Teaching

Throughout the time in the LTS program along with my internship at CASLS and tutor work at AEI, I have had many opportunities to implement what I have learned in the classes and transfer that knowledge into practice. Instead of imagining what my students might say in lesson plans, I was able to take in what they said and adapt my lesson according to the needs of the students while also maintaining my student learning objectives (SLO’s). (Brown, 1995) (Brown & Lee, 2015) My first official teaching experience was with CASLS when I started interning for Li-Hsien and was helping teach a class for exchange students from Japan and China. In this internship, there were 5 other student teachers and we each took turns teaching and co-teaching an individual class. I taught two 2-hour classes, one with another student teacher and one by myself. We were also asked to record ourselves so that Li-Hsien could see how we taught the class while she was away in Taiwan. During the class that I taught by myself, I created a lesson plan that focused on a language lesson for the first half of the class and included watching a video that described different pronunciation features in the English language, and for the second half of the class, I created a game of Jeopardy that the students would use a review to answer questions of topics that arose earlier in the class. It was at the time of creating this lesson plan where I realized how important it is to make learning fun and how game-based learning really increases the motivation and participation of the students. It is common to see tired faces from students at times, especially if the class is in their second or third language, but when there is a game involved, the energy increases and people start engaging with the material a lot more while answering more questions.

Later, I began working at AEI where I continued to guide students on their pronunciation and vocabulary acquisition. Here, I learned the importance of a needs analysis at the beginning of meeting with my learners in order to observe where their language abilities were and what their main goals were for second language acquisition. From there, I could plan our conversations around topics that would help reach their goals, while also keeping things authentic and practical. This often led to asking my conversation partners to describe how they feel about certain things and to elaborate with certain vocabulary words to expand their lexicon. I’ve learned throughout language learning processes that it is important to be able to connect what you are learning with your own personal life in order to acquire and maintain newfound knowledge in a target language. As I mention in my Statement of Beliefs, which is one of the artifacts for this area of proficiency, language and language learning are not linear so it is important to use a variety of methods and techniques of language teaching inorder to best address the needs of the students and learners. I go on to emphasize the importance of having a positive and safe classroom environment that lowers the pressure and anxiety that comes with learning and using another language. This mainly increases learners' motivation and confidence and also encourages learner involvement and opportunities for discovery learning which is crucial to the outcomes of the course (Bruner, 1961).

Later on during my time in the LTS program, I had the great opportunity to intern with Li-Hsien again, this time with a 4-week course teaching every day from 10am-3pm. The students in this program were from Tamagawa University in Japan and were a part of the OIIP teaching internship program. At first, I was extremely nervous, but that quickly subsided when I realized that the students were also nervous themselves. They had just arrived in Oregon a few days prior to starting the class and I was the first person at UO that they met. We met every day for a month in the AEI building and were virtually the only ones there. We quickly bonded and became one big group of friends. Even though there was a set curriculum with premade slides, I took the time to create small mini lessons within the overall lesson that focused on introducing new vocabulary words, fun facts about Eugene and Oregon, and lessons on how to build words based on the morphemes that are present in the word. To make that class fun and enjoyable, during downtime or time when the students were working, I would play music or videos of their favorite bands and singers which brought the morale in the classroom way up. I found that the students were enjoying coming to class and often stayed for longer than they needed to. We also had fun presentations such as creating commercials or products that they would sell that would help improve an environmental issue of their choice. Here I learned the importance of autonomy in the classroom and the impact it has when increasing the students' motivation. During this opportunity of teaching, I learned the importance of having a certain level of autonomy in the classroom. This vastly boosts the morale of the learners and may increase the learners interest in the topic or class as a whole. 

I also had many great opportunities to implement my teaching knowledge that I gained throughout the years through tutoring at AEI where I would implement my knowledge of linguistics in order to assist my learners with troubles in various fields of language such as pronunciation, pragmatics and the use of tone in the English language, and also grammar lessons. At the AEI, I have had the opportunity to converse with learners from many different backgrounds, each with their own specific needs for language learning. I have learned to identify these needs and focus on addressing them when tutoring or teaching a lesson. I have also learned many different ways to make language teaching fun and enjoyable. This was most evident when taking the Talking with Ducks class. Here, members of the LTS cohort teamed up to create fun and engaging activities that involved everyone in the classroom and required a large amount of communication amongst students. In retrospect, it was one of the most lively, active, and festive classes that I have ever been in and the smiles on the faces of the students in the class really reflected just how enjoyable and special the atmosphere in that class was. This showed me how much of a difference that making a class entertaining can be and just how much it affects the motivation of the learners in that class.

During the pronunciation class, I learned first hand how it felt to teach pronunciation to another learner. Throughout my college years as both an undergraduate and a graduate student, I had mainly practiced the pronunciation of learning the language of Japanese. I practiced the phonemes of English as well using the IPA chart extensively; however during the LT 539 Pronunciation course, it was my first time to really hone in on giving language lessons that focused on teaching the pronunciation of English sounds to a non native speaker of English. We were assigned a tutee and conducted lessons on pronunciation that fit the specific needs of that learner. Through an initial needs analysis which included an informal introduction of themselves, I was able to identify specific areas in which the tutee could use some improvement. Here, I was able to utilize some of my own ideas in this class such as creating my own tongue twisters based on the pronunciation features that my partner had struggled with. Initially the tongue twisters were difficult to get through, but over time and during the next few meetings that we had, I noticed a vast improvement in my partners pronunciation abilities as they continued practicing the tongue twisters. Because my tutee was from Japan, I also used my knowledge of the Japanese language and could more easily identify phonological language differences that would pose a challenge to a non native English speaker from Japan. Certain vowel sounds, minimal pairs, and phonemes that appear in one language but not the other, all play a part in the intelligibility and comprehensibility of a language learner. In this class, I was able to accurately identify the pronunciation differences and design lesson plans that focused on improving a learner’s pronunciation in those areas (Derwing & Munro, 2015).

I intend to use what I have learned throughout the teaching experiences that I have participated in during my time in the LTS program and implement them in my own curriculum when teaching English abroad. In the case of teaching English in Japan, there is a very different way of how classrooms operate and the methods that are used when compared to the context of teaching in America and may have to be altered in order to meet the standards and norms of classroom culture in Japan. However, in certain contexts such as personal tutoring or after school language and conversation schools, there are plenty of opportunities to implement techniques that have been taught in this area of proficiency. The LTS program has prepared me in a vast number of ways to be able to adapt to a new teaching and learning environment and to maximize the learner’s experience in the language classroom.

References

Bruner, J. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, 21–32.

Brown, J. (1995). The elements of language curriculum: A systematic approach to program development. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Brown, H.D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An integrative approach to language pedagogy (4th edition). Pearson Education, Inc.

Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2015). Pronunciation fundamentals : evidence-based perspectives for L2 teaching and research. John Benjamins Publishing Company.