This week’s class started with Dr. Lybeck’s presentation about using Content-Based Instruction (CBI) in teaching Writing to non-native speakers. I was greatly inspired by the idea, especially when the content being implemented was Second Language Acquisition – a topic which is close to every language teacher’s heart. Also, since none of my language skill classes were instructed in this method throughout my English learning experience, it was hard for me at first to imagine how a CBI language class was like. And the presentation with detailed descriptions of how the teacher goes about teaching the students helped clear the mist of the unfeasibility of CBI in an EFL setting that had been with me since I was introduced to this method of instruction. This change of mind drives it home to me how as a teacher I can teach differently from the way I was taught, as long as the method benefits my students. Besides, as Dr. Lybeck stated, she wasn’t sure if the improvements the students made were due to the instruction or if there were any other contributive factors, still, I believe the instruction has an important part to play. One more thing this CBI writing course that I find really stimulating is that at the end of the course, students walk out of the classroom equipped with not only the skills needed to prosper in their academic writing life, but also a considerable amount of knowledge about second language acquisition that is surely beneficial to their language development in the long run.
Bekir, Kizuna and Veronika’s presentation about learning styles and strategies which followed was really concise and informative. One issue which was brought up by JoAnn during Bekir’s presentation about the use of group work and which is quite familiar to me was the fact that during group work, students may turn to their native language without teacher’s notice. Even though this is a quite natural thing to do when students at a modest language proficiency level have difficulty expressing themselves in the target language, it takes away one of the main purposes of group work implementation, which is to foster the use of English within smaller communities and to maximize students’ talking time. In my experience, many of my teachers used “financial punishment” to deal with this problem. That is to say, the teacher goes around to observe the students while they are working in groups, and apart from taking notes of mistakes and answering questions, he/she also listens and notices students who use their first language more than 2 times in the discussion and writes their names down. At the end of the class, the teacher reads the name list out loud and students whose names are on the list must give a particular amount of money to the teacher. In my case the amount was not too big but it was large enough to “bother” students who resort to their first language too often. Though this solution did work for some of the speaking classes I was in, personally I don’t like it since it seems too straight-forward and the involvement of money may adversely affect student-teacher interaction. To me, a more effective solution teachers might use is to assign each student in each group a specific role, and among which there is one called “moderator” – whose job is to make sure all group members limit their use of the native language during group discussion. The moderators may be asked by the teacher at any time during the group activity to report on how many times their groups have turned to the native language to make sure they are doing their job properly.
The last activity of peer-reviewing on the last two genres was useful as always. Also, I was glad that Dr.Smidt gave some explanations and examples of the posters that we are to make during the last week of class. This gave me a clearer picture of what to be included in the poster presentation.
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