Week 12 Reading reflection - Teaching Writing

In this week's reading, there are a few points in Chapter 21 - HDB book that capture my attention when it comes to teaching and learning the skill of writing.

First, the book distinguishes two types of writing that has been used in academic context: real writing, in which the purpose is to express oneself, and display writing, where writing is a primary for the display of a student's knowledge. Personally i have never thought of writing in this way before, and that's probably one of the reasons why i am really delighted by this. It seems like in school the a large amount of writing falls under the second category, where students are "forced" to show teachers how well they grasp the knowledge in form of writing. And i wonder if that, in any case, may cause the lack of love for writing in some language learners, since they are not writing in their own will. Still, i think one of the things that language teachers can do here is to turn display writing into real writing, or in other words, create an authentic need for students to write about what they have learned. In my opinion, this can be done by a number of ways, one of which being to change the way a writing prompt is worded. For instance, if the prompt which asks students to write about how to make a birthday cake is categorized as display writing, creating a context for the prompt such as "The birthday of your friends' mom is approaching and she wants to make a birthday cake as a surprise to her mom. However, she doesn't know how to make a good strawberry birthday cake and writes to you for help. Write back and show your friend how to make a birthday cake." Here the issue of keeping a specific audience in mind while writing is also brought into play.

Second, the matter of timed writing is also worth mentioning. As stated in the book, for the purpose of evaluation, many in class activities require students to finish their writing in a certain amount of time and after handing the writing students rarely have the chance to get back to it and see what improvements they can made. Although timed writing is necessary in assessing students' writing skills, especially when they prepare for English tests such as TOEFL or IELTS, this does put them under a lot of pressure and make writing a painful rather than delighting experience. Also, this can also cause the bad habit of not planning or proofreading the writing, since often times students give an excuse that they run out of time to do these steps . Language teachers, therefore, need to be really sensitive when it comes to writing within time constraint, and makes sure that we give our students enough practice to familiarize themselves with speed writing when they need to.

Week 11 Class reflection - Emergent reading and writing

The class began with a small discussion started by JoAnn's question as to whether or not gender makes any difference in one's ability to read and write, since according to JoAnn's experience, her daughter learned these literacy skills much faster than her son. As we discussed in groups and then as the whole class, it seems that most people agreed that this has more to do with individual differences than gender. Also, in my opinion, the fact that one child can read or write faster and better than others rests heavily on the amount of time and practice he/she devotes to reading and writing. Another thing about early reading and writing that i feel greatly identified with and which worked well for me is that very often what one reads at the early stage of the literacy development process will stay longer than anything else read at a later age, and this can also nurture a love for reading and writing which may continue to be with a child for a good long time.

For the first activity, we watched a short clip about a teacher teaching reading to a group of young students and then jotted down the literacy development principles that we saw being demonstrated. The list that we were able to come up with after that includes guessing the content of the reading, explaining difficult words, reading aloud, taking school activities home, taking into consideration students' interests, and another interesting feature spotted by Stephanie is "finger following along". A couple of ideas were then brought up to explain why the teacher did that (and this is also usually done by teachers who work with young learners as well). In my opinion, this gesture might be used to keep young learners focused on what they're reading, in case a large number of reading lines may distract them. This analysis of reading principles very much reminds me of a reading software that i was exposed to while i tutored English language learners at Franklin Elementary school last month. The software is called Reading Naturally, and as i learn about the principles for developing learners' reading skill, it becomes clear to me that the software follows closely these principles. The reading texts in the software are categorized into different levels and based on their language level, each learner is assigned to work with a certain number of reading passages. A goal is set for each learner by the teacher and he/she has to reach that goal before being able to advance to a higher level. Each reading practice starts with the learner choosing a topic he/she is interested in. The computer will then pick a passage and the student first needs to guess what the passage is about based on the picture given. New words are then explained and the learner is asked to pronounce them along with the computer. Then comes the main part of the practice: the student reads the passage along with the computer several times before reading alone. Comprehension questions are then asked to check how well the student understands what he/she has just read. Personally i found this software a very good tool to help second/foreign language learners practice their reading skills, both reading aloud and silent reading. Students can also learn accurate pronunciation of words and good intonation as they read along with the computer.

The next and also last activity was a fun one, when in groups we went out looking for and chose among library resources some artifacts that can be used to teach reading and writing to young learners. Chris, Stephanie and I picked a book about farm animals and decided to use puppets as reading aids. Each student is assigned an animal role and is given a puppet representing the animal. As the teacher reads the story, the student whose role is mentioned would make a sound of the animal role he/she plays. We thought such direct involvement would make reading more fun and exciting to young learners. After working in our group, we got the chance to work together with Thea, Rachel and Brian and exchange the activities we had. I must say the books our partner group chose were all suitable for teaching young learners, and Thea was a really good narrator as she demonstrated the activity to us.

Reading for Week 11 - Literacy and Second Language Teaching and Learning

This week's reading focuses on literacy skills in early childhood and then shifts toward literacy development in second language teaching and learning.

The first part of Chapter 5 in P&B book reminds me very much of my own experience in learning how to read and write in my native language. I remember at the age of 5 i often held a newspaper upside down, made up things and read it to my father, having no idea why my mom was trying to resist herself from laughing. I also took all of my mother's notebooks (she is a teacher) and traced her handwriting after having been bored with drawing a whole lot of meaningless and disorganized lines. This perfectly matches what is described in the book about young learners' great desires to grasp and develop literacy skills. It also brings into attention that adults or teachers can take advantage of this feature to "plant" the love for reading writing in children.

Literacy development in second language learning, however, oftentimes does not seem to work in such a motivational way. In fact, apart from very young children who learn a foreign language roughly at the same time as they learn to read and write in their native language, many second language learners find it challenging to practice and master literacy skills in their target language. A wide range of literacy development activities mentioned in the book are therefore very helpful as language teachers work with students to help them develop their reading and writing abilities.

Week 8 Class: Creating Creative Speaking Activities

This week's class continues to focus on the skill of speaking, which seems to be a never-ending topic to talk about when it comes to second language teaching and learning.

Marya started her presentation by posing two questions of choice: accuracy and fluency; segmentals and suprasegmentals. Personally i think it is not easy for language teachers to separate these concepts when it comes to real teaching contexts, since the lean toward one or the other depends on what and whom we teach, and that the imbalance is only applicable at a certain point in the teaching, not throughout the curriculum. For instance, if we teach students a grammar point or how to pronounce a new word, it will be tremendously helpful if the focus is on accuracy, since we do not want our students to have an incorrect perception of that grammar point or word pronunciation right from the beginning. Meanwhile, in a speaking activity where the purpose is to get students to talk, fluency should come first and accuracy should be present only when the teacher corrects students' errors afterwards.

The next part of the class that took place in the GLL was about running a google search for speaking activities after a quick wholeclass brainstorm. Again the Internet is a great tool to look for teaching ideas, and we were able to find quite a few resources that can be used for teaching speaking. I myself found a website where music is multipurposefully used in TESL, such as as speaking prompts (have students listen to the song "And i love you" by The Beatles and use it as a prompt to describe their boyfriend/girlfriend or an "old flame"), or materials to practice intonation, etc. In my opinion, apart from achieving the language goal, songs or music, as culturally enriching artifacts, can also be a good way for students to know more about the L2 culture. Also, i liked the activity of each group going over to another group's findings and using what had been found to create a speaking activity. This was undoubtedly a very effective way to share resources among teachers, since the Internet resources are huge and one might not be able to find what others do. My group worked with some very interesting pictures and we created a story-telling activity based on the pictures.

Peer review of Part 1 of the Final Portfolio, the last activity of the class, was useful as always. The break-up of this assignment into two parts did help reduce the workload we will have to do at the end of the semester, which i really like.

After today's class, the biggest thing that lingers in my mind is how to create speaking activities that are fun, inspiring and engaging to students. In my opinion, this requires a lot on the part of teachers, such as of experience, creativity, good observation, the researching and learning spirit, motivation... The list may then go on...

Week 7 - Class reflection - "Let's talk about talk!"

This week's class started with Kizuna and Aaron's presentation about teaching the skill of speaking. I think they were very successful in leading the discussion and getting everyone in class to share our own experience in learning to speak in a foreign language. Apart from the issues that may pose difficulties for students mentioned by Kizuna that i greatly agree with, to me another challenging problem when speaking in English is the lack of vocabulary. Since the impromptu nature of speech does not give me enough time to think and choose the vocabulary, i often find myself running short of words to express my thoughts. Therefore, i really liked it when in the next part of their presentation, our presenters mentioned some speaking strategies that can be used to get students talk and facilitate their speech.

The next part of the class which took place in the GLL was very interesting and inspring to me. Since the computer did not work very well, we were divided into two different groups, one listening to the recording and evaluating the students' oral performance, and the other designing speaking activities using props and puppets. Personally, i found the SLOM criteria are too general to reflect the oral strengths and weaknesses of students. However, it can be a great guideline from which language teachers can build a more specific evaluation form depending on the proficiency level and the needs of their students. Next, i found it very exciting and intriguing when watching the other groups who were assigned to work with puppets present their activities. I love Bekir and Jodi's use of animal puppets to teach the modal verb CAN. I like "Chris and company"'s Minnesota-based activity. I was inspired by Kizuna and Brian's use of frog act as story-tellers, and found Chao, Marya and Stephanie's choice of props very interesting, especially the model of organs that Stephanie "wore", which i think can be very useful for teaching about body parts. This fun and practical activity greatly reinforced the usefulness of realia and props in making a scene for a speaking activity and arousing students' interest in the task, thus getting them to talk more freely and enthusiastically. Also, this activity brought to my attention the bountiful resources for language teaching and learning that are available in our library.