Week 15’s class (4/20)

I enjoyed tonight’s class very much. First of all, we were all taking an AccuPlacer test, which is used to help students to identify their academically English performance in terms of language skills. I took TESL 1 test, which inculdes writing, listening, and reading test tasks. It took me about 30 minutes to get it done. After finishing the test, for some reason, I didn’t get my writing score back so I had no clue of where is my writing ability in this test. But it was such a great opportunity for these ESL prospective teachers to experience how a formal ESL assessment is developed and to see how they feel about this test. This would help them to consider some practical principle or steps while they are developing a test? Later on, we moved to the step of designing a test. It was a lot of fun and benefical to learn from our assessment’s sharing.

Week 15: Assessment

This week’s reading is to continue the topic of “assessment.” Two tests are discussed in chapter 24 of HDB; they are norm-referenced test and criterion-referenced test. A norm-referenced test refers to the process of comparing one test-taker to his/her peers such as TOFEL and SAT, whereas in criterion-referenced test, it only competes against a test-taker himself or herself such as the ones we take from our regular schooling classes. In addition, some practical tips to construct a test are provided in text. The testing objectives should be clear and unambiguous. And then from the objectives, you can outline and draft of your test. Revision and final-edition on your test are necessary. After administering the test, utilize the feedback and provide ample washback are important. You can use them for making your next test better. These informal assessments such as portfolios, journals, conferences, observations, and self and peer-assessments are alternatives of assessment.

Week 14’s class (4/13)

I enjoyed last Monday class. Ahmet and Jodi were giving presentation respectively at beginning of the class. Later on we’re broke into two small groups defining these statistic terms such as validity and reliability. And then each group was divided into two more groups discussing and developing an assessment based the assigned task. Then we shared our assessment with the whole class. It was fun to learn different notions of a test from the whole class.

Week 14: Assessment

This week’s reading gave me a quick review of what I’ve learnt from Dr. Stoynoff’s class, Second Language Testing. The major purpose of an assessment is to reflect what was taught in class and to see where students are in order to help them improve their skills. Test constructors should consider a good assessment is not only measure for grading, but also utilizing both self-assessment and peer assessment as well as other alternative means. To assess academic English language skills (reading, writing, listening, structure, vocabulary), test format, instructions, scoring rubric, reliability, and validity should be also taken into account. A good test format is starting with relatively easy items and then interspersing easy and difficulty items. The instructions should be brief and clear. Test constructors have to consider objectiveness of items and how long it will take to score items as well as the easier way to score. The test should be also concerned about a measuring instrument and what it purports to measure in the test.

Week 13’s class (4/6)

Last Monday I attended the Education Job Fair in Minneapolis and had interviews there. When I got back to Mankato, it was near 9 pm so I decided to skip the last thirty minutes of the class. I heard about that our guest speaker had a wonderful speech in the class. It is such a great loss not being able to come to the class. Hopefully these interviews will pay it off then. I heard from my fellow classmates that the videotape analysis will be due next Monday as is planned. In addition, we will need to work on the posters for our final presentation of portfolio project in two weeks. I’m going to talk about this with my team member next Modany.

Week 13: Writing

Teaching writing is a very complex task. This week’s reading has presented some general issues to help teachers to shape their writing classes. These issues mainly involve writing curriculum design and response or feedback to students’ writings as well as error corrections. While designing a syllabus, curricular goals, the levels of students’ writing skills, and teaching philosophy should be taken into account. These techniques, such as brainstorming, listing, clustering and free-writing, can help students to begin their writings. Feedback or response can be oral as well as written from teachers and peers. With regard to error correction, teachers can put check marks underlining errors. Besides, teachers should keep it in mind that providing all errors might overwhelm students, so they can focus on these errors that may result in miscommunication.

Week 12’s class (3/30)

Today at the end of this class, we were broke down into small groups, and shared our video selected about 10-15 minutes from our ESL teaching class with our group members. After watching, each member exchanged their thoughts/ideas about what they see from this video and responded to each other in what we could improve our teaching from their eyes. I like this activity a lot because the feedback or response we gain might be our blind spots of teaching, which we don’t see ourselves. In my case, I didn’t know that I didn’t make a clear of definition of thesis statement while teaching in the class, even after watching the video a couple of times. I think this is such a good activity for these who are prospective teachers to polish their teaching skills.

Week 12: Writing

The readings for this week deal with the differences between adults and children with regard to five factors and how to accommodate such differences in our teaching. These five factors are intellectual development, attention span, sensory input, affective factors, and authentic, meaningful materials. Compared to children, adults are more able to handle abstract rules and concepts, have firmer egos and longer attention spans for activities which may not capture their immediate interest as well as better understand a context-reduced segment of language. In addition, the need of sensory input is not always as varied as children’s.

In addition, the readings also refer to the early stages of English writing skill. English has so many rules for predicting the correspondences between letters and sounds, which is important for effective reading and writing skills as well as pronunciation. Hence, it is important to engage learners in recognition activities to help establishing the basis of it at their initial stage of learning. In addition, more advanced writing tasks are focused on in order to help learners move from letters and words to meaningful sentences and larger unites of discourse.

Week 11’s class (3/23)

I was on campus this afternoon. However, for some reason I began having cold sweat and did not feel good so I decided to go home and take a rest. Since I was not in the class, I didn’t know what was going on. But according to the syllabus, the video type analysis will be due by next Monday. In addition, according to the classmates, for next class we will need to bring in a 5-10 minutes of our teaching and peer review each other in small groups. We will be responding to give peer comments, which will be due two weeks after next Monday. I think this is such a great idea to get feedback from others because we could see our blind spots of teaching by other people’s view. I like this idea and am looking forward to it.

Week 11: Literacy Skills

This week’s reading mainly introduces the strategies and principles of teaching children literacy skills in a second language. Two teaching methods working on beginning reading are referring in the book. They are part-centered method and socio-psycholinguistic method. The former includes phonics approach, sight-word approach, and basal reader approach, whereas the later contains Language Experience Approach (LEA) and the whole language approach. It also comes to the notion of different uses of reading materials to different ages of learners. For older beginning learners, it is important to provide the materials which are at lower levels of difficulty but not overly childish and will appeal to their interests. For the younger, it would be appropriate to assist and develop the understanding of ideas such as pictures, quotation marks, punctuation marks, and so on.

Week 10’s class (3/16)

Adib and I had a presentation for class tonight. I was kind of nervous before and during the presentation but I’m glad that I made it. I feel that I’ve stepped out one more pace. I actually got a chance to practice it twice before the class. I’m receiving pronunciation clinic service from Hearing Department this semester. I went there before the Method class and my tutor brought me to a real classroom and had me practice twice since she knew that I would have a presentation tonight. I think it’s really helpful.

It seemed that we had a warm conversation tonight. Many students were so willing to share their thoughts or experience on the subjects we're discuss in classs. I think it is good to have such a healthy conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Week 10: Reading

These four chapters mainly and commonly contain the information of the principles and the strategies for teaching reading. In the principles, giving enough time for intensive reading, choosing material relevant to student’s goals, balancing on choosing complex and simplified texts, encouraging using strategies to read, following the SQ3R sequence, and assessing students’ comprehension are more focused. With the reading strategies, students can work with texts on the process of pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading. At the beginning stage of pre-reading, previewing, skimming, and exploring key vocabulary are very important. Summarizing key ideas, looking for answers to questions posed during pre-reading, predicting what will come next are these strategies commonly used at the during-reading stage. At the last process, ensuring the understanding of the major ideas and supporting information and extending the ideas or information are weighty.

Week 8’s class (3/2)

In Chinese, there is an idiom saying that “three cobblers with their wits combined exceed the mind of the master, Zhuge Liang,” which means two heads are better than one. I like brainstorm game very much. Tonight we were collecting our ideas what kind of materials and resources we can use for listening and speaking in ESL class. We all threw out any possible teaching activities or medium coming up with our minds. It’s also interesting to see the results turned out to be. We got a total of 38 different possibilities. I knew each solution has to adjust by taking into account of students’ needs. Additionally, they are also a good resource for my APP. I actually picked up a couple of ideas and expanded them on my APP. Many thanks to this class. I have a big movement on my chapter 3.

Week 8: Speaking

In MCM book, it has focused on children’s listening and speaking skills of English learning. It says that children are learning by planning so that visual and hands on activities are important and they should be provided to these younger learners. Besides, teachers should engage these students who have more kinesthetic learning style to learn through body movement. In addition, activities such as songs, poems, TPR, and TPR storytelling can expose them to oral language practice. I also learnt from the book that ESL teachers will bring their knowledge of English, of course, teaching techniques, and their intuition about children to the classroom. I know I should promote these three dimensions of teaching, and especially the last one. In HDB book, it also recommends how to treat local errors and global errors. Correction is unnecessary in local errors while correction is needed to global errors since the message is unintelligible. In the both readings, they all refer that top-down approach now most displaces the bottom up activities in pronunciation teaching.

Week 7’s class (2/23)

I like the idea of using these figure puppets and these visual objects to teach kids. I know that they’re very helpful tools to help and catch children’s attention in class. I remembered once I taught Chinese fruits lesson to kids with these fruit toys borrowed from our library. I jumbled them around on the ground, and asked students to pick up these fruits I called out every time. It seemed they had fun with it. I learned that children enjoy playing with language and they learn through playing.

Week 7: Listening & Speaking Skill

The week’s reading is mainly focused on oral language development in the ESL classroom. It gives an overview of the theories of oral skill, describes how listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills are intertwined in our daily lives, and offers a number of speaking activities that language teachers can implement in the classroom to promote students’ oral skill. These activities or exercises are role plays, discussion, speeches, songs, drama, poetry, and so on. Besides, P&B textbook presents how oral language is developed in each content area such as Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies. Continuingly, P&B also introduces a couple of tools to assess student’s oral performance: checklists, anecdotal records, and SOLOM. I like the rubric shown on page 144, which includes five measures to assess students’ oral proficiency, because I think it provides a general index of oral language proficiency.

Week 6’s class (2/16)

I enjoy tonight’s class very much. Tea and Stephanie were tonight’s presenters, and we had much fun during their presentation even though I didn’t quite know the “Sam Says” game...=D I also like the guest speaker part. Solen, our guest speaker, was sharing his own English teaching experience of listening and speaking with us. It definitely helps me my understanding of how ESL classroom (speaking and listening) looks like, and I personally think it was the highlight of our class tonight. I also like the idea of pairing up ESL students and Americans. With this activity, ESL students can learn more English from their partners and gain more American cultural experience. I don’t know if those volunteers participating this project are from Education Department, but on the other side, they will definitely earn some experience of diverse culture by working with their tutee.

It was kind of sad to watch the Malaysian short film toward the end. My tears were welling up my eyes. It just reminds people like me that our parents are getting old and they will leave us one day.

Week 6: Listening Skill

With this week’s reading, it gives me a basic sense of what objectives ESL learners should achieve in terms of their different stages of skill in listening classes. Besides, it also helps me the understanding of what kind of materials and activities we, as language teachers, can provide in classroom properly. I know there is no clear cutting line among beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels and there are some transitions in between but this reading provides me how a language learning/teaching process looks like. We know that language skills are not like something you can accomplish in two hours three times a week. Indeed, it is a long run to go and is built up step by step.

Among different levels of listening skill, different teaching approaches are referred in the textbook. In beginning level, providing learners simplified codes and modified speech are needed. With intermediate level learners, hearing to authentic texts with reduced forms are necessary. The first two are simply learning to listen or listening to learn the language. On the stage of between high-intermediate and advanced levels, they learn about the context of other areas. They also need to learn jokes, slang, and culture references toward to the target language.

Week 5’s (2/9) class: Vocab Activities & Corpus

Tonight’s class was fun. I like Stephanie and Rachel‘s presentation. Before the class started, I knew Stephanie was excited to give her presentation, and she couldn’t wait it. How positive she is. During the presentation, I like the way she showed her warmth to the class. I’m sure her students must like her very much. In addition, the two vocabulary activities which were engaged during the class were quite interesting to me. The word bubble activity was using your prior knowledge about the words to see how you associate with it. Another activity (I forget the name) was to make a guess of the words’ meanings from its context even though you don’t know the words beforehand. Both vocab approaches definitely can be used in my future classroom.

After moving to Global Learning classroom, I found that these websites of corpus or concordances useful for my future learning or teaching of English. I think they are good resources to look up the uses of words and to explore the words’ collocations. I would like to keep these website links on my blog, and they are:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple
http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html
http://www.someya-net.com/concordancer/index.html

Week 5: Form-Focused Instruction

The form-focused instruction is regarding language grammar and vocabulary. The understanding of grammar can help us construct a sentence while vocabulary is the basic item to all of the four skills. Teaching grammar or not teaching grammar is a hot topic in language classes. According to Brown, there are six general guidelines as reference for judging the need of grammar lessons in the classroom. Much grammar focus will be on adults, intermediate to advanced levels, highly education background, writing and speaking skill, formal context, and toward a professional goal. In addition, Brown also indicates five approaches for vocabulary instruction to CLT, and they are devoting some class time to words learning, helping students learn vocabulary within context, promoting the use of a English-English dictionary, encouraging students to develop strategies for determining the meaning of words, and engaging in impromptu learning.

Week 5: Vocabulary Learning

Explicit learning of vocabulary is regarded as a minimum threshold, which is to engage student to learn a certain amount of words, for example: 2000 highly frequent words. And then after that, it will be appropriate for students to read numerous authentic texts or expose them to meet a word in different contexts to expand what is known. This is how implicit learning of vocabulary takes place. While reading this chapter, it just recalled me of something we read last week: Matthew effect, which mean the rich gets richer, and the poor gets poorer. The more you read, the more your language skills improve.

As an English learner, I personally think the most difficulty of vocabulary learning process is the collocations and idioms as referred on the textbook page 292 and 294. The examples of collocations are exactly like the text shows: rancid butter and sour milk. I don’t know why people use “rancid” butter and use “sour” milk, not saying “sour” butter and “rancid” milk. In my e-dictionary, both “rancid” and “sour” refer to the same thing “having a bad smell.” I'm sure there are millions of cases like this. The example for idiom would be “up to the ears/elbows/eyes”. At the first time when I read it, I knew each single word, but I couldn’t understand what they meant when they all put together. I know that a wide reading will help my vocabulary knowledge and improve the word co-occurrence.

Week 4's (2/2/09) class

I enjoyed tonight’s class. First of all, Thea and Rachel were the presenter for tonight class. By asking quesitons, it made us reflect our own cultural experience or encounter of language learning or teaching. One of questions was talking about the Japanese and Chinese writing styles. What I wanted to make up here is that direct addressing is one of the Chinese writing styles, and it is not the only one. Some other writing styles of Chinese do exist. For example, there is another one similar to American academic writing style. Later on, we sit in a circle discussing the cultural topics such as foods, gender, social status, and so on. For me, this is the highlight of tonight. I learnt a lot of cultural customs from the class such as double-dipping thing. That was very interesting to me because I wasn’t aware of this culture since I’ve been here for one and a half years. Culture differences sometimes make life difficult, but they definitely can rich your life experience.

Next day (2/3), I did a little research with my American friends, including my host family, on the double dip matter. It seems that they all agree with that. Some said that they would never dip a chip, take a bite, and then dip again. That is just like putting your mouth in the dip, and others wouldn’t never use that dip again.

Week 4: MCM Language & Culture

People say that either language is part of culture, or culture is part of language. I’m not attempting to discuss the issue of which came first, like eggs and chickens. Instead, culture and language are closely intertwined with each other. They bear a strong relationship to each other. They are just like the two sides of the same coin; one cannot split the coin in two.

With cultural considerations, teachers can take a guess why their students behavior in that way. Teachers can identify students’ own needs in culture learning. Cultural activities and objectives should be carefully organized and incorporated into lesson plans to enrich and inform the teaching content. While students learn a second language, some cultural beliefs or philosophy are actually conveyed in the text language. Through the study of a second language, students gain a knowledge and understanding of the cultures that use in that language.

Week 4: HDB CH 17 - Integrating the "Four Skills"

Chapter 17 is focused on the importance of integrating language skills. In the text, Brown refers a number of possible approaches of four-skill integration and how they contribute or relate to language learning and teaching. These approaches are content-based instruction, task-based instruction, theme-based instruction, language experience approach, and the Episode Hypothesis. While content-based instruction is centralized on the subject-matter content, task-based instruction is focused on the task itself in a language. Theme-based instruction, differing from content-based instruction, is used to balance the multiple interests of students and a focus on content. In addition, experience learning is to give students concrete experiences to involve them in language learning intrinsically. In the Episode Hypothesis, students will learn a language easily if they are given connected sentences which have a logical structure and a storyline.

Week 3's (1/26/09) class

Today we had a team brainstorm for about 15-20 minutes for designing the topic what we’re interested to discover from ESL classes. I know this exercise was getting to bring up our ideas on our final work. In our team, we’re more focused on how technology affects the ESL writing classes. I like this kind of brainstorm activity very much because I feel this is one of the good approaches to explore other people’s thoughts and discover how people think differently than mine. Some ideas are just so creative, which I have never though about. This is definitely the one which we can employ to our teaching exercise in the future.

When we were at GLL classroom discussing our final paper, it seemed that I was the one lost. I don't quite get how this final works. I’m in the four-member group, but I don’t know if four of us are supposed to observe the same classes. If not, how we could arrive the conclusion of our final paper. It will be different content setting and different goals regarding our topics with the same core theme: using technology in ESL classrooms. I hope I can figure it out by the time comes.

Week 3: My reflections on Chapter 25 (HDB)

After finishing my medical treatments last year in Taiwan, I started to look for a part-time teaching job. I wanted to apply what I have learnt from school as well as build up my resume at the same time. Fortunately, I got an English substitute teacher positions in elementary school and cram schools for few days. At the beginning class, I had a high self-expectation toward to my teaching, and often times expected me myself to be a master teacher. I tried to do best as I could in the class. But the truth is that I’m just a novice teacher, and how I could become a master teacher overnight. Over expectation made me stress out. When I read the Chapter 25 on HDB book, I has a strongly feeling that this is just writing to such a person like me. This is what I really should learn. Learning has no the end, and we should never stop learning because there is something you can always improve your life, not only on teaching.

Week 3: Keep ourselves updated (MCM)

There are a great number of ideas available for language teachers to continune their professional development, and they are: engaging in several professional conferences related, subscribing and reading related journals or magazine, attending workshops or seminars or especial programs, exchanging teaching experience with other colleagues, and so on. It is also good to know that many resources about the TESL professional institutes and websites addressed in textbook from p. 537 - p. 548.