Like I said, I devoted a lot of time to finding helpful sources for the multi-genre research paper this weekend and I think that what we discover by completing this project will be very helpful to how we will teach in the near future. Already we have gotten a taste for how difficult it will be once we start teaching (i.e. Veronika's blog about their presentation). Even though we will be focusing on what we want our students to learn we will also have to take how our students learn into consideration. This includes everything from the psychology of our students to the time management of our classrooms. Since I don't really feel like discussing time management, I'm going to say a quick word about student psychology.
Usually when I think about psychology I think about how people behave, but rarely do I mull how our brains actually work. This weekend I found an interesting article titled: The Influence of Working Memory on Reading and Creative Writing Processes in a Second Language. In the article it explains that working memory is just a more precise term for short-term memory, but the thing that I found interesting was that it claimed that a person's short-term memory or attention span affects their learning of a language. Salim (the author) states, "Researchers contend that the different shares of processing and storage may be the source of individual differences in reading comprehension. A skilled reader is a more efficient processor, so s/he has more information storage capacity. That is, s/he has more attention left for information storage." What I took from this little excerpt and the beginning of his essay was the fact that IF we can increase our students attention span or their enthusiasm for learning then it might be possible to teach them English more effectively.
If I remember correctly I think that this subject was also touched on in one of our readings this weekend. So if I can find it then that will be my subject for the second portion of this week's blog.
3 comments:
Excellent point about focusing on both what we want our students to learn and taking how they learn into consideration.
Certainly an interesting interpretation about efficient learners and processing capacity. Another way of looking at it is the affective filter, where some situations cause students to be less 'efficient.' Also, the more proficient a learner is, the less conscious attention needs to be brought to bear on a particular activity, thus leaving more room for other processing needs. In other words, the learner is working towards automaticity.
First of all, I really want to know why you select title “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” for this blog. It is extremely long!!! I am also very interesting individual difference between learners like you. If we can minimize individual difference, we can teach English much easier, right?
I don't know if minimizing individual differences is the solution only because I'm not sure how you go about doing that, but it would probably make teaching easier (but is that the goal or is the goal to make learning easier?)... I selected the title for a few reasons. It's a fun word to say and it's based off of a song that we sang in grade school from the movie Marry Poppins. But I really decided to use it because I used this word with a native Japanese speaker in Australia who was learning English as her L2. I was teaching her new English words during a vacation and when I asked her to repeat this word she looked at me like I was crazy.
Post a Comment