November 10 Post (Week 12 but Week 11 readings)

All of the contexts in Kuma’s Chapter 9 got a bit confusing and overwhelming. However, I thought that the examples in the text were great. I think it is important that we realize that there is an immediate linguistic environment (extralinguistic) that our students will have to deal with. This particular section stuck out to me because it reminded me of a student in a class that I am observing at Bloomington Junior High School. His intonation is terrible and he puts stress in all the wrong places. Yet, this is only one of his many problems, and it seems like the teacher finds this to be the lesser of the many. Regardless, I think this immediate contextual situation should be addressed because it is true—it’s hard for me to understand him when he speaks. He does better in his everyday English, but when he is reading is the real problem. He at times in completely incomprehensible and comprehension is obviously a huge part of teaching a student English. As far as situational contexts are concerned, I have not seen this to be much of a problem in my experience. However, I am hardly experienced! I can see how this would matter because of the example given, and this could be frustrating. All of the factors discussed in the chapter need to come together because it seems that all of these different contexts can happen extremely close to one another. Therefore, it is vital that a teacher is ready to address all of these issues.

I found Kuma’s Chapter 10 extremely interesting. I have never given much of a thought to why language is split up into reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and it never occurred to me that there was once a very strict order. Since I have been studying TESOL, I have only been exposed to the idea that language skills need to be integrated. The first half of the chapter discussed some ideas about reading and writing before speaking and so forth, and to me this sounds crazy! Being a language learner myself, I know that these skills are intertwined and practicing one skill can trigger another. I liked the micro-strategies mentioned, and will be sure to keep these in mind. I particularly liked micro-strategy 10.1 simply because they all use humor. It seems as though they would be effective in bringing in real world examples which helps them to be fun and engaging.