Design

Throughout the LTS program, I have been granted many opportunities to design lesson plans for a number of diverse language teaching contexts, across all different language aspects. These opportunities have awarded me with a growing passion for integrated, student-centered design that can be adapted to individual learning goals and needs, as well as an understanding and a respect for the importance of courses, lessons, and activities that connect deliberately and thoughtfully to specific, achievable goals and learning objectives. These are all elements of teaching design that I am passionate about carrying into my future as an educator, and they are the elements that I am most proud to showcase in my work from my time in the LTS program. 

My first artifact is taken from the LT 548 Curriculum and Materials Design course, in which I developed a low-budget creative writing course for English second language learners in private or charter high schools. With minimal resources required, this course introduced students to a number of successful literary voices from diverse cultural backgrounds and explored the common strategies and devices of multiple writing formats, as well as how to utilize them in original ways. This curriculum was an exploration in central design – as defined in Graves’ (2000) Designing Language Courses: a Guide for Teachers – and personalized, project-based learning, providing students with the opportunity to decide the theme of an entire unit of the course, and spend almost the entirety of the class creating artifacts to populate a final portfolio. While a writing course in name, the numerous assigned readings for the class, as well as discussions, workshops, and foray into spoken vs read creative work, much of the assignments and coursework of this class was integrated, as opposed to being specific to a single language aspect.

While my curriculum design portfolio may have been a love letter to freedom in design, there are also many learning contexts where one has less control over your curriculum and materials. My second artifact, a lesson plan and its respective materials from the LT 439 Design for Learning Language Pronunciation class, was created to complement a preassigned reading textbook chapter. These “mini-lessons” for pronunciation once again demonstrated an integrated lesson design, utilizing reading, speaking, and listening language elements, where students were tasked with reading through various sections of the textbook, listening to the instructor accurately pronounce or orate the language features relevant to the lesson, and then producing these features themselves. Each mini-lesson had clearly defined objectives that were closely connected to the materials they were designed for, as was outlined before the activities and tasks of each mini-lesson. These lessons covered both segmental and suprasegmental elements of English pronunciation, and did so in a balance of description and analysis and controlled practice activities. The balance and progression of these activities was organized using Celce-Murcia et al.'s (2010) communicative framework, which advocated for a progression from description and analysis to listening discrimination, to controlled practice and feedback, to guided practice and feedback, to end with communicative practice and feedback. However, due to the fact that these were mini-lessons designed to integrate into a reading lesson, I specifically only included description and analysis and controlled practice, to bring attention and brief practice opportunities to these features, which could be further explored at a later time in the class as it became necessary. 

My third design artifact is the lesson plan and materials that I created collaboratively with Aissa Canteras, Yueyuan Jin, and Mary-Kate McBride as part of the LT 537 Second Language Teaching Practice class. This artifact includes the slides, lesson plan drafts, and activity materials for the week five lessons that we led, themed around holidays (and specifically Halloween). While it may be more closely considered to student interest than student needs, this entire course was very sensitive to the interests of the AEI students that were participating in it, and surveys were conducted bi-weekly on what students were enjoying, what they hoped to see improved, and what topics they wanted to see introduced in the future. We were able to take the data that had already been collected in prior weeks to benefit our own designs, and we were able to add to this growing pool of student responses to assist the next groups in the weeks after us. We balanced activities for various group sizes, from pairs to whole class, and offered students multiple activities that allowed them to get up and move around the room. All of this worked to keep students engaged with the content and motivated to participate, and there was hardly a silent moment in our classes. A great thing to see in a conversation elective!

My final artifact is one of the lesson plans (and its related materials) for the LT 536 Design for Language Learning Systems class. This lesson plan was designed for an English for Specific Purposes course that focused on the job application process, and the specific lesson plan was focused on job interviews. This lesson plan once again follows an integrated approach, requiring students to discuss materials and topics, listen to audio resources, read articles, and generate written answers for potential interview questions. This lesson plan was a balance of guided activities and independent practice that worked to scaffold students toward confident, independent application of interview skills, similarly once again to the Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) communicative framework, though this time not specifically at the level of pronunciation This lesson plan was also designed with the clear, specific course objective in mind that students would be able to utilize reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in English to find job openings, write a resume or CV, and attend job interviews. 

References

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., Goodwin, J., & Griner, B. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A coursebook and reference guide (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press.

Graves, K. (2000). Designing language courses: A guide for teachers. Heinle & Heinle.