These are personal reflections on topics in teaching english. They include my personal opinions, experiences, and some of my activity ideas that I have for teaching english. The language and format of these journals is not meant for academic purposes, but instead for an informal personal reflection of my own ideas and feelings. It also includes one reflection of a writing activity I presented to the class with Will Cato, my partner in teaching-crime. At the bottom is a word document attachment with all the same entries for download purposes.
Topic Reflections – Aaron A Rafter
Introduction to Language Teaching
Lewis and Hill’s section on the principles made me think of some of the guys I work with. Some of the questions brought up in the chapter about pragmatics and the way we say things vs. the words we are saying are very important to second language learners. Two guys that work for me are from Vietnam, and one recently was in bit of trouble because one of our managers had reason to believe he was stealing from our store. The employee had purchased a television and before he left the store he swapped the TV for a different model and walked out with a box of similar variety. The good thing was that the manager was wrong, but the bigger problem was how he approached the situation. The Vietnamese employee was engaged in conversation about the situation and was explained that took a television out of the store that didn’t match his receipt (he had made a purchase). Instead of saying to the employee “You might have taken the wrong TV” he was told “Theft and falsification of receipts is a violation of company policy and offense that can get you terminated.” Now I understand this statement, but it was a bit wordy for his level of English. His only takeaway, as he told me afterward, was the word “terminated” which was a word often used around our store (unfortunately). He had jumped so far ahead that he thought his employment was already over and he didn’t understand why when all he knew was it had something to do with the television he had purchased. This goes along with the point of “natural conversation is too difficult for elementary students.
Snow talks about the efforts a student actually puts into learning a second language. I can say that learning my second language was all on paper, and my time outside of classes was limited being fulltime in retail management and taking 15-18 hours during the semesters I was in my L2 classes. As a college student, I’ve learned how to study (cram). So I averaged out among the four classes with a 3.5, a respectable grade, but a grade is all I really feel like I’ve achieved. I can read and write at a decent level, but listening and speaking skills are terrible. It makes me feel like I did not achieve the teachers objective in the class, just my own.
Course Planning
Course planning is easily my favorite topic around being a teacher. Marcus Buckingham is a speaker and teacher on how to be a leader in many different fields. Through his seminars, lectures and books he has taught many people across the U.S. and U.K. on how to be successful and lead. He wrote one book called “Now Discover Your Strengths” that discusses individual talents that people have inside them, since we all think differently. I took his survey and found my top five talents: Strategic, Analytical, Learner, Developer, and Adaptability. Having strategic come up as my strongest talent, Buckingham would describe me as a planner, thinking out obstacles I will encounter to alter my plan. So I write business plans for my store, and I predict the problems we could run into before they happen, which I could take that skill into the classroom when writing out my course plan. Also, I am Adaptable, which Buckingham describes as able to change when a problem occurs or an obstacle I didn’t predict happens. So, on days I am less prepared then others, or should a plan fail in the classroom, then I can adapt to make it work or change it on the spot. I’ve always thought about how I would grade a class and write a syllabus. I’ve always critiqued the syllabi instructors have given out over the years and how I would do it different. Sometimes I’m more accepting and optimistic about a class than others. I think a large part of the syllabi I like to examine is the goals and objectives vs. how easy it will be to acquire the goals. Of course, it is natural for us to find the easiest way to achieve our goals. The key thing to remember is that the goal is not to get a good grade, but to actually learn something. If I can achieve this in a classroom, that is getting students to learn easier, then I feel like the students would have less stress and still be successful. It’s a similar goal I have at work. I try to make my guys job as easy as possible without interrupting our goals as a store.
Lesson Planning
I will struggle with following Lewis and Hill’s advice on reading the entire course book initially. I think I would read ahead at all times, I just know myself and I can’t focus on one book for a short period of time. I’ve always struggled in classes that require more than two or three books a semester, especially if they are read one at a time. When a book is broken up (like our class), I can skip around and read a little of each book at a time. Sometimes I don’t even make it to the end of a chapter, no matter how interesting the book is. My wife has tried countless times to get me read novels, and regardless of the theme, I can’t get through them as quickly as she can. I set it down sometimes for days before I pick it up again where she will kill 300 pages in just a couple of hours. I think the individual lesson planning I will be effective at and executing the plan I won’t have a problem with. I don’t mind being in front of a group and correct and teaching. I feel like lesson planning will be my biggest struggle initially but something I can pick up on after a bit more experience.
Classroom Management
I like pair and group work. With second language learners I haven’t seen discussion get off topic and out of control. After all, we are learning to teach adults. I would prefer that in group work the students speak the target language only. I like the idea of total emersion in a language; it’s something that I feel like I’m missing from my second language. I know that when I worked in pairs and was forced to use my L2 it was tough but it helped me build speaking confidence. I feel like students who are at more of a beginning stage in their L2 need to get over any confidence problems to become competent in a second language. Listening to each other in a second language is probably more entertaining than listening to a teacher stand up front and lecture for intro level students, and perhaps lecture type courses should be later in their learning experience since students will have to deal with that when they enter a college classroom. Exposure to all forms of media is a great idea for managing a class and helps with the lesson planning phase. Music, video, and pictures are aids that should be utilized especially if a computer and projector are provided. I feel like visuals keep a class attentive and give them something new to look at other than just a teacher’s face. Also, practicing listening without reading lips is a good task, which is why music would be a good tool to use when teaching a second language. All these media can be taken and used for speaking, listening, reading and writing. So many methods can stem from utilizing the tools in a classroom (request one with these tools!).
Assessment
I have heard so many students (and teachers) act wishy-washy about correction in the classroom. “You should correct students so they don’t make mistakes” or “You should not correct students because you might hurt their feelings” are general comments that have been thrown out in classrooms I’ve been in. I think correction is good, but how a teacher corrects is even more important. Being honest with students from day one is a good start; tell them that they should expect to be corrected and that their peers should be expected to correct them. It should be a positive experience when correcting a student. I think correction and participation added to the grade at the end of the course helps with the overall goals and objectives of the course. If the focus is on written tests, my opinion is that students will focus on reading and writing and not learning the entire language. I reflect back to my L2 and much of my assessment was on paper. As a result, I’m pretty good with the language when it comes to reading and writing, but not listening and speaking. I know that if students were encouraged more to speak up and participate, they would have more opportunities to make mistakes and be corrected and they would be more confident speakers which (obviously) an important part of language. I think this all relates to the backwash effect Snow talks about in the book. “[We should] test the skills [we] want students to develop…” which is precisely what I missed out on in my L2. I was tested on speaking once in a classroom in two full years.
Teaching Listening
Listening is tough for second language acquisition. I have some friends learning Japanese and Chinese and I know that they are struggling with the pace and tones and all sorts of pragmatics. I know it’s not much easier for English learners with stress patterns, all three hundred of our vowel sounds, and the theta sound. In class we talked about fire, far, fur, fear, and fair, and sometimes I have a hard time understanding Americans when they say some of these words. I can just imagine a SLL trying to comprehend someone saying “Start a fair” or “That cat has a nice fire coat.” I would think that teaching stress patterns would be easy, but I speak English so naturally that I forget that stress even exists, which can make it difficult to pick out the stress on a word quickly for a student. I have to think about it often.
When teaching listening, I would use a bunch of different media. I used to like watching films in my second language. It was always challenging if a teaching showed a film clip without subtitles and then it was a light shining down when the subtitles were turned on a second or third time through. I even helped to have subtitles in the target language so it helped with matching spoken words to the text. It crosses listening with reading. I’ve done dictation before and it’s a boring tasks, but I think effective for a method of evaluating listening skills.
Teaching Speaking
Speaking is easily the most challenging for my second language. I have had little interaction and as a result, I have trouble constructing sentences quickly and sometimes I can’t complete a sentence without long pauses and deep thinking. In my classes, I dreaded the moment the teacher was going to call on me to speak. When the teacher was going around calling on people down the rows, I would look ahead and try to figure out what it was I was going to be saying and recite it in my head many times before it was my turn. It was very ineffective. It felt a bit like Krashen’s ideas with learning language; that is that the learner should only receive input and produce zero output. The learning process for speaking is two ways. So, as a result, I will be conducting more pair and group work when it comes to speaking activities. I also would like to create a presentation for my students (at least once within a semester) to get up in front of the class and speak. I think speaking in front of groups is a valuable skill for students to master before getting to a college level or even in the work place. The only teacher I had in my second language that I would go back and take classes from again assigned a presentation for the class and it really forced me to come out of my shell. The odd thing is I don’t really have a shell until it comes to speaking in my L2. I consider myself and outgoing and personable person. Speaking in my L2 in front of my peers was one of the more stressful moments of my college career. I only wish I could have done it more throughout the semester.
Teaching Reading
I spent much of my own time with a bottom up strategy in my L2. I did more intensive reading and translating each word to English trying to get the main idea. I always felt like if I didn’t do it that way I would miss out on some important detail that I might be tested over. None of my instructors ever talked about methods for reading in a second language. It’s like they were just there as native speakers who were perfect at correcting our mistakes and better at making us sound like a native or fluent speaker without an accent.
I feel like as much as speaking and listening sort of go hand in hand, reading pairs with writing very well. I write the same as I read. I translate each word before writing my passage. It’s often time consuming but it’s almost always correct. However, since many of these skills tie together, my method for reading and writing hinders my speaking as well. Since I spend so much time thinking about what I’m going to say/write, I’m not very good at just spitting out what’s on my mind. I feel really bad for the guy who is about to get hit by a bus and I can’t quickly spit out the words “Look out for that bus! Jump out of the road!”
I like the thought of having a guide of some sort to help you through reading a passage. It helps to sort out the important parts or the parts the instructor expects me to know. Also if I’m looking for key words or ideas and can skim faster through the lines or pages while I try to find that main idea behind the pages.
Teaching Writing
I love freewriting. Freewriting is an activity that helps me get moving even in English. I really like all the prewriting activities like making webbing, listing, and brainstorming. I even like the idea of students doing this in their first or second language. I think it is important to get ideas down first before writing for real.
While Will and I sat down trying to think of writing activities, we wanted something fun and interesting. I think students need to have something good to write about. I’ve written a thousand times over my life about my most embarrassing moment, what I did last summer, or the most interesting place I’ve been. While I think those might be good topics for beginners since they are familiar with these ideas already, we wanted something fresh for the students to write about; so we came up with the stimulating pictures activity. We wanted to entertain the class while they were watching us, and I think capturing the audience’s (the student’s) attention to learn and develop and idea is an important part of not only being a language teacher but just a teacher in general. In addition to this entry, this week I will include my reflection on the activity Will and I presented.
Micro-Teaching Reflection – Teaching Writing
Will and I started bouncing this idea off each other about a week before we presented. We knew we were going to do a free-writing activity, we just did not know what we were going to have the students write about. I’ve always thought that if I were going to teach a class, it would have to be entertaining. Every class I’ve ever skipped in college was almost always a result of boredom. It’s not that I think teachers are getting paid to entertain me; I do think it is their responsibility to keep the attention of the class. As a result, Will and I wanted to make sure we inspired the class. We figured that a stimulating photograph of some sort that got them grinning from ear to ear would really give our class something to write about. I felt like we accomplished that goal.
I’ve felt good in front of the class lately. I recently did a presentation in Sociolinguistics and in Second Language Acquisition and I received some really positive feedback from my peers and my instructors. The feedback I received from my peers on this micro-teaching was consistent. Three of the four had comments that said I had good control of the class and that Will and I were confident speakers.
The only thing I expected more of that we didn’t get was more participation in the reading segment of the activity. Will and I wanted to hear some funny, fabricated stories from our classmates. It worries me that if it were a real class I don’t know how to react when I get nothing. What if I ask the students to participate and they don’t? I almost called on random students before Brad shared his paragraph that he wrote. The quiet seconds after we asked people to share their stories was a quiet moment we didn’t predict.
I think using web-based material is a valuable tool that should be used whenever possible. It’s like we discussed in class, if you can’t explain it, You-Tube it or Google it. Our images came from Google Images. Pretty much anything a person would need to demonstrate or show a class is on the web. I’ve also noticed that when teachers use props like photos and movies instead of just a power point slide show, I’m much more likely to stay awake for the entire class period. I think I’m sometimes thought of as a slacker when it comes to school, but the reality is I just want to be motivated and captivated just a little bit. If that’s the student I am and if that’s the class structure I want, then I have to be the kind of teacher that can reach that one student and make them want to pay attention in my class.
Teaching Vocabulary
Vocabulary is something I’ve started holding closer a bit more since I’ve started studying Applied Linguistics. It really wasn’t until the Practicum Course I took over the summer that I valued learning vocabulary in L2. I think this is, again, as a result of poor execution on my teachers in my L2. Most of my vocabulary lessons were a list of words out of a text book and I had to look them up in the glossary or an online dictionary/translator and that was it. I really like the use of vocabulary and pronunciation. After all, it is important not only to be able to read the word and know what it is, but also what it sounds like and how to pronounce it. I’ve liked the syllable/stress pattern exercise. I didn’t really think about how important stress was as an English speaker. It’s simple details like that I take for granted. It makes me think if Chinese speakers treat think of (or don’t think of) the tones and their language and how much of an impact that part of the pronunciation is to their language. Also, I like descriptive definitions. I feel like if students can describe a word descriptively instead of prescriptively it’s more valuable. I think it’s important to teach students to use resources when learning vocabulary. Items like online dictionaries and language translators are useful tools. I also think that when I’m teaching, I will encourage or even require students to use a thesaurus to find other words with a similar meaning to supplement their vocabulary sheets.
Teaching Grammar
English Grammar is Evil. Dr. Pickering talked about clauses and sentence structures in SLA recently and how English speakers are fortunate to have so many different structures. As a result of having so many structures, we can master our L2 structures quickly. But those languages that have much more simple structures tend to not branch out with different clauses. They avoid these at all costs.
I learned grammar doing countless exercises, and while the approach was rather boring, it worked well for me. Like all my teaching methods, my goal will still be to make it entertaining. I think if I use grammar sheets or grammar exercises, I’ll have to make them based on a silly topic. There really is no other way to me. I also think that using speaking and narrating as an activity would be good for some parts of grammar like past tense, present tense, and clauses. I was thinking of an activity with Will we didn’t record about having students prepare a presentation and they would have to include different parts of grammar in a narration, but it didn’t make sense for a micro-teaching activity. I don’t have all the details, but in my head it all works out. I like the idea because it gets students away from the paper and gets them up and moving around. Also, speaking the different grammatical forms helps them with pace of speech so they don’t pull an Aaron Rafter and pause to conjugate the verbs in past tense in their heads and then spit them out in spoken speech. Their grammar in speech would be more fluid since they would get more practice out of the activity and break up some of the jitters at the same time of speaking in front of people which they will likely have to do in the future.
Teaching Abroad (Guest Speakers)
I feel like I could sum up this weeks journal with one sentence: I don’t want to teach abroad. It’s not for everybody. But if I were doing this coursework five years ago I would have considered the idea, but if I had taught abroad I feel like my story might have ended up much like Jason’s. I speak German as my second language, and like him, I considered traveling to Germany for a few months so I wouldn’t lose the language. It never happened. And now, I’m losing what little I did work so hard on since I never use it.
The largest issue with teaching abroad now is that I’m tied down. I’m focused on building a resume for teaching her in the U.S. and probably local to Atlanta. It’s tough to get away now that I have a mortgage, a wife, and a little girl on the way. Our families are in the Atlanta area (which I could easily let go of) and my wife likes being close to them, especially since we are wrapping our arms around the idea that the grandparents could baby sit. I’m content with teaching English as a second language instead of as a foreign language. I will still find just as much joy with my student’s success here as I would if I were on their turf.