October 27 post

I thought the section about Hispanics in the Johns article was quite interesting, because of course there are tons of different cultures that are all lumped in that category. I think it is good that someone has made the distinction. I particularly liked the section about the difficulties that many “Hispanics” may face, particularly “Generation 1.5” because I think this is important to realize as language teachers. If your students are young enough and have a pretty good grasp on the language, chances are they are the ones with the driver’s license and they are the ones going around with their families translating. This can be tiring and could cause students to start to resent the language and learning the language. Knowing this can help teachers to be more patient and create lessons that sound less like translation and more like a student’s own creation.  The same can be said for the distinctions the article made about those who check “Asian” on the census. I have seen from my experience working at the ELI that there are huge linguistic differences and different forms of social interaction amongst students from the different Asian countries. Because of all of these differences, I loved the idea of drawing in these differences so that students can enhance their learning. I think that creating a list of questions, like the one in the article, is a good way to think about the different ways to create lessons based on the individual students. While this may be difficult in a mainstream classroom, I feel like ESL classrooms often have fewer students (at least that is the case at Bloomington Junior High where I am observing). Therefore, this would be completely possible.

The article “Teaching to Transgress” was very negative, and sad in my opinion, but it was interesting the way the author talked about cultural diversity, and how the excitement about cultural diversity has changed over the years and how “to create a culturally diverse academy we must commit ourselves fully” (7). This is interesting because it implies that it is very difficult to change your ways for the comfort of someone else. To me, this seems like it would be easy, but I suppose in many situations it would be problematic. However, what I really enjoyed about this article was the author’s perspective on Freire and his ideas. Hooks says “Freire’s work affirmed my right as a subject in resistance to define my reality” (13). This quote was powerful to me because I found it to be applicable to anyone, including myself, despite the fact that he was talking about himself. I have read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and also found it fascinating, making it easy to enjoy this article. His ideas truly sparked some of mine. How can I teach those of a different culture when I know nothing of it? As discussed in the article above, I do think it’s a great idea to bring in linguistic and social aspects of the students culture in order to enhance learning. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but how?

Finally, I watched the youtube video “Shaping the Way We Teach English: Module 02, Building Language Awareness.” It states that we must pay attention to form, but practicing these through rules and memorization is not the best way to teach grammar rules and structures. Rather, we need to teach form in a given context, or language awareness—the focus on the pragmatic uses of language. The video first talked about using meta-language, having learners do the work, using a balance of inductive and deductive techniques, use of situational and culture language use, and use authentic material sources. I would have to say that all of these ideas will work in my classroom someday. When I look at my experiences at the ELI, I realize that for these students learning English in a context and in a certain situation is so important. While these ideas seemed like good ones, once I got more into the video and saw some of these put into practice, I became more hesitant. I thought creating a connection between students and the pilgrims was a good idea, but I wondered if this would be appropriate for high school students, or adults. I do not plan to teach such young children, so I do not expect my students to enjoy sitting down after pretending like they are rowing down the river in a boat, and then answering questions on a card. However, I did think this was a great exercise for younger children. While this example may not work in my future classroom, I think I could adapt it to make it work. I could still give my students roles to play, and I could be less of a part of the conversation like the teachers are in this clip. I think older students would prefer to walk around and talk to each other, maybe try and solve some sort of mystery, as opposed to sitting and waiting for me to ask a question. I did like the activity where students had to create their own brochure. The video mentioned that it helps students with their organization and vocabulary, and I think that would transfer over just as well with older students.

                                                                                          

Class Activity on sexist ads

We had the sexist ads to work with, and so far this is what we came up with in class:

-put the ads on the board and have students write their initial reactions. Then ask them "what are the gender roles like in your country? Are they anything like this?" and have them write down their responses.

-have a discussion about what the students wrote down

-have a discussion on sexism and have students try and determine, as a class, some of the assumptions the ads are making (women only have one purpose, men deserve to be waited on, etc.)

-general langauge awareness: How would you change the words (and/or pictures) to make the ads less sexist? Have a class discussion.

-have students take all of this information and write once again, this time discussing what the ad is doing, and then how to change it (exactly what was discussed in class)

October 20

I feel that the chapter on learner autonomy was one of the most useful chapters, at least for me. I particularly liked the section about "learner training" because it is true, our students do not only need to know the concpets that we are teaching them but they need to know how to learn (which I take to be the narrow view of learner autonomy). This is not just strategic preparation, but psychological. Studetns likely have all of these expectations about how a class works in their own countries when the way of teaching and the way the class works in America could be completely different. They may have to re-learn how to learn entirely because their previous strategies (assuming we are talking about adults who have strategies) could be very unhelpful in an American classroom. I like how Kuma listed out how teachers should go about helping students with this problem by explaining important points of teaching. For example, it should be informed, self regulated, contextualized, interactive, and diagnostic. Further, Kuma discusses a broad view of learnere autonomy, and this was personally my favorite. I think that the whole point of learning is so that you will soemday be able to know where you fit in this world, thus making you a happier more successful person. I imagine that ESL students have great struggles when deciding what they are capable of and deciding what they are going to do in this new country. They have significantly more worries, in my opinion, that natives, so teaching students in order to liberate them stuck out to me as being extremely important.

The next chapter talked about fostering language awareness. This chapter scared me a little bit because I know that I learned English at a very young age, and I feel as though I'm aware, but some of the examples made me think otherwise. For example the question "why is it three bedroom apartment and not three bedrooms apartment." Truthfully, I was unsure, and I'm scared this will someday happen in my own classroom. Therefore, I realize now that I cannot get by just by being a native speaker. How can I expect my students to be aware of their English and the reasons for their choices in English, when I myself don't take the time to figure these things out? It's much too hypocritical for my taste.

October 13 post

The article about how to choose the right text book was a bit intimidating. I found it interesting that there was a section about a fit between the textbook and the student, and then a fit between a textbook and the teacher, and both sections had the same topic concepts to think about. This paralleled nicely, but it got me wondering how in the world one textbook can cover all of these “fits.” Obviously, this simply will not be possible, but this fact is a bit discouraging. It also scared me when it said that “a teacher needs to read the whole book—from start to finish, including any appendices” (4). I in no way want to be lazy, but textbooks can be so big and you would need to read a few of them before making your decision, and I wonder if this is realistic. I know a few different people who did not get a teaching job until a few weeks before school started. Personally, I think it is possible to thoroughly overview a textbook, and catch important features of the book, by reading reviews, seeking help from other teachers, or following the steps outlined under the section “initial reading of a textbook.”

I thought the distinction between syllabus and curriculum was a good one in “Curriculum design and materials development,” but for me made everything more confusing then when I began. I feel like I have always known the difference, and this article confirmed that my thoughts are correct, but it certainly made me re-read and second guess myself a few times. However, the article talked a lot about how to go about organizing and approaching both a curriculum and a syllabus, and I appreciated that. I have created a syllabus in a few of my methods courses here at ISU, but we rarely think about how it differs from a curriculum. As for the section about customers and stakeholders, this reminded me of Paulo Freire’s idea about the banking concept of education. Obviously, the students are the “customers” of the information given by the teacher and the textbook, but this term was problematic for me because we do not want our students simply “buying” into everything we say. As teachers, we should want out students to discover things on their own, analyze, and essentially be given the tools to find for themselves why something is correct or makes sense before buying into not only the issue, but buying into an idea that they can’t or don’t understand something.

This gets me into my opinions about learner-centered curriculums. As I stated above, I personally feel as though questioning and actively thinking about issues is much more effective than simply assuming a teacher or a textbook is always right. Now, I know that as a future teacher I will need to use a textbook, but I will certainly try and use the concepts, but not necessarily the examples or the language used in the book if I do not think it fits my students need to explore and understand things in their own terms. The article talked about contextualization and the importance of giving examples that students can relate to, and I think this is something very important that a text book likely would not produce. You know your students so you, as the teacher, should create these personalized examples and activities.

October 6 post

Intuitive heuristics was something that I completely agree with. Based on my own experiences learning another language, instruction is not nearly as effective as speaking and actually discovering the language on your own. The things that I remember most about Spanish are those that I learned on my own, whether it be from a native Spanish speaker I heard speaking or a word that I looked up out of curiosity. I agree with the book that inductive teaching is better than deductive teaching (although it does not explicity say this). Looking back, I think that my foreign language classes were set up with a more deductive approach, likely because this is easier for the teacher. However, I also agree with the book when it says that many adults want this deductive structure because it is more explicit, more concrete, and easy to refer back to this type of instruction when mistakes are made. My experiences at the ELI have proven this to be true—adults want something they can refer back to, not something that they have to discover. I will often ask students “what do you think?” and they give me this look like, “Just tell us so we can start studying.” The question then becomes what should you do as a teacher. I personally feel that research has shown that if you look at the big picture, intuitive heuristics should be the goal to learning a language and therefore I think teachers should use this research and put it to practice, instead of listening to the students who think they know what they want.

I enjoyed the Skehan article and I felt like it touched on a lot of subjects, but the section “individual variables” stuck out to me. At first I thought this was going to be a section of common sense and give the over-taught lesson that “everyone is different,” but there were some points that I found extremely interesting. For example, the text said that “high task attitude students seem more affected by task manipulations than do low task attitude students” (7).  First of all, I feel like the word “manipulation” is selling some students short and has a terrible connotation. I also do not like how we are constantly putting students into these groups and on these different tracks and classifying them and as this and that. It says that group-based differences in task performance can disguise differences among students, but I think it is unrealistic to believe that we can walk into a classroom, classify every student as either having a high or low task attitude, and then putting them into groups accordingly. This also eliminates the importance of different types of students working together.