Three years into my teaching career, I had an opportunity to be part of a newly launched bilingual program in Japan. It was in a kindergarten (which equates to a preschool in the US) with a student population of about 300. The students had 30-minute English lessons once a week, but the school director felt it was not enough to make an impact on students’ language learning. She decided to offer bilingual classes where both English and Japanese were to be used throughout the day. The plan was to have two lead teachers in the classroom who would take turns facilitating activities in class. The launch was successful with half of the student population signing up in its first year. It was an exciting time, but because of the unexpected albeit positive response, the school was not completely ready to run the program. Everything had to be created from scratch. I was an intern at the school during that time, and I clearly remember being tasked to create materials for the classes. I have a visceral memory of being handed boxes of new art supplies and being given the freedom to make whatever I wanted. The school did not have an English teaching team then, so they depended on me and my fellow intern to start preparing for the program. Without any plan nor direction, I went on a DIY spree and made alphabet cards, calendars, and posters. I did not completely think about what the classes would be like, and what the goals would be. All that mattered to me was that I created something eye-catching and fun for the students. After my internship, I returned as a full time English teacher. I got on board in its second year when there was already a curriculum in place, teachers roles were a lot clearer, and the teaching team knew what the students needed. It was a perfect time because I had room to be creative but still had some form of direction. I designed lesson plans and created more materials. I saw these come to life as I implemented and used them in my classes. As months passed, I was more invested in my job. While it seemed like the students were happy in class, I felt like there were still opportunities to improve further. Having very little background in language teaching, I could not pinpoint what I had to do. I questioned whether I was covering the right topics and focusing on skills that they needed. I learned through the LTS program that  there is a systematic process to lesson planning and curriculum design, and this includes establishing clear goals and objectives, and setting the time to understand the learners and all other contextual factors that influence students’ learning. It is not a straightforward process, but it is one that certainly leads us in the right direction. 

I initially planned on focusing my LTS coursework in finding ways to improve the English language curriculum of the Japanese kindergarten. But as I started raising my own children, I gained more interest in teaching Tagalog. Having experience working in preschools in the Philippines, I also knew that there was an opportunity to teach the language to Filipino children. With both this insight in mind and my experience in Japan, I decided to combine the two and created the course “Salita,” which is a Filipino immersion class for children ages four to five years old. My Course Design Project for the course Curriculum and Materials Development (LT548) shows how I used a systematic approach in creating my immersion program. The first three, and perhaps the most important, steps were conducting a situational analysis, writing a needs assessment plan, and specifying goals. Situational analysis is looking closely at the audience, which include the students as well as all other stakeholders. It also describes the setting such as physical conditions, resources, cultural and societal norms, and the institutional factors related to the course (Brown & Lee, 2015). Needs assessment is examining the students’ needs, which are classified into three types, namely necessities, lacks, and wants (Nation & Macalister, 2010). Questions like “where and how will the learners use the language?” and “what topics are interesting and relevant to the learners” are taken into consideration when analyzing needs. Finally, writing the goals and student learning outcomes (SLOs) includes identifying the target audience, expected learner behavior, conditions in which the task will be performed, and degree of performance, also known as the ABCD framework (Yerian, 2022). Going through these first three processes proved to be beneficial as it laid out the foundation and gave me direction in what I needed to teach and include in my curriculum. It was a big light bulb moment for me because it made me think about my time in Japan and realized how I failed to intently go through these processes. Of all the three, creating clear objectives was the most lacking. I was often told students simply needed exposure to the language, but it was not specific enough to help me plan my lessons accordingly. This led to me doing whatever came to mind, and though my students were having fun, they were not making any progress because we did not even know what we were aiming for. 

Throughout the course of the LTS Program, I made quite a number of lesson plans, all of which followed the same template. With the systematic approach in mind, my lesson plans always included a brief overview of the context as well as the overall course goals and objectives of the lesson. One lesson plan that I am particularly proud of is one I co-created with Yueyuan Jin in the Design for Language Systems (LT536) class. It is a lesson plan on telling time and it was designed for students ages 6-7 years old learning English as a foreign language in an after-school program in Japan. Considering the age and proficiency level of our learners, we knew that differentiating instruction was vital when designing our lesson plan. For us, this was important because we needed to increase the motivation level of our students, improve student engagement, and incorporate ways to easily manage behavior in the classroom. In class, we watched a video written by Ferlazzo (2018) titled “Differentiating Instruction: It’s Not as Hard as You Think,” which perfectly summarizes Tomlinson’s three ways we can differentiate our lessons: differentiating content, process, and the product. In our lesson plan, we focused on differentiating the process, which means providing a variety of ways in which students can process or make sense of the content. We incorporated a variety of materials and activities that involved auditory, visual, social, and kinesthetic learning such as fluency circles, flashcards, pair activities, and Total Physical Response (TPR). 

My 3-Session Lesson Plan for the course Design for Language Learning Systems (LT536) focus on the theme of the different parts of the body. I differentiate content by incorporating a variety of materials to access content like using songs, story books, flash cards, and realia. Visuals and auditory aids are highly effective tools because they offer a multisensory experience in the classroom (Brown & Lee, 2015). With the advancement of technology, accessing these materials has never been easier. Before, teachers were limited to books available in the library and would sometimes have to purchase books to use in class. This time, we can rely on the internet to access these books. When I was selecting my storybooks, I used Youtube to preview the books and decide whether they were suitable in my lessons. This allowed me to save on time having to physically go to the library and search for books that were related to my topic. Aside from this, having these books available via Youtube allowed me to present these stories in different ways. In my lesson plans, some of the stories were presented using the actual physical copies of the books while some were presented through video. According to Brown and Lee (2015), realia, or using actual tangible objects is also ideal. It gives a sense of authenticity wherein students are able to connect lessons with real life experiences, and it also stimulates “kinesthetic connections. In relation to this, my lesson plans were designed with the embodied learning approach in mind. Embodied learning is a teaching paradigm that promotes language production by incorporating body movements into students’ learning process (Macedonia & Knösche, 2011). Some of the embodied learning activities include TPR, air writing, and use of gestures. 

One of the challenges I encountered while teaching English in Japan was I always found it overwhelming having to choose which skills and competencies to focus on in my classes. I wondered whether I needed to devote more time to grammar, vocabulary building, or their reading or writing skills. To me, it was one skill or another, and it never occurred to me I can integrate several skills and competencies in one lesson. In my Mini Pronunciation Lesson Plans for the course Design for Language Learning (LT539), I learned to integrate several language components which include phonology, spelling and grammar. Despite having multiple competencies to work with, I found it easy to think of activities because my objectives were clear. Two of the mini lessons focused on segmentals, and the other two on suprasegmentals, so I simply had to align my activities with these concepts. When designing this lesson plan, I followed Celce-Murcia et.al’s (2010) Communicative Framework for Teaching English Pronunciation. This consists of five phases: Description & Analysis, Listening Discrimination, Controlled Practice, Guided Practice, and Communicative Practice. Ideally, pronunciation lessons would include all five phases but because these are mini-lessons, the activities only included two or three of the phases. As educators, having the ability to find pockets of opportunities to teach a variety of skills is important. In some cases, we do not have the luxury of time, so we have to be efficient in our teaching. Aside from being able to integrate skills in one lesson, another aspect I like about creating this lesson plan is that I was able to experience adapting and modifying activities from a textbook based on my objectives. Textbooks have a reputation of being too rigid because the content as well as the tasks are often inauthentic and do not represent how language is actually used in real life. It can also be difficult to find textbooks that align with course goals and student learning outcomes because language classrooms are highly context driven. But, because I knew what needed to be done, I was able to use a textbook as a resource and adapt the activities based on the concepts I had to teach.