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.