's how they are," it is hard to determine where the line between being culturally-sensitive and respectful and being stereotypical and negative.  Sometimes the dichotomies here are much smaller and more subtle than we think.

ENG 345: Kuma 9 and 10

The Kuma chapters helped remind me about the difficult of language learning and teaching.  I really liked how he illustrated that language is somewhat dependent on the context, resulting in coherent sentences from seemingly incoherent ideas and vice versa (especially in the telephone ringing, bath taking example on page 211).  However, being reminded of these areas of language make the native speaker in me think ahhh yes, that makes sense! I can think of one hundred instances where this happens every day! But the teacher in me is a little more skeptical.  How will I teach my students about intonation? Does this need explicit instruction or will exposure to natural language be enough? 

I don't want to leave my classroom hoping students understand.  I want to practice and come up with tasks that will ensure understanding (or at least awareness) of all types of contexts including situational, intonation (and other extralinguistic contexts), extrasituational, etc.  This all seems very heavy.  I'm wondering if context is something to dissect with medium to higher proficiencies.  Or do we just jump in with the beginners and teach them about 'natural' English language use and hope they aren't overwhelmed.  As a language learner, I felt that listening to natural language definitely helped, but that it wasn't enough for me to fully grasp these issues in France.  How do we teach this then? When do we start teaching it?  Who benefits the most from it?  How can we make it seem less overwhelming?  What tasks can be involved?  These chapters left me with more questions than answers.

Eng 345: ch 24, 25, myth #1

When doing these readings, I found that the article summed up the text of the two chapters in a very coherent and understandable way.  It was interesting to read that paraphrasing takes such a large vocabulary.  I was surprised when I saw that there are resources online to teach students academic vocabulary that they will need if they are going to be in an academic setting in English.

Most of the vocabulary teaching, however does not depend on teachers alone.  When I studied French in school, we had vocabulary lessons every week.  Each week, I would learn the material, understand it, and do well on the quizzes.  However, if I didn't regularly use it, it was gone.  Sometimes I still can't remember words that I need to say, and my language capabilities are much higher than they were in high school.  Half of learning vocabulary is dependent on the autonomy of the learner.  If the learner does not consistently work at learning and memorizing the vocabulary, they will lose it quickly as well as their ability to paraphrase, summarize and synthesize the information.  Students aren't able to use the material to learn if they are constantly misunderstanding the language used in it.  Learning English, and more specifically vocabulary, is very much dependent on the learner's autonomy.

The article also mentioned the importance of explicit teaching of vocabulary.  However, I want the students to be engaged in their lessons and it is difficult for me to think of a way to teach vocabulary without it seeming to be out of a textbook.  Any ideas on task-based lessons for vocabulary?  I was thinking something along the lines of charades, or writing stories that include words from a list, or learning songs that include new vocabulary.  Besides this though, I want my students to gain autonomy by feeling engaged when learning new material.

ENG 345: ch 11 and 12, Cary article

These articles taught me a lot about self-reflection.  I felt that the most important thing to take away was that learning strategies explicitly will help the students become better learners, which is ultimately our goal as teachers.  Not only this, but if the students are given a chance to think about their strategies, errors, and goals, they are better able to articulate how they plan on improving.

However, it is important to remember that there is a such thing as inundating the students with too much information.  The explicit strategy teaching should be built seamlessly into the lesson, which is possible but difficult.  We will have to build those into our lesson plans, knowing exactly what strategies would work best with which exercises.

I was trying to figure out how to have the students reflect without forcing a study on them, or several surveys.  I know that journaling is often done, however, there are many more options.  Exit-slips, or asking the students to recall what they've learned that day, would help solidify this explicit instruction.  In these exit-slips, I could ask the students to set a few goals for their language learning and how they think that strategy will or will not help them achieve that goal.  By providing the students with many strategies, my classroom would be sensitive to all students needs, abilities, and learning styles.  The hardest part, I think, will be fitting them into the lesson without interrupting the flow of what I'm teaching.

Eng 345: ch 21, 22, 23

I found these chapters to be extremely helpful.  As an pre-service TESOL educator in my last classes before practicum, I feel that I haven't learned much about the skills required for listening until I read these chapters.  (Nor had I realized how important it is to incorporate into the classroom...)

One of the most important points I read was about nonreciprocal listening.  So much of listening in today's world doesn't allow the listener to ask clarification questions or comprehension checks.  Just thinking of media in general, the listener does not get to ask questions when listening to radio broadcasts, anything on television, answering machines and voicemails, even most religious ceremonies and meetings, as well as the majority of speech presentations, whether formal or informal.  This is a skill.  Students can't expect to know the skills they can use to comprehend what they are hearing unless we give them ample practice with real language.  As the chapters pointed out, the listening portions of many textbooks, as well as other sources of listening practice in the teaching world do not give any example of real language.  Authentic language has uses of pauses, ungrammatical fragmented language, as well as facilitation devices that students need to be exposed to and aware of.  Therefore, using authentic language as much as possible in the classroom will benefit the students and allow practice in developing this skill.

Part of chapter 22 reminded me of living in France.  "It is vital that students of a language be given practice in dealing with texts where they understand only part of what is said" (244).  When I first went to France, I was extremely discouraged when I couldn't understand everything.  They spoke quickly and the slang was over my head.  No one told me that I wouldn't understand every word that was said, probably because it never occurred to my teachers or family to tell me.  However, this feeling passed and I became better and better at using context clues.  Because of this, I found that this part of the text was extremely important to include in the classroom.  Students need to be reassured that not knowing every word isn't failure; instead, it provides an excellent opportunity for students to practice finding context clues and manipulating the language to fit their needs.