I am showcasing a document I created in LT 548 Curriculum and Materials Design titled Statement of Beliefs for my first artifact. In this document, I discuss characteristics that I believe a language teacher should have and aspects of a language teacher that I hope to improve. I often contemplate the teacher's role, which Brown & Lee (2015) define as guiding students and facilitating learning in the classroom, and whether I fulfill that duty. I also explain that implementing cultural knowledge into language teaching is a vital and valuable lesson for language learners. According to DeCapua (2018), cultures have many aspects that cannot be seen through simple observations. I want to incorporate the less visible cultural norms into language learning. Alongside these characteristics, I noticed through observations and watching my professors how vital patience and kindness are for learners of any subject. 

For my second artifact, I introduce a reflection I wrote during LT 539: Pronunciations, titled Teaching Demonstration Reflection. In this reflection, I review the teaching demonstration I presented in class and the lessons I learned. I used the communicative practice activity from Celce-Murcia et al.'s (2010) 5-step communicative framework, whose purpose was to create a chance for learners to practice the suprasegmental feature with less guidance from the teacher in the sense of scripts and sentence structures. Students were asked to take turns hiding in a location on a map and answer questions the finder asked. While the activity took place, I observed students for feedback and whether they were reaching the lesson's learning objectives. I gave feedback to students who needed it to reach the objective. While reflecting on this aspect of my teaching demonstration, I was reminded of a past research study discussing how feedback had helped improve students' motivation (Liu & Zhang, 2023). As I reflect on my teaching and prepare for my future teaching context, I want to become a teacher who provides effective feedback that suggests room for improvement, shows students where they have already improved, and helps increase motivation.

The last artifact I displayed in this portfolio section is a teaching reflection I wrote in LT 537: Talking with Ducks. In this course, I got the opportunity to create lesson plans with my classmates and implement them in an English conversational course for international students at the University of Oregon. The part of the lesson I focused on was where I introduced an activity. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is defined as "an approach to language teaching that emphasizes learning a language first and foremost for the purpose of communicating with others" (Celce-Murcia, 2014, p. 15). This activity utilized the CLT framework and allowed students to produce and exchange language through CLT. According to Lee & VanPatten (1995), utilizing CLT by creating "information-exchange" tasks creates a chance for language learners to practice communication and inquiring information. For this task, learners were asked to question each other for information about the fake cultures they represented. Something that I noticed and was able to practice was providing students with clear instructions. I was thrilled to be able to practice introducing a communicative activity and see students actively participate.