brown ch. 4 & 16 kumar ch. 3

         I thought chapter 16 was the most interesting, I could relate to some of the information, and it will be very helpful to me when I get into my field. One thing it talked about that I thought would be helpful is the “10 commandments” for good language learning. There are so many components that go into being a good language learner and a lot of them are talked about in the 10 commandments. I think a teacher should go by these when teaching students another language because it really tells them how to make them feel more comfortable and competent in their new target language. Fear is a really big characteristic that many first time learners experience when starting a new language because they fear that they will make a mistake.

         When I was learning Spanish, as a second language, I was always scared to raise my hand and talk because I did not want to make a mistake. I felt that my teacher did not do the best job of making me feel comfortable in the classroom to participate and work on my oral production of Spanish. Due to the fact I was never comfortable in my Spanish classes, I never developed the second language that was intended. If my teacher had used something like the 10 commandments than she could have helped me and other classmates become more comfortable in the classroom to express ourselves and become more fluent in our target language. If teachers do not start their year off with “commandments” or ideas of how to help their students become good language learners, then what can they do later on in the year to help their students succeed?

         Also, I found the information on how to teach strategies in the classroom to be helpful. It is really important to engage your students in your lesson for the day. Students learn much more when they are interacting with other students and they are engaged in the activity. Students learning a second language especially need to be interacting with others because it is one of the only ways they can improve their language skills. When they speak out loud and talk with the teacher or other classmates, they are able to get feedback and corrected which helps them improve for the future. How can you teach a classroom full of beginner students a new language without getting them engaged in activities and interacting with their peers?

         I am currently in a classroom with two year olds and I have found that the best way for them to learn is through hands on experiences. They have been working on their colors, so we do art projects with them using the color of the day. Whenever I play with puzzles with them or toys, I constantly ask them what color a certain piece is or what number is on that toy, so that they are learning while playing. For younger children, they are not always aware that they are actually learning something while playing and that is sometimes the best way to do it.

         All of the principles discussed in chapter 4 were also closely related to everything discussed in the other two chapters. It was more principles related to how students can be successful learners in the classroom and then be able to bring it outside the classroom. All of these should be taken into account when I become a teacher for students learning a new language. One of the biggest factors that go into how a student learns is the way a teacher teaches and what track they take to teach their students.

         My biggest challenge becoming a teacher will be to accommodate all of my student’s different needs into my lessons. It is necessary that every student is taken into account so that no one slips through the cracks and begins to fall behind because you did not accommodate them. 

3 articles

         In one of the articles, Hatch says, “One learns how to do conversations, one learns how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction, syntactic structures are developed.” I thought this statement was very true within a classroom. The more the students are speaking the target language and interacting with each other verbally, the better they will become at the target language. I struggled in my Spanish class to develop good syntactic structures because I did not interact with my classmates in the target language; we would speak to each other in English and only interacted with the teacher in Spanish. The more practice any student has with their target language, the easier it is going to be for them to speak, write, listen to, etc. their target language.

         One thing I found in the articles was how they continuously talked about how interaction is a necessity for these learners. Interaction allows the learners to practice the language with their classmates or teacher and it also allows them to receive feedback from their speaking partner. Having interaction allows students to receive feedback about their grammar errors, mispronunciation, incorrect sentence structures, and much more. I always found it helpful in my classes to have students help/correct me when making a mistake because than I would learn the correct form and fix it. It always helped me to hear the mistake from someone else otherwise I would continue to make the same mistakes. It concerns me and makes me wonder, what if a teacher taught a class without student interaction? I have been in classrooms where teachers have very limited interaction and I never did well.

         Also, I found the talk about how CLT is the solution to language learning to be very interesting. They talked about how there is no better method, they ignore other people’s views, and they ignore all other aspects as being irrelevant. As we have discussed before, there is not one best method to teaching and saying that CLT is the only way could affect students dramatically. It is necessary to pull from many different ideas and thoughts in order for students to develop good language skills.

         They talked about how some priorities for CLT was that it gives students fluency, purposeful communicative activities, and student-student interaction. These are many important characteristics while teaching a language to a group of people, but there are many other ones that are not included. It is important to pull different characteristics from other methods as well. How are teachers supposed to decide whether CLT is good for their classroom or not?

         I agreed with and found interesting that it talked about how the context approach disagreed with the CLT approach. The context approach believes there are many other ways to learn languages and CLT is not the only way. There is no proof that CLT is the only method that is good because there are other approaches and methods that are equally valid. Also, I agreed that methodology is only one factor in language learning. There are many outside factors that can affect one’s learning. 

chapter 3

        Chapter 3 gave me insight on what the goals and what communicative language teaching is in the classroom. In this method of teaching, it is important that whatever you are teaching, it sparks the interest of the learners. There were seven characteristics discussed of the communicative language teaching approach; overall goals, relationship of form and function, fluency and accuracy, focus on real-world contexts, autonomy and strategic involvement, teacher roles, and student roles. Reading about those characteristics, I found that the goal is to teach the grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language together, the teacher should focus on contexts outside of the classroom, the teacher is considered the facilitator, and the students are active participants in their learning process.

         After reading these characteristics, I connected with a bunch of them, realizing that I want to use many of those in my classroom someday. Overall I want my students to succeed and learn to their fullest potential, but I want to be there for them as an empathetic coach as well (as stated in the reading). Also, I find it very important for my students to be an active participant in their learning process because I want them to be interested and determined to learn what is being taught. Thinking back to some of my school experiences, my third grade teacher cared more about her students doing well and understanding the concepts, then following the curriculum and staying on task day to day. If she felt we needed to work on something more because we were not grasping the concept, then she would take an extra day or more time in the day to work on that concept.

         The next approach talked about was the task-based language teaching approach, which addressed the two different kinds of tasks. According to the book, a target task is when that the students must accomplish beyond the classroom. An example given in the book of a target task was to have the students give their personal information in a job interview. Then the book said a pedagogical task is to form the nucleus of the classroom activity. To continue with the example given for the target task, it would be for the students to listen to job interviews, or to model an interview so they could do a role-play of an interview.

         The last thing in this chapter I found important was the different kinds of learning a student can do and instruction that can be given to them. Learner-centered instruction allows the teacher to be creative with how they teach and gives the students some control. Cooperative learning is where the teacher and the students work together as a team to obtain the goals and objectives of the class. Interactive learning is where the students have a lot of pair and group work.

         I plan to use these three techniques in my future classroom because I believe that working together with your students, having your students do group work, and allowing the teacher to be creative is what makes a good learning environment. Throughout my entire schooling career my teachers have done group work in almost all of my classes, however, they do not always work as a team to obtain the goals and objectives of the class. I have had teachers that are more concerned about following the book, so if a student falls behind they do not stop to help them.

         The article also talked about different teaching techniques and tasks as discussed in the book. The article talked about how games, role plays, and drama techniques can help students for real world communication outside of the classroom. I think that those kinds of techniques are the best kind of practice for second language learners. It is most important to always practice speaking the language and these techniques are some of the best ways to practice speaking. This help students become more confident speakers in their second language.

         I found that my Spanish teachers did not do enough of these activities for me to pick up the language and become fluent. It was very difficult for me to speak Spanish because I did not get enough practice speaking the language inside or outside the classroom. I believe the only way for nonnative speakers to become more fluent in their second language is by practicing over and over by speaking in the language.

         A lot of the article was repeated facts that we read in the book or discussed in class about the postmethod perspectives and particularity, practicality, and possibility. It becomes very confusing as a teacher as what method to pick, which techniques are best for your future classroom, and how you should interact with your students. How do you put together the perfect agenda for your classroom of different types of students each year? 

Kumar 1 & 2

          Chapter 1 mainly talked about the three different ways a teacher can take on the task of teaching their students; teachers as passive technicians, teachers as reflective practitioners, and teachers as transformative intellectuals. In all of them there are pros and cons that I found throughout what a teacher is supposed to do in each scenario.

            I found that teachers as passive technicians had some qualities of what teachers should be doing in the classroom today. Teachers that take on this type of teaching are measured by how well they take in the knowledge and then whether they effectively give the knowledge to the students. In this type of a classroom, the teacher is considered a conduit. It is important to figure out what the student comprehends from the knowledge the teacher gave to them.

            Although I believe that teachers are responsible for relaying knowledge to the students and it is their job for the students to comprehend what is being taught, I also believe the students can bring knowledge to the table as well. Students have personal stories/experiences that can help themselves and other students connect to the topic they are discussing in class. Also, I think it is important to have the students interact and connect with what is being taught in class, so the teacher is not the only one relaying information to all of the students.

            The next way was teachers as reflective practitioners where the teachers are seen as problem-solvers. Teachers are required to think critically and imaginatively in this process. In this method they talked about two different actions that can occur: reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action. Reflection-on-action is where the teacher makes a lesson plan and then decides after how effective their teaching was to the students. Reflection-in-action is when teachers monitor their ongoing performance and randomly adjust their teaching.

            One quote I loved from the book in this section was, “learning to teach doesn’t end with obtaining a diploma or a teaching degree but is an ongoing process throughout one’s teaching career” (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). Even though there are many different methods and ways to teach students in the classroom, I believe that learning for a teacher should never end throughout their teaching career. I have heard many stories where once a teacher is “secure” in their job they stop caring about the curriculum or changing their lesson plans in any way and they only care that their job is secure.

            The third way was teachers as transformative intellectuals where the teachers had two tasks: they want educational advancement but for personal transformation. This way also seemed more realistic in the way that they would construct a curriculum and syllabi based on their students needs and wants. In this situation, I believe that is one of the most important things to do when teaching. Your job is to teach the children and by making the syllabi around them, everyone can succeed and do well in the classroom.

            The only question I had after reading this question was “why can’t we pull all of these ways of teaching together and make something that works?” This was similar to last week where we talked about how you can’t make one perfect method. There will never be a perfect way to teach the children, but we can continuously work to help the children succeed which is our ultimate goal.

            Chapter 2 of this book discussed a lot about methods again and how there is never going to be one perfect method that works for every teacher, every student, and every classroom. It began to talk about how the eleven methods we talked about last week can be clustered together into three topics: language-centered methods, learner-centered methods, and learning-centered methods.

            The language-centered method was closely into relation with the audiolingual method. This methods concern was the students would grasp the grammatical structures of the language. This method developed more intentional learning rather than incidental. The teacher’s job is to teach the grammatical structures, so the students can internalize them. As discussed before, each of these methods have something in them that I would take to make my own teaching method, but not one method is going to work on my students.

            The learner-centered method was closely in relation to the communicative method. This method was concerned with language use and the learner’s needs. This method gave the learner the opportunity to practice communicative functions such as speech acts. This method gives the learner the chance to practice their communication skills and more specifically a specific function. The main goal is to get these language learners to have accurate grammar and they become communicatively fluent.

            In my high school years of taking a language, I found that their main goal was not to have us become communicatively fluent. We spent most of our time working on grammar and forming sentences, rather than learning how to speak the language fluently. It is difficult to move forward with a language when you cannot fluently speak the language because you are focusing on the grammatical issues of the language.

            The learning-centered method was closely in relation to the natural approach. This method allowed learners to participate in meaningful interaction through communicative activities in the classroom. The learners in this method learn through communication, but language development is more incidental rather than intentional. All of these methods had some similarities with a few changes to them.

            I believe what was brought up in the limitations of the concept of method that is how there is not going to be one perfect method. It also talked about how the term method is being diminished. I think there should not be a method or the word method because it has people/teachers believing that there is one way to teach your students which is far from the truth. This article left me questioning how we should approach teaching if there are not methods to follow. Does everyone form his or her own way of teaching?