Final Project Progress

Cara and I have been making progress on our final project for class. We have contacted Sarah Jomae, who is in charge if the International House to make sure it was alright we held these workshops. Ms Jomae seems to be on board with us coming in a few times through out the semester to talk with the international students. We have also come up with a list of dates that would be the most convenient for us, we just need to make sure the dates are alright with I-House. The dates we are thinking are Sun. 10/24, Tues. 10/26, and Sun. 11/7. The times for these days would be 6pm, 7:30pm, and 6pm respectively. In addition we have developed some thoughts and ideas for possible topics for the sessions. These topics include:

1. Learning English

• When did you start learning English?
• Why did you learn?
• What methods were used? (Did you find these methods helpful?)
• What was the hardest thing for you to learn?

   2. English in your home country vs. English in the US

• Are there any similarities? What?
• What was most shocking when you came to the US?
• Do you feel your previous knowledge prepared you well?
• What do you still find yourself struggling with?

  3. You Americans are so strange! Why do you...?

• Allow students to ask us questions, such as "why do you say/do _______?"

Now, we plan on coming up with different activities to incorporate at each session. We want to include things that would engage everyone and that the experience would be beneficial for everyone. We also plan on making fliers/advertisements, so the students are aware of these workshops. :)

You Can Read It, But Can You Practice It?

As I continue to study education, specifically bilingual elementary education and TESOL, I begin to wonder if I will actually be able to put the methods and strategies I have learned into practice. As I read the articles for this week, I kept thinking, of course! Of course you want to be sure to incorporate diversity into the classroom, of course it is important to have well trained teachers,  of course providing a model is helpful for ELL students, I have read this a million times. However, I then began to think to myself, I have been given what seems like endless opportunities to read about the "best practices" to utilize in a classroom of ELL students, but I have rarely been given the chance to practice these theories.

Do not get me wrong, I have learned a great deal of helpful tips and information in regards to how to best reach out to English language learners, which I plan on remembering and using when I become a teacher, but I strongly feel I lack the experiences of putting them into practice!  In other words, sometimes you can only read so much, until you have to put the material you have learned to "the test." Otherwise, you may never be a good teacher because you never practice what you read. For instance, I can read everything there is to know about baseball, but that does not mean that I will be a good baseball player--I have to practice the sport in order to become good at it.

I think that Sleeter brought up a good point in the article, Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools, when she pointed out that so many teachers lack the proper and necessary preservice training when working with culturally diverse students. The article mentioned that so many students who are studying to become teachers are not provided the necessary materials and information about teaching in different settings and how to reach out to students from different backgrounds. In my opinion, I think Sleeter should also add that many preservice teachers lack the necessary experiences to teach students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Materials, education, and experience should all go hand in hand. I do think it is important to educate preservice teachers about how to teach in culturally diverse settings, but I also think that clinical experiences or more hands on lessons should also be included. I feel that going from reading and learning to teaching in the classroom is a mighty big leap if you have never really had any prior experience interacting with students, especially students of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Mismatches

"Mismatches are unavoidable. They are a part of the practice of everyday teaching. Even highly structured and meticulously planned lessons will result in perceptual mismatches of one kind or another" (Kuma p. 90). Personally, I feel that this piece of information is good to know up front as a perspective teacher because it helps eliminate the pressure of always having to be "perfect." By no means am I saying that because mismatches are inevitable one should not consider how to avoid any confusion in a lesson. Rather, I am trying to point out that these types of communication failures do happen-- no matter how prepared, experienced, or well planned out a teacher is. Even in a mainstream classroom with native speakers, mismatch situations may arise. We just have to remember that nobody is perfect, not even teachers (as shocking as that may be), and the teacher and/or student may not always communicate their thoughts or ideas clear enough for others to understand.
As a future teacher, I need to remember that these moments of language misunderstanding are going to present themselves, and that I should not be discouraged by them. In fact, as Kuma later points out, mismatches can actually be used as a learning opportunity. For example, I am a resident assistant on one of the international floors and earlier this year, I was writing a reminder message on my residents' whiteboards using the "common" phrase ASAP (meaning as soon as possible). Later that same day, I had a resident come up to me and ask, "what does ASAP mean?" It was at that moment that I realized many of my residents may not understand what the expression means. After informing my one resident of the word's significance, I then went and wrote, "= as soon as possible," next to ASAP written on the whiteboards. By adding the meaning on the whiteboards, my residents learned what ASAP means, and I recognized that I have to be careful with the terminology I use because sometimes I take advantage of my audience's language background knowledge.

Teaching: A New Approach

This week was a bit of a humbling experience for me in regards to TESOL and which teaching methods are "better" than others. For awhile now, I was beginning to think that the Communicative Language Teaching method was, for lack of a better word, superior to the other types of teaching approaches (such as direct method, grammar translation method, etc.). Although I am not able to pinpoint where these thoughts originated, I can only guess that I started developing this view point after learning about the many benefits the CLT method seemed to have in comparison to the other approaches. I started to believe that CLT was the "newer" and "trendier" version of teaching a second language in comparison to the previously practiced techniques. However, after reading Stephen Bax's article, The End of CLT: a context approach to language teaching, I began to realize how wrong I was.

In his article, Bax makes an excellent point when he mentions how the CLT approach has been overused and overemphasized for so long. In fact, others began to have a similar view point as myself in the sense that if the CLT method was not used, the teaching program was somehow backwards. Bax gives the example about a man who went to Japan and questioned the experienced teachers' use of the Grammar Translation method. He later states," this displays an unfortunate attitude: a young and relatively experienced teacher comes to a new country of which he has almost no knowledge. Without any reference to the culture, the learning context, student needs and wishes, and other contextual factors, he immediately judges far more experienced teachers as failing. And what gives him a license to do so, as he sees it, is the fact that he is a native speaker, and that he is armed with CLT" (pg. 2). When I read this comment, I could not help but imagine myself doing something similar. Maybe I wouldn't actually say it to the instructor directly, but I would probably be thinking it in my head. "Why," you might ask? Because I would probably think my teaching methods were more effective since they are "newer." As I continued to read, Bax put me in my place once again when he talked about how clearly other methods can be just as effective--it all depends on the context. For instance, in schools over in Holland or the Czech Republic, who did not use the CLT method, the students were able to speak English really well. This shows that the CLT approach does not always have to be used, but rather, depending on various factors such as the students, resources, culture, etc. can help determine which teaching method would be the most effective. Or more simply put, it all depends on the context of the teaching situation.  

To close, I would like to say, "Thank you Stephen Bax. Thank you for keeping me in check and helping me realize that CONTEXT is a very important factor when selecting a teaching method."

Kuma Reflection

Although a lot of good material was presented in this weeks reading, I found it interesting how defining the role of a teacher is much like choosing the best teaching method for a classroom. While reading chapter 1 in Kumarauvdivelu's book Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language Teaching, I could not help but notice that there has never been one conclusive decision on the definition of a teacher's role in the classroom. According to Kuma, some individuals see themselves as passive technicians, others reflective practitioners, or even transformative intellectuals (sometimes a combination of them all) when it comes to being an educator.

I just found it interesting how there are (what sometimes seems like) endless discussions as to what is the purpose of a teacher in the classroom, and how those talks are similar to the continuous discussions of which teaching method is most effective for second language learners. Personally, I have come to discover that the conclusion in both of these topics is that there is no conclusion. There is not a definite answer because there is no one best term or method. In other words, people will always view their role in the classroom, or which teaching approach would be the best practiced, differently because every person and situation is unique. Depending on the make-up of the classroom environment, as well as on how the individual themself views the situation, will influence the teacher's approach to teaching a second language and/or defining their personal role to their students.


In general, I have gathered from the various readings for this course thus far, that there is not just one way to define a teacher, nor is there just one teaching method that works best. As the instructor, he/she will have to evaluate his/her students and their abilities, in order to select a teaching approach that would be the most effective. In addition, every teacher may see themselves maintaining a different role in the classroom as their fellow co-workers because their situation and viewpoints are unique.

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How would you approach this?

As a second language learner, I have experience many different types of teaching methods over the years. For instance, when I first started to learn Spanish as a freshman in high school, my teacher used more of a grammar translation approach. A majority of the class was spoken in English and we would translate various words and/or phrases from English to Spanish. At the time I found this method to be helpful because I was a beginner and did not have the slightest clue how to speak Spanish. This method helped introduce me to many important vocabulary words and phrases in the Spanish language.


However, as a continued on with my Spanish learning, the methods my instructors used to teach began to change as our ability levels were increasing. To give an example, the approach my Spanish teacher from senior year used could fall under the cognitive approach method. As learners, we were never really corrected on our pronunciation, unless of course the word we used was completely wrong. My teacher viewed speaking errors as something that was only natural for non-native speakers to experience. In addition, we spent time focusing on improving our abilities to read and write in the language as well as learn about different grammar rules. At the time I found this teaching method a bit challenging, but in a positive way. This approach helped me improve my Spanish language abilities.

A third type of language learning that I have experienced is the direct approach. This past summer I had the opportunity to study abroad in Mexico. While I was there, the professor only knew how to speak fluent Spanish; therefore, the entire class was taught in that language. At times, she would use hand motions or other gestures if the class was unsure on what she was saying. My professor also liked to include various literary texts into her lessons for us to enjoy, rather than analyze the grammar. Once again, I found this teaching method to be beneficial to my Spanish learning career. Being immersed in the language and having to constantly speak and understand in my L2 helped me further develop my Spanish abilities. I found the direct approach to be helpful at that stage in my life because I was at a more advanced stage in the language learning process.

Overall, I would say that one method is not better than the other. Sometimes the type of method that would be “best” depends on the ability level of the class or even an individual. I felt that the methods my teachers have used through out the years have been appropriate for the level of proficiency I was at during that time period. When I become a teacher, I feel as though it is important for me to know the language ability of my students, so that I can utilize a teaching method that would be most suitable for them. However, sometimes the entire class may not be at the same level, and as a result, I will have to be more flexible with which teaching styles I use in the classroom.