Week 7 Readings

"A method of teaching allowing the students to learn by discovering things by themselves and learning from their own experiences rather than by telling them things." (176)  This quote, I feel, explains how to activate intuitive heuristics.  Basically it is better to learn by your doing than by the doing of the teacher.  My fiance is a big computer nerd and when I need help with my computer, he won't help me.  He tells me I have to figure it out, he will sit with me and give me ideas on how to solve my problem but he never does it for me.  I think this has made my understanding of my computer much greater than if he were to come in and fix it and leave.  What would happen if the problem occurred again and he wasn't there?  I would be out of luck, that's for sure.  Kumaravaduvelu does a good job explaining how to activate intuitive heuristics.  He explains in the inductive approach to grammar, the teaching lies in helping the learner discover what the grammatical rules are.  In deductive teaching there is hardly any interaction between learners which Kuma states is necessary to create an environment promoting self discovery.  Like we have mentioned in class before communication between everyone involved in the learning process is essential to learning and better yet essential to learner discovery.  As a future teacher it is important for me to step back and reflect on my teaching to see if I am creating opportunities for my students to learn for themselves or if I am not creating opportunities but instead telling information.

Final Project Progress

I have been in an ESl classroom with K-5 students on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  I have been observing the interactions between the teacher and student/s, students and students, and students and content.  I hope to be discussing a lesson with my CT that I will teach to a group of 4 first grade boys on the topic of transportation.

Week 6 Readings

After reading the article by Christine Sleeter I had several different thoughts going through my head.  At first I was comparing my best friend and me.  We both want to be teachers but we have two very different views of teaching and diversity.  We are both white females, she wants to teach in a farm town with no diversity, I want to teach ESL, I embrace the idea of diversity and would love nothing more than to teach in a more diverse setting than I was raised in.  We both grew up in a predominately white school system; the only difference was my school did have ESL.  Did this little exposure to diversity while I was young, change my whole outlook on education?  I thought about this a lot after reading about the amount of diversity training most pre-service teachers have and their ideas of diversity in the classroom.  Then I started thinking about ISU and how it prepares our teachers for a more diverse classroom.  I looked at my diversity hours and noticed that I had completed all 50 of them but I don’t remember doing this.  I don’t remember going to a diverse setting and it made me wonder what ISU considers as a “diverse experience”.  Not only that but how can just 50 hours prepare pre-service teachers for a diverse school, it doesn’t and it can’t.  Like the article said after the short exposure to a diversity class many pre-service teachers didn’t have a lasting impression.  Their ideas of diversity were changed for a few months and then returned to the previous state.  As diversity increases pre-service education needs to increase diversity teaching as well.  I like the idea of field experience or even the immersion experience.  This idea has good bones and can only benefit both teachers and future students.  My last thought follows the quote, “the researchers mentioned here attribute students’ learning to the power of community-based, cross-cultural contexts in which they have to grapple with being in the minority, do not necessarily know how to act, and are temporarily unable to retreat to the comfort of a culturally familiar setting”.  It’s a long quote but I feel it puts the shoes of diversity on the white majorities feet.  We get to feel what its like to be the minority.  Again this can only help our understanding of diversity in the classroom.

Week 5 Readings

     This weeks readings gave me something to think about, especially minimizing perceptual mismatches.  In many classrooms there are perceptual mismatches between the teaching objectives and the learning outcomes.  Kumaravadivelu discusses ten potential mismatches that can occur daily.  It was really interesting to see all the mismatches and how often they could occur in a language classroom.  The first three mismatches, cognitive, communicative, and linguistics are important for future language teachers to consider and become conscious of.  If these three mismatches are not considered then there will be a lack of learning in the classroom and a great deal of frustration.  

     The author then explains there are three pedagogic insights about perceptual mismatches, they are unavoidable, identifiable, and manageable.  After reading his chapter I would agree with him.  Looking back at the 10 mismatches it is hard to believe some of them still occur even with the best efforts of both the teacher and student to minimize it, they will always be unavoidable.  I also agree they are identifiable.  In order to identify the mismatches it is best to discuss and understand the teachers and learners perspectives.  The last insight, mismatches are manageable, gave me the best source of comfort.  While reading the chapter I was so worried that I would be creating all these mismatches and my objectives and my students objectives wouldn't match and I would just have a mess of a classroom.  This quote," a mismatch can be converted into a learning opportunity in class" really made me feel better.  Yes mismatches are unavoidable but if I can at least identify the issue then I can create an opportunity for learning for me and for my students.

Week 4 Readings

I found this week’s readings for interesting.  Chapter 3 of the kuma book reinforced what I have been learning in the education program at ISU.  The best way to maximize learning opportunities is to build on the interactions between students and interactions between the students and the teachers.  Dick Allwright defines classroom instruction as "the interactive process whereby learning opportunities are created."  I feel this quote is absolutely true.  In a successful classroom there needs to be interaction between students and between the teacher and the students.  When interactions take place in the classroom it feeds both students and teachers with opportunities that may not have occurred otherwise.  It was interesting to see some teachers miss learning opportunities and then explain they just didn’t think about it.  As future teachers this is a macrostratgy that is one of the most important.  If we cannot build learning opportunites from our students interactions or create them for out students then we as teachers are not only allowing our students to fail on understanding but we are setting them up to fail in the real world by not showing them how learning opportunities are everywhere.

I also found the article on CLT and the way Chinese schools and learning are not compatible to be a good source of information.  In China there is a deep respect for education.  The teachers are seen as a mentor and sometimes a parent, good teachers are the ones who care, help, and pass on their experiences.  They also hold teachers in such a high position that they are supposed to posses all the knowledge and always have the right answers.  This is not true of the teachers in CLT, teachers are at the same level of students and can learn from students.  This is only one way the article discussed the incompatibility between Chinese culture and CLT.  This article really brought to my attention how important it is to pay attention to the culture and context you are teaching in, to find the most appropriate method or methods.  In China, CLT won’t work as well as other methods, however, some aspects of CLT will work.  This reinforces that teachers cannot pick a method and stick to that but use several different aspects of several different methods to promote the best student learning.  

Week 3 Readings

This weeks reading was full of information.  In chapter 1 of Beyond Methods, I was presented with different roles that teachers play.  Teachers can be passive technicians, reflective practitioners, and transformative intellectuals.  Each role includes characteristics of another role.  Teachers play many different roles through out the school day and even the school year.  Knowing these roles and how they connect and integrate into one another will help me plan my roles accordingly.  Chapter 2 of this book gave me a few things to think about.  The chapter discusses the dislike of methods, this is new to me.  Kumaravadivelu suggest a postmethod pedagogy with three parameters.  The parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility.  Again these parameters share characteristics of one another, they work together to create a relationship.  I think the roles that teachers play and the parameters of the postmethod pedagogy show what teaching a second language is really about.  You can't have just one or the other.  The roles and the parameters intermingle and build on each other and this is what happens in a language learning environment.  Language learning builds off several different aspects from methods, to parameters, to the roles that the teachers play in the classroom.

Language Approaches

I have had my fair share of language learning experiences.  When I was in elementary school I took Japanese lessons and throughout junior and senior high  I studied Spanish and German.  I continued with Spanish through my first few years of college.  In my Spanish classes at the college level my instructor used the communicative language teaching approach.  From the beginning of the semester he made it aware his goal was to get us to communicate as much as we could in the target language.   In class we would have several opportunities to discuss material, role play, and create dialogues.  During this engagement in the language the instructor would be available for help and advice and also take notes on errors.  When the class would come together again we would discuss some of the errors he noticed, no one was ever singled out. At the end of the semester we would have a 10-20 minute conversation with the instructor individually as an assessment of our language ability.  This gave us a purpose in the class and many people strived to communicate in a purposeful way instead of to get the grade.  I think this approach really improved my spanish because I had to learn the language in order to even attend class and communicate with my classmates.  I also experienced the direct approach.  My teacher would always have examples, pictures, props, for the new vocabulary we were learning.  When it was time to talk about grammar the class was presented with a  situation and we had to figure out the grammar rule.  We spoke a lot in the class and reading, writing, and listening were all based on what we were doing orally in the class.

I was more comfortable with the communicative language teaching approach.  I enjoyed talking with my classmates and my instructor and not having to worry about my errors.  I knew if I made errors my instructor would address them whole class and never single me out.  This made me more comfortable in all aspects of language learning. On the other hand, some aspects of the direct approach made me feel more in charge of my learning and I like.  I like figuring out the rules and taking pride in the knowledge I am gaining.

There is never one best way of doing anything.  This is especially true for language learning.  Each student is an individual with individual ways of learning.  To say one method is better than another is depriving students of a different way to learn which could end up benefiting them in the future.