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.

Eng 345: chapter 26-28, kuma ch 8

Before reading these chapters, I didn't know the importance of reading in a second language.  It was explained in all of the chapters that reading definitely makes a huge difference in the comprehension aspect of learning another language.

Grabe in chapter 26 states that, "a large vocabulary is critical, not only for reading, but for all L2 language skills, for academic abilities, and for background knowledge" (279).  Building a large vocabulary is a hard feat for students as well as a challenge to incorporate it into the classroom.  When reading through the dilemmas and the struggle to incorporate reading for fun, I couldn't help but think that I could pretty easily add 10-15 minutes of reading in class every other day or so.  Students could also have an assignment or project attached to this extra reading.  Each month, a new book could be read and the students could create their own project about it, such as performing skits, making mixed CD soundtracks, creating dioramas or posters about characters or plot, etc.  I felt that as long as I was able to have access to decent reading material for the students, whether it be my own books or a book from the school or public library, I would love to add more reading into the curriculum.

I also agreed with Jacobs and Renandya that students need to read material that is not too difficult for their abilities.  Therefore, Vygotsky's i+1 wouldn't be the best way to incorporate reading.  It is important that we foster a fondness in our students when it comes to reading, simply because it is proven that grades and study skills are directly affected by it.  i+1, or incorporating difficult text in a class with ELLs would create a lot of frustration and stress toward reading, which is exactly what shouldn't happen.  ELLs would greatly benefit from more reading, and I think it's extremely important that TESOL educators work diligently to add it into their curriculum.  

Eng 345: application project ideas

I'm really excited about this project.  Most of the TESOL classes had research papers due at the end of the semester.  It's exciting that I can finally create a teaching experience that will synthesize all of the TESOL information I have learned.  Elise and I hope to create a 3-session (one hour each) program in iHouse (international house) at ISU.  We want to create an "ISU Survival" type of workshop that could include information on academic writing, communication in class, and communication in social settings.  We are still bouncing ideas around and I just recently contacted the faculty mentor for iHouse.  I look forward to starting!

Eng 345: Ch. 3 and 7 Anthology

These chapters, on changing models and lesson planning explained the importance of having a plan and being able to be flexible enough to change it when necessary.  It also brought up many models of curriculum and methods that can be used together to help students learn the target language.

The most important issue raised, in my eyes, was asked in the beginning of chapter 7.  Finney asks, "...is it possible to teach a language within the four walls of a classroom? I think not- and so we also need to help our learners to learn how to learn and to keep on learning" (69).  I think this is important to keep in mind as we enter the field of TESOL.  With all of the methods and approaches I keep learning about, I am trying to tweak them to find what essentially could be considered a best method...even though it doesn't exist.  It is important to be humble when teaching; we cannot teach the English language in the classroom.  Instead, we need to focus on trying to teach students how to learn a language and how to become life-long learners.  Having this as a goal or objective would not only help us from running to a "best method," but also help the students understand that language learning is a journey, not something that can be marked off of a checklist.

Eng 345: SIOP

After being in the teacher education program at ISU for a few years now, I always thought that we were lacking classes and instruction in how to teach students will special needs.  I knew that in my English classrooms, I may run into many diverse situations and would need to be able to teach every student to the best of my ability.  After reading this week's articles, I was appalled that most teachers have no idea how to teach ELL students, even though they will certainly encounter many.

It would seem obvious that ELL students are in other classes besides our own, but what if they aren't able to keep up?  With many teachers being unaware and untrained, it seems that many schools are unprepared in teaching ELL students and helping them succeed in their academic lives.  One of the most important points of the article, in my opinion, was that "...content-based ESL teachers seek to develop the students' English language proficiency by incorporating information from the subject areas that students are likely to study of from courses they may have missed if they are fairly new to the school system" (Echevarria et al., 6). In other words we, as pre-service TESOLers, are the link that ELL students can depend on.  We can seriously help them succeed in their other classes by including vocabulary, discourse, and rhetoric that pertains to the academia they will learn in science, math, history, etc.  This is important to remember.  Providing this link will not only strengthen their English proficiency, but will also help them succeed in their future academic endeavors.

Eng 345: task-based instruction

The article and chapter really helped clarify what I've been wondering for weeks.  Using the language and teaching through meaningful tasks and language, sure, but how?  However, I was surprised to read in chapter 5 that "...no task-based program has been implemented and subjected to rigorous evaluation.  Until this has been accomplished and any positive results replicated, the use of task-based courses will be open to doubts and criticisms" (Beglar & Hunt, 102).  I was really surprised to read that even though many authors argue what works "the best" in classrooms (whatever that means...), that no one has really critically looked at task-based instruction in a classroom setting.  It seems to me that these methods would be evaluated almost instantly unless they were either too difficult to evaluate or they weren't used as the only model in the classroom.  This brings us back to giving credit to an eclectic approach, or what I think of as using the best approaches for the context of the lesson and of course, the context of the students and the classroom I will be teaching in.

Though task-based learning makes sense to me, it still seems a bit idealistic.  Simulating meaningful language usage in an activity may or may not be meaningful for all of the students.  And let's not even bring up the stress and pressure of passing language testing.  Though I have learned a lot of activities and strategies from task-based learning that I will definitely be able to use in my classroom to promote language learning.