Week 13 classtime reflection

Although the reading covers many things, this week's class primarily focused on the use of literature in the language classroom.

Starting with Adib's concise and well-run presentation on using a short story (or fairy tale) as a teaching material, the class proceeded with another short story-based activity, and i really enjoyed the task we were asked to do: thinking of as many teaching activities developed from the story as possible. Our group worked hard and came up with 20 activities, and it was also interesting to hear other groups share their ideas. Through this activity i came to fully understand how such a small literature work can generate lots of teaching ideas and a variety of thoughts, how important it is for language teachers to be creative and adaptable in creating learning tasks, and one last thing being the sharing spirit among teachers. Since different teachers may have different approaches toward the same teaching materials, sharing experience and the tasks that are designed can help enrich the teaching scenario and circulate bright teaching ideas.

Also, as the issue of blogging was raised, i think i am one of the students in the class who likes blogging and find it interesting and inspiring. Since i have been keeping a personal blog on Yahoo360! for more than 2 years, to me blogging is not a stranger, rather, it is a good way for me to express my opinions, feelings, ideas and more importantly, to share and to be shared. Unlike a personal diary in which the writer writes to herself/himself, blog entries, as long as they are not so personal, are for the writer to share his/her viewpoints and emotions, which very often come out more easilyby means of writing than speaking. The exact same things apply to this learning blog of mine. I find the blog another means for me to communicate with my teacher and my classmates besides class hours. And it seems i am able to express myself much more here than in class, since 4-hour meeting each week is defintely not enough for everyone's ideas to be listened and shared. As a future teacher, i will definitely use blogs as one of my teaching tools, especially when i teach writing.

The following discussion about the final portfolio was really helpful, and Bekir and I were able to figure out what we needed to include in the portfolio. I found Pair-work work really well here.