Teaching

Teaching is a sea of wonders. With every journey, you sail with new people, discover new lands, and overcome new challenges. Just like the sea, teaching is never predictable.

My first artifact is a teaching statement that was articulated in LT 548—Curriculum Design. It entails many of my goals with respect to applying social justice in the language classroom, disrupting totalitarianism in education, and dismantling passive modes of teaching (e.g., grammar translation, transmission model) to promote learners’ agency and centrality. In many educational contexts—specifically ones in the MENA region—outdated approaches to teaching and learning focus primarily on rote memorization, grammar translation, and test teaching. The widely spread assumption is that success lies in mastery. In this light, the teacher is regarded as God, and students are His servants. Questioning God’s words or commands is not a possibility; passivity prevails! In this light, educational systems perpetuate forms of hierarchy and oppression instead of opposing them. I was a student of such systems, and I grew to be a part of them. During the LTS MA program, I was determined to explore forms of educational reform that encompass education in general and pedagogical approaches in particular.

My LT 537—Second Language Teaching Practice artifact is a reflection on an English conversation class that I collaboratively designed and led with my colleagues Bibi Halima and Britany Stagnoli. The lesson plan focused on the method of particularity (Brown & Lee, 2015), taking into account contextual factors, students’ needs, and learning styles. Since the class aimed to engage students in meaningful conversations, the learners were encouraged to be critical thinkers of knowledge, applying language to perform a communicative act. Throughout the class designs, we applied meaningful Task-Based Language Teaching or Task- Supported Teaching (Ellis, 2003), which is regarded as a “strong vision” of the Communicative Language Teaching approach (CLT), supporting unrehearsed language performance inside and outside "the womb of the classroom" (Brown & Lee, 2015). Learners were asked to reflect on the meaning of “bucket list” and articulate their life goals and future aspirations. This approach focused on language acquisition through "use,” seeing value in engaging students in structured communicative tasks that are mapped to have them question, analyze, create, and automate their learning.

Furthermore, the facilitation of the activity interweaved principles of authenticity into the design. Lead teachers shared their authentic stories and pictures of items that were and are on their bucket lists. This has created a sense of inclusive community, portraying teachers as human beings, not as teaching figures. The individualistic attributions in the class—from both the teacher (s) and the student (s)—and the plurality of vision gave rise to an awareness of self and the collective. Upon reflection, this activity required a large structure of groups in the class, which is an area of improvement for future designs and implementation. This would allow the students to explore language as a communicative act at the discourse level, gaming with cohesion, coherence, and pragmatic abilities that take into consideration the social situation and contextual frames (Canale and Swain, 1980). Moreover, the procedures of this activity included modeling of items that were on the bucket list for lead teachers. A future extension of the modeling to include various tense structures (past, present, and future) would activate the students’ schemas of tense knowledge and application to express their thoughts.

My LT 539 artifact—Designing Language Learning Pronunciation is a reflection on a series of tutoring sessions with a student from ARB 303. The sessions were designed to focus on areas that negatively impacted the intelligibility of the student (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010). In the first tutoring session, diagnostic assessment was implemented so that the pronunciation of certain segmental and suprasegmental items would be prioritized. The diagnostic assessment worked as a needs analysis model to highlight phonological transfer from English to Arabic and a formative assessment for the student, communicating his needs and areas of further improvement. The following two tutoring sessions included teaching the segmental features of the Arabic /ħ/ vs. the English /h/ and the suprasegmental features of assimilation in the definite article’s /l/ sound. 

In teaching the segmental feature of the Arabic /ħ/, the learner was engaged in a flipped learning experience where the typical view of knowledge-provider as knowledge-seeker was deconstructed. Although the tutoring sessions focused on the communicative framework for teaching pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010), including stages of description and analysis, the learner provided explicit analysis for the production of the sound and audial reinforcement of meaningful minimal pairs in English and Arabic. To illustrate, the student studied the segmental feature /ħ/ and compared the simulation of its sound production to glass fogging and the /ahh/ sound after drinking soda. In this tutoring session, flipped learning did not only question hierarchy in the classroom but also redefine the parameters of learning and the role of students. This “emancipatory” approach shed light on the learner, redirecting attention away from the teacher as the controller and reversing the traditional course of things (Cunningham, 2017).

Teaching the suprasegmental feature of /l/ assimilation in Arabic was both a challenge and a reward for me and the learners. In the tutoring session, I followed scaffolding and sequencing procedures, implementing a three-stage task design that included observation, analysis, and extension. After the description and analysis phase, the learner observed and captured the assimilation of the /l/ sound from a video about Arab weddings, analyzed the neighboring sounds that led to the assimilation, and took part in a role play on arranged marriages. The student-centered learning environment allowed the learner to engage in co-constructing knowledge, performing higher-order thinking skills (i.e., apply, create, and analyze), and consolidating their new knowledge with the support of the teacher.