Brown Ch 22, Kumar Ch 7, 8

Lauren Watters

October 22, 2012

Brown Ch 22

Kumar Ch 7, 8

            Brown says that about ten years ago the profession of teaching was giving mixed message about how grammar and vocabulary should be integrated into the classroom. Only some language teachers do not focus on form. Grammar includes organizational competence, semantics and pragmatics. Grammar is the rules that show how to structure sentences. As an English Education major, grammar is a big part of my schooling and my life. Context is important with grammar as well. Grammar is a process. When I was in high school, I learned grammar in sections. Once every year was the time frame and the same material was covered every year: adverbs, adjectives and subject/verb agreement. But in English language learning classrooms should we be teaching grammar? Would this just confuse them even more to have grammar lessons or a grammar unit? The variables for deciding how to teach grammar in the classroom are age, proficiency level, educational background, language skills, style and needs and goals. I think that grammar needs to be taught in a two week span within teaching writing to students. Proper sentence structure, using the right voice, writing to an intended audience and teaching correct grammatical rules should be taught in unison. I think handouts with pictures would be best to teach students so they can match the pictures with the words. For vocabulary, I personally have always been taught to use note cards to memorize definitions. However, this is not a good strategy for long-term memory. Time needs to be allowed for students to comprehend the material and learn it in context. Bilingual dictionaries are helpful for students to have. As a teacher we have to remember strategies to help students develop vocabulary use and their grammatical skills. Individual, group work and whole class discussion need to be integrated in the classroom so students have a variety of learning strategies. Should we be using form focused instruction in the classroom or just use what we as teachers feel is best?

            Creating language awareness in the classroom is important. Language is important to the life of every individual. It helps us to understand each other and express ourselves. “We use it, misuse it and abuse it.” I think that even cursing is a prime example of this. We use these unacceptable words to show how angry or upset we are with an issue but those words are not acceptable in society (job interviews, with elderly people, etc.) Language awareness can be fostered in a general sense and in a critical sense. The majority of individuals have to seek to “light fires of curiosity about the central human characteristic of language which will blaze throughout our pupils’ lives.” Teachers want to light a fire in each student so they are excited about learning and want to further their education. However, some student’s fires get blown out when they are corrected too many times as a language learner in their writing, speaking or reading. We want the fire to continue to burn even after they are done with schooling. The American and British movement stresses the integration of language experience in the curriculum in secondary schools. It is suggested that secondary school teachers are trained in nature and function of language, language and thought and language and culture. I think all teachers whether they are teaching second language learners or not should be educated about the function of language. Sometimes students think that since they are not in an English classroom they do not have to use correct capitalization, punctuation, or sentence structure. They think that teachers only care about the content and not how it is written down. Some of my high school teachers were like that and would say “This is a math class, not an English class.” Well, that just navigates students into the mindset that language structure and form doesn’t matter unless they are in an English classroom. I think this also makes things ten times harder for the English teacher because they have to re teach students the correct way to form sentences, etc. If we teach students with heuristics, by letting them discover things on their own, there is a possibility that they will learn better. After practice, learners should know how to use correct speech and writing rules. I hope that as an English teacher I will be able to teach my students grammar in a way that is not tedious and boring. I don’t think that always simplifying grammar and English lessons to English language learners is the correct way to go about things. I want to be able to meet their needs and let them feel like they are learning challenging material.

Blog #6- Kumar, Brown, Cary

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.