Lauren Watters
October 8, 2012
Brown 18, 19
Kumar 5, 6
Cary, S.
According to language learning, conversation is the best device to set the stage for acquisition. Using conversation while learning an L2 helps to engage in meaningful interaction: teacher to student, student to teacher and student to student. As a teacher, you should be promoting communication between students so they can become more fluent in their L2. While students are conversing, they can express their own experience of the learning process, but also talk about their life experiences in a different language. After taking just about seven years of Spanish, I am still embarrassed at my speaking and writing ability in my L2. When doing group work, it is easy to complete the task but then start speaking in English again. My professor for Business Spanish at Illinois State would walk around and discourage us from speaking any English, especially when we were talking about things that did not pertain to the class. It was hard for me to stop speaking English in the class because I didn’t know what I wanted to say in Spanish. My vocabulary was not wide enough. Of course in all of my Spanish courses, participation is a huge chunk of my final grade, but I felt like every time that I talked, I was being stared at and judged. I think this could be defined as my foreigner-talk, as Kumar discusses. I would deliver my words and sentences slowly, try to pronounce correctly, pause a lot when I couldn’t think of what I was going to say next, and substitute words. My professor, however, was a very understanding teacher because I had talked to her about my nerves while speaking, writing, etc. She used a lot of teacher talk with me so that I would not sound so idiotic when I was speaking in front of a majority of native speakers.
Input, interaction and output are important when learning an L2. Each individual has a zone of proximal development that is the distance between the actual level of language development and the level of potential development. But everyone does not have the same level of development, correct? I think that one person’s potential for their L2 is different from the next person. For example, some people in this class have much higher Spanish skills compared to me, but can I get on the same level as them? Will I ever become fluent? I personally highly doubt it unless I am fully immersed in the language all of the time. I would be forced to learn it. When I was taking Spanish classes, I did not like to actively participate so maybe if I tried a little bit harder, my L2 wouldn’t be the death of me. Because I feel embarrassed and not capable of speaking, reading and writing the language, I wanted nothing to do with it. I would put off homework, studying and anything else related to the Spanish classes I was enrolled in. I don’t want my students learning English as their L2 to feel the same way I do about Spanish. My question is how do I get them to feel the opposite way that I feel about my L2? Do I need to continue to use teacher talk? Maybe individual conferences would work with my students so I can ask them how they feel about learning their L2 and any questions/concerns they have. I want to promote autonomy within my students and I want them to achieve their goals inside the classroom. As an English major, I think every student should know how to critically think. Students should be interacting with themselves, the teacher and their educational surroundings. I like the Oxford Strategy system because it shows different strategies to use with students to maximize their learning. Microstrategies and mini lessons can help teachers introduce new topics to students without overwhelming them. Questionnaires are a good tool to use in order to get to know your students, but I don’t think that bombarding them with five different surveys is the best way to get to know the personalities in the classroom. It is a good idea to see what the students goals are, their lives outside of school and what kind of learning styles they prefer. That way you can modify your teachings if necessary.
According to Brown, teaching listening and teaching speaking can help students learn basic principles and formats for listening and speaking in the classroom. Are my students going to know how to listen to directions on paper, orally, etc.? Because my students will be in high school, I hope so. However, I need to be prepared at whatever curve balls are thrown at me. I feel like listening skills are taught in elementary school as a respect issue, but not all students follow the rules. The following characteristics need to be taken into consideration when teaching listening and speaking skills: clustering, redundancy, reduced forms, performance variables, colloquial language, rate of delivery, stress, rhythm, and intonation and interaction. It is important as a teacher to have listening goals for your students because you want to move them from beginning listeners to advanced. Doing many listening exercises will help them achieve this goal, such as listening to a sentence describing a picture then selecting the appropriate one. To make this activity a little more advanced, I would have students listen to the description then draw their own interpretation and explain why they drew what they did. Having conversations with students is one of the easiest ways to teach them how to speak but other strategies needed to be incorporated so students don’t become bored with the lesson. One student pretends to be a salesperson while looking at a catalog while the other student orders items. Because I will be teaching students how to speak “correct” English in class, I need to make sure that I avoid using fillers like “uhm” and “like” and “okay” while I am speaking. Overall for both reading and writing skills, the teacher needs to motivate the students and keep giving them positive feedback about their progress. Too much negative feedback leads learners into shutting off completely and will not attempt any more communication. Local errors do not need to be corrected but global errors need to be treated in a different way. The model for treatment of classroom speech errors would be a good model to keep nearby while teaching because it can be hard for teachers to resist always correcting students at times.
I agree with the article written by Cary in reference to celebrating all cultures of the students in the classroom. Students may feel more welcomed and not as shy about their background if students are allowed to talk about their culture and family life. I personally would like to do a cultural unit with my students where they can make food, give history, sing songs, show crafts and do a show and tell. I actually did something like this in a geography class and I enjoyed learning new facts about cultures around the world, some I didn’t even know existed. While I was involved in a teaching internship for a sixth grade Reading and Language Arts class, one student was Vietnamese and spoke little English. This was my first teaching experience so I was not sure exactly what to do. Should I have taught her a different way? Did she actually learn anything from me? I wish my high school teaching preparation classes would have helped me be more aware of the fact that students might not have English as their first language. I think students should be teaching some words/phrases to other students as well during these presentations. I love learning new things and the younger students are, the more adapt they are to learning new things and remembering them.
