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.