readings

In order to be a successful language teacher, one must both read and write proficiently in the target language. This has always been my assumption, and for total fluency, it is true. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are critical skills that any language learner needs to master before he or she can claim themselves to be fluent in the target language. However, this does not mean that those skills will all grow at the same rate in a classroom. This week's readings pointed that out for me. I always assumed that students would grow at roughly the same level in all of these skills throughout their education. This is not true at all. Granted, some students will progress equally in all language skills, but that is not to be expected from every student. As teachers, I believe that it is our job to pay attention to our students' language skills progression, discover which areas they are excelling in or may need some assistance in, and to give them that assistance accordingly.

Module 02

I really liked this Youtube video. It only makes sense that in order for language awareness to be effective, the usage of language must be authentic. Using real advertisements as we did in class last week, or real travel brochures as was illustrated in the video, were perfect examples of authentic language use. In using them to discuss the features and aspects of language, we not only learn about the functions that we are studying, but we also get to see them in action, which is equally important. Without the ability to both use and recognize language features, having studied it doesn't really do us any good, and that goes double for ESL students.

Learner Autonomy and Language Awareness

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This is my presentation week, so I'm going to keep my comments here to a minimum. You'll all hear what I have to say later anyway. :)

I really love the concept of language awareness. It's pretty much advocating teaching rhetoric in an ESL classroom. Rhetoric is a really useful tool for understanding why language functions as it does. By studying the effects that language has on it's listeners and speakers at all times, we can consciously choose to use language in ways that produce our desired outcome.

Learner autonomy is also a really great education tool. It advocates giving learners a chance to take charge of their own education and make their own educational decisions. I really like this concept too, since I know that my best work has been done when I have a chance to make some of my own decisions in a classroom.

10-13 post

I feel that it is our job as educators to make our curriculum meet our students' needs. To this extent, I really hate product based curriculum planning where the end product of the education is more important than the means through which it is achieved. The whole time I was reading about this, all I could think about was how much it felt like the way public schools teach to standardized tests. I think that it is absolutely crucial for us as educators to consider how our students are learning, not just what they are learning. As we discussed in class last week, every student is going to excel in different areas for different reasons, and if we are only concerned with their ability to repeat information at the end of a unit, we are not addressing those different strengths and weaknesses properly.

I am a big fan of addressing students' self discovery in the classroom. Every student is going to succeed in a different environment, so using a lot of different teaching strategies and styles is the best way to address all of my students' needs. The only problem that I foresee in actually doing this is that I think it is impractical to expect to be able to address ALL of your students' needs in EVERY class period. It simply can't be done in the 55 minutes that we are allotted in each class period. We can help to achieve this goal by mixing up our daily routine though. If we try to expose our students to a variety of learning styles, then they will be able to adapt their home studies to what suits them best, even if we can't do it every day in class.

Oh my goodness, I logged on today to find that my post from last week did not get published! So while it may be late, I would still like to get my reflections on the internet.

I think that cultural diversity in the classroom is one of the most important parts of being a teacher. This goes double for those of us who will be teaching TESOL, since we will have students from a multitude of different cultural backgrounds over our years as teachers. I was not lucky enough to be exposed to multiculturalism as a child, since my school was pretty homogenous, but I did get a look at some different cultures in high school. The transition from having had no exposure to people from different cultural backgrounds to being dropped into a very multicultural high school was shocking. I wasn't really sure how to behave, so I can't even imagine a teacher trying to enter into a multicultural classroom without having any prior exposure to that sort of environment. We should really strive to get some experience dealing with people from other cultures so that we will be better able to deal with them in the classroom.

My final project is going well. I've done a little but of research into different types of websites that I could create and I have a lot of ideas about what I want to include on my website. The main problem that I am encountering is money, since I really can't afford to purchase web publishing software or a proper domain name. I have seen a lot of teachers use wikispaces though, so I am going to look into that now.