"Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays"

Probably the most helpful thing that we did in class last week was the peer review. It mainly got a couple groups in the class to look at each others work and critique it, but it also provided some valuable feedback for each group. I think that being able to see a couple different approaches to the same project was also helpful because it gave my group some fresh ideas on where to take our project next. The only thing that I was left wondering after this portion of the class was: why didn't we devote a little more time to this activity since it was so helpful? I ask this question just because my group was not able to go into the details of the project which we were reviewing. We only got a chance to skim it over a couple times and we felt rushed with the written response. I would say that the most valuable feedback was the verbal response because it gave everyone enough time to point out most of what was discussed as we were reviewing the other group's project.

A couple other highlights from last Monday were Chris and Stephanie's presentation and Dr. Smidt's teachable moments discussion. The presentation went well and it allowed everyone in the class to focus on at least one component of a lesson plan. I'm not sure if we came up with a coherent and teachable lesson, but each area of the lesson plan that was written on the chalkboard was fairly well done. I just want to mention the teachable moments discussion because it focuses on a teacher's ability to work on their feet and react to unforeseen situations. I think that this is a very valuable ability that a teacher should acquire with experience because it allows a failed lesson plan to succeed sometimes and it can also make the class much more enjoyable for the students as well as the teacher. I've seen how experienced teachers have utilized this concept in the past and it allows the class time to pass by evenly and naturally instead of in a choppy pre-conceived order (although if it is used incorrectly it can cause the class to get off track).

Shakespeare in ESL??

The section of the readings that I'd like to focus on is the "Guidelines for Language Classroom Instruction" in the MCM text. The reason why I want to focus on that is because I think that it provides a useful and practical outline of the preparation for and the execution of an ESL lesson. It starts with the lesson planning, then states a variety of tasks (motivation phase, input/control phase, focus/working phase, application phase, testing, and some other aspects to think about when preparing to teach). Of course all of these suggestions may not be used in a single class, but being aware of the many different kinds of activities helps to get me thinking about what I might want to use in my classroom. 

An example is the translation activity in the Focus/Working phase section on page 34 of MCM. For the Multi-Genre project my group is focusing on creative writing and one of the activities that we are using to promote this genre is the translation of parts of Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Now this may sound like a difficult activity for our ESL students but in The Journal of Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching there is a great article about how this activity can be used for ESL students of varying proficiencies (if anyone wants this article I can cite it for you). The gist of the article is that by translating or rewording a small text from Shakespeare's play (such as the "To be or not to be?" scene from "Hamlet", which was quoted by our friend Bill from Saigon) into modern English the students get an insight into the culture of English while gaining confidence in their language abilities as well. I have yet to use this activity (I may use it with my tutee), but it seems like an activity that could engage students with the English language if done properly.

Video Reflections

Ok, so I saw this great use of the word "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" on Saturday Night Live (an American comedy show) and I had to add the link here so that everyone can watch it (I can't upload the video here because NBC is over protective about their shows). The title is "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is Fatal":

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/mary-poppins/727503/

Speaking of videos though, I thought that Jodie's use of the "American Tongues" video was great. Not only did it enhance her presentation, but parts of it were pretty funny (i.e. the one woman who wouldn't have babies with a southern accent "crawling around inside" of her). It just goes to show how prejudice people in the US can be about other dialects, even when their own is strange to begin with. I had seen this video in my Introduction to Linguistics class that I took as an undergrad and I remember that we also watched a few videos about pidgin English too. I've always thought it would be fun to be able to teach some aspects of creole or certain English dialects like Irish-English, but I don't know what practical purpose that would serve to the general ESL/EFL student. I did manage to find an ESL website rather easily that gives quizzes on Creole-English though: 

http://iteslj.org/v/creole/

So it is obviously used by some ESL teachers.

The other thing that I'd like to mention about our last class was the fact that we got to work in our Multi-Genre groups for over 30 minutes. This helped immensely. My group (Adib, Stephanie, and I) got to throw around some ideas about how to make our next two genres better and being able to ask Esther some questions helped a lot also.

Ch. 8: Just Plain Interesting

Chapter eight of our HDB text was very short, but it was very enjoyable because it helped me to realize how many unique opportunities are out there for us as ESL/EFL teachers. I mean, coming into this field of study I already knew that there were a lot of opportunities worldwide for teaching English and that is the main reason why I decided to go to school for an extra couple years, but this chapter highlights many more unique situations that I wasn't really aware of. For example in the post-secondary/Adult Education section Brown talks about VESL (Vocational ESL), survival/social curricula, and at the beginning of the institutional context section he mentions courses offered in areas as specific as conversational English.

But the most practical information in the chapter (for me) was when Brown highlights the difference between ESL and EFL settings and what needs to be focused on in these different settings. It was practical for me because even though my degree will be in TESL I will most likely be teaching EFL in another country besides the US. That's not to say that I will never come back to teach in the US, but my primary reason for entering this program at MSU is to use my degree to travel and to gain teaching experience in other countries so the difference in approach will be critical when I begin to teach. Possibly the most interesting part of the chapter though was the section discussing English as an international language. This particular piece of information isn't anything new to me, but the second bullet point on page 136 about how English is used as "a tool for international communication" instead of a way to teach "U.S. or British cultural values" was interesting to think about because it stresses that there are many ways and situations that English is actually used in across the globe that don't require perfect native-like proficiency. Of course if someone was using English as their L2 for scientific purposes they may want to be more proficient than someone using it for tourism, but the idea that English is becoming an international or global language is just plain interesting to think about and I can't wait until I can actually view this phenomena in a realistic context outside of the US.

Another Week and Another Reflection

Dr. Smidt was right, "It's better late than never". Last week we had a visit from one of our local librarians and even though we had already finished the first draft of our annotated bibliographies I found the visit to be very helpful. It was helpful not only because we will have to do research for other classes, but I think that by knowing more about the details of the MSU database we might find an article for our Multi-Genre project that we had overlooked before. I've been visited by these librarians before in other classes, but since this was more specific to our current needs it helped to make me aware of information that I hadn't been privy (I think that's the first time I've ever used that word) to before.

A couple of other things that we did last week was Rachel's presentation and working on our classmate's example lesson plans. The presentation was done pretty well because I think it got most of the class to think about the readings and it was also fun, but the danger of having the men compete against the women is that sometimes the competition can make things get a little out of hand. I thought that working on another group's lesson plan was interesting because it helped to show our group a different way of attacking a lesson plan and it allowed us to work with new ideas which was helpful.

Oh, How We All Love Grammar.

In the readings for this week one of the things that stood out to me was the explanation of grammar to our ESL students. In our HDB text, Brown stressed that as teachers we should keep the focus off of grammar and we should focus on more communicative practices instead (with a few exceptions of course). From my experiences in my own L2 I've noticed that most of my teachers have followed this advice. Those classes were aimed at the beginning levels of German (Novice low to Novice high from Ch.7) and that maybe the most important reason why my L2 teachers never taught a lot of grammar. But when they did use it, it was always used to show us the important differences between English and German sentence structures. Of course there was always the one student in each of my classes who couldn't get enough of this, for what reason I could never comprehend, but even this minimalistic approach to grammar got slightly confusing to many of the students when it was taken further than just sentence structures. Proof, I guess, of the relative unimportance of too much grammatical explanation.

One difference though between these classes in my L2 and the ones that I will most likely be teaching is that in my classes we were learning from non-native speakers (except for one class in about six years) and so most of the instruction was in English instead of German. This allowed for more explanation of grammar, but I honestly don't think it contributed much more to my learning experience. It actually may have detracted from it. Since the lessons were mostly in English, it made it hard to fully grasp the new language and its grammar. I know that in my High School the most proficient L2 speakers were in the Spanish classes and coincidentally the teacher was a native speaker and (much more importantly) most of the classes were taught in Spanish with minimal grammar, which was not translated into English for easier digestion. Even in all my years of English study there was only one year (8th grade, age 13) when we discussed English grammar extensively and it wasn't even the main focus of that year, vocabulary was. It's not that grammar isn't important, it's just that I think English (and other language) grammatical structures should be internalized by the student rather than memorized. Once they become proficient at the language (as Brown says) then the students can benefit more from grammatical instruction because they already intuitively know what is and isn't correct. Then conscious awareness of grammar is a more useful and realistic goal.

Dr. Smidt or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Theory and Methods

Stanley Kubrick anyone? Love him or hate him, he changed cinema. And does using this movie title link our Theory and Methods class to the Atom Bomb?... Anyways... To the subject!

Which is my reflection for class on last Monday. Throughout the class I was trying to see how Dr. Smidt's activities were enlightening the class as compared to my activity (and a couple activities I wanted to do but didn't have time for) on the same chapters. One thing that I noticed was how she engaged the class by taking advantage of the ways we learn (Visual, Kinesthetic, & Auditory). I should give this subject a rest, right? Wrong, I just want to use the last class as a good example of what I was talking about previously. Particularly in the activity where we wrote down our thoughts and stuck them to the chalkboard for peer assesment: I thought that this activity was well done since it allowed for group socialization and communication, but at the same time it allowed students to work independently AND it was visual, we were allowed to "work with the text" by writing down our own ideas, & we had a discussion about the 12 principles prior to the activity. Of course it wasn't a perfect activity: we could have been told that what we were writing down was going to be scrutinized (but not harshly) and we could have been given a little more time to come up with more creative thoughts. But for the most part this activity was pretty well rounded.

The other difference in presentation that I'll briefly mention is that there was no lecture about the material. Not even for 5 min. In a class where we're learning how to teach it makes sense that we are learning by doing and I think that helps a lot as long as the activities don't get too repetitive. Since the purposes are to reinforce the material, giving us teaching tools, and trying to enjoy it at the same time I think that activities like this have been engaging and teaching the class much more than a simple lecture might.

Instantiation of my Presentation

My main goal for the presentation that I gave last Monday was to bring the twelve new abstract principles that we read in the book into a more concrete light. In other words, I wanted the class to be able to see how each one of these principles could be used in our future classrooms. Unfortunately I don't think I accomplished this goal.

I tried to get everyone involved at the beginning by having a few people say where they will be teaching and I think that that was a good start. After all who doesn't like to talk about the new places they will be experiencing or their home country? One thing I could have done differently though, to make this short activity go even further, would've been to have a couple people explain how they perceive the problems that they may encounter in a new culture or the ones that they know they will have to deal with in their native culture. This might've gotten the class to think more about teaching in an actual classroom and then we could've discussed a couple principles (not all 12) that we see as critical in solving some of the challenges that we will be facing in the near future as teachers.

But I did not think of this until afterwards and the result of my presentation was that a good portion of our class either tuned out or were uninterested. I know that if I was listening to myself during this presentation that I would've been unengaged also, probably because I had already read the bland text before class. But my biggest, and maybe most simple, realization about the presentation was that I didn't accommodate the variety of learning styles that we have in our classroom (Visual, Kinesthetic, and auditory). I now realize that my discussion was mainly auditory and that (according to principle 5: Strategic Investment/the learner's methods of learning) this wasn't a good strategy to get the class engaged while reinforcing the previously read material. Instead I should have had some elements from the other two principles integrated into the presentation. After class I thought "well duh", but I think that it is simple and practical ideas like this that many of us overlook which may be the most helpful when we begin teaching in an actual ESL classroom.