Last week: Brown 23 & 24, and Shohamy: Assessment and testing

Assessments are helpful to see where the student is at, their weaknesses and strengths, and the progress the student has made. When creating a test, it is important to make sure they are practical, valid, reliable, authentic and have a wash back effect. These are priorities for the design of language assessments. Like the wash back section mentioned, it is necessary for teachers to provide feedback on test performance. When teachers provide feedback, it always helps me to know my weaknesses and strengths, as well as what and how to improve the next time I take a test. I have known classmates that are scared to argue with the teacher about their grades, because the teacher would get upset or not even listen to the student. But, I have also seen teachers that are more than welcome to discuss grades and be open to receive a student's feedback on a grade. I need to remember not only to provide feedback, but be open to hear my students about their own grade. I need to remember that a letter or number grade cannot help my students improve their own learning. Providing feedback in tests is useful for all grades. Brown also touches on the practical steps to test construction in classrooms which I found very useful. Test development is a delicate process that needs a lot of preparation to appropriately assess students. The before, during and after test strategies could help me when using all kinds of assessments, so my students can fully understand the upcoming test and be aware of their expectations. Any information that is given step by step helps me see exactly what I have to do to develop a more effective learning environment. Every student deserves the right to find out their weaknesses and strengths, and self-evaluate their progress to become more independent in their learning process. I found these chapters very useful because they provide specific steps to design an appropriate test for students, how to help them develop autonomy, and create a more collaborative learning environment. The chapter on assessment by Shohamy addresses how to better assess the discourse competence of the students tapping on the four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking). It is necessary to use a variety of discourse types on tests to appropriately assess the individual. Another important aspect they focus on is the importance of applying a variety of  discourse features and criteria in evaluation. The testers could create their own scales based on the expected goals and objectives of the test. The chapter also suggests the importance of using different elicitation techniques rather than standard test formats to be able to appropriately test them. As well as Brown, Shohamy suggests teachers to use feedback by giving assessment conferences regularly, so the students can improve their learning. I found these chapters very useful especially for language teachers who are developing tests and assessing ELL students, but these ideas can also work nicely for regular mainstream classrooms.

Week 13: Lesson Planning and Curriculum

One necessary aspect of teaching is writing lesson plans because it helps organize what one is planning on teaching. Before writing it, it is necessary to plan and prepare ahead so we can appropriately apply it to the student's unique learning styles and needs. I have written a few lesson plans for classes, but I think I still need more practice on it. Preparing for a lesson and figuring out what and how to teach is helpful to me, especially because I'm more of a visual person. Having every step of my expected lesson, and a clear set of goals and objectives, can benefit me, even though I know it will most likely change during the actual lesson. It is also necessary to expect a variety of answers and give open-ended questions, as well as challenging the student with high-order questions. Being able to adapt and being flexible is key to every lesson planning and teaching. Brown discusses the need to focus on variety, more student talk, good pacing, good timing when writing lesson plans. Also, it is key to take into account the variation of ability in the students, and monitoring the difficulty of the lesson, we want to challenge the advanced ones without making it too hard for the below and average students.The different techniques and materials the book offers, such as role-playing, problem solving, dictation, technological aids, realia, etc., can help make a lesson more engaging and meaningful, and help support learning, especially for L2 learners. Also, another aspect involving teaching and lesson planning is the importance of monitoring our own teaching acts discussed by Kumar. He mentions the M&M scheme and the importance of self-evaluating, self-analyzing, and self-observing one's teaching acts to explore one's classroom processes and practices. It is necessary to plan ahead, write out in detail the steps, and expect the unexpected when teaching all sorts of students.

Research paper: TESOL and Culture

After doing some more research, I have decided to change my previous topic (on teaching listening) and focus more on the effects of culture and language on ELL writing skills. My research question: How can L1 linguistic and cultural influences affect L2 writing skills?. I want to focus on the types of challenges the student faces influenced by their native culture. Also, how these identity factors affect the development of  English writing skills for ESL learners. I will focus mainly on college level or graduate students. I want to discuss the pros and cons about cultural influences, and student's beliefs and attitudes about it. My topic is still in progress.
Sources:
 "Argumentation across L1 and L2 Writing: Exploring Cultural Influences and Transfer Issues" by Hacer Hande Uysal (2012).  It is a study that explores the argument preferences of people from the same cultural background across their L1 and L2 texts within a cultural-educational framework.

"Teaching of English Writing in American and Chinese Colleges: A Data-Based Study" by XU Hui-yan (2012). It analyzes the similarities and differences in teaching English writing in Chinese and American colleges through surveying the published papers. American writing teachers tend to work in teams with more focuses on collaborative learning and writing communities, while Chinese teachers work more individually with stresses on errors analysis, teaching for the test, and negative transfer of Chinese language and culture in English writing.

"Identities and Beliefs in ESL Writing: From Product to Processes" by Xuemei Li (2007). This article focuses on the relationship of culture, identity, and beliefs with regard to the writing process and the process of learning to write in the ESL context.

Week 12: Kumar 11 & 12 and Brown 26

This week's readings help me realize that as a future teacher, I have the opportunity to model mutual respect across cultural, political, and religious boundaries while tapping into controversial issues, so I can create a more unified and safe classroom environment for every diverse student. It is necessary to avoid any biases, as a teacher, when taping into world issues to create a more egalitarian classroom environment. This reminds me of the role of the teacher as a transformative intellectual. We need to reflect and connect pedagogy with wider social issues. We need to challenge our student's minds and guide them to treat other races, cultures, and languages equally. Political and economic issues affect everyone and if these issues are presented within the classroom, we can help our students challenge their own perspectives on these issues and develop a more unified concept of the world. We can help them become critical thinkers about current issues affecting the world. These chapters help me see beyond the classroom and understand how I can make a change in a child's life. Teachers should treat everyone equally, model fair treatment across cultures and be unbiased on any social issues that affect anyone in the classroom, so their students can follow the same path. Children learn by observing and modeling, so every teacher is a model and if the teacher discusses issues surrounding every student's life, then they can challenge and prepare them to face the sociopolitical and economic issues that affects their life in a more critical way. Also, ESL students come from different countries and bring their own unique beliefs and attitudes to the classroom. If teacher connect everyone's beliefs, every student will be able to understand the importance of accepting one another. We are more than just a language teacher or a content teacher, we represent someone that can make a change in a world that is in desperate need for change. Teachers should help their students embrace their own culture and language, as well as creating and maintaining a linguistic and cultural identity. By respecting the student's linguistic and cultural identity, we can connect with the student's family, community, and personal identity. We should appreciate their identity in the classroom because it defines who they are as a human being. A question that was mentioned in one of the chapters that I am still questioning is how can students preserve their own cultural identity if they have to survive in a culturally challenged world? I am sure that with the teacher's efforts, and school and family support, they can help a child surpass any obstacles that this world may bring to the student. As teacher, we can help our students challenge these obstacles and issues (economical, political, religious, educational, racial, social, etc.)  that are affecting their families and themselves. By following a critical pedagogy and being a more transformative intellectual, the classroom will be a more unified, acceptable, fair, and loving environment for each and every diverse student.

Week 11: Kumar ch 9 & 10 and Brown ch 17

These chapters help me visualize the importance of teaching lessons that include all the language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) because these are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. In every classroom I have observed, the lessons always involve every language skill, from a beginning discussion to engaging in an activity. It is not possible to teach without incorporating all of the four language skills. In a lesson, there is usually a discussion to prepare the students on a topic (writing on the board and reading from the board), then classroom interaction between students to students or with teachers occurs (speaking and listening), after that there is group work or individual work, which can include all four skills depending on the activity. This is one lesson, and there is various lessons throughout the school day, so all four skills are necessary to focus on when teaching a classroom. Teachers should follow an integrated skills approach. Reinforcing all language skills will help students understand the new language and interact with it in various ways. We use them together inside and outside the classroom to create a more meaningful learning environment and this can definitely help our future L2 students achieve a higher proficiency level. If the students are encouraged to interact using all four language skills, they will be prepared to engage in an actual communicative exchange with a native speaker outside of the classroom with more confidence. It is also important to teach them how to appropriately create coherent text/utterances that will fit a given situation within a specific social setting/ cultural context. It is essential to understand the linguistic environment in which a word occurs to ensure the proper understanding of the item in other contexts. Especially for L2 learners, it might be difficult for them to engage in a communicative exchange if the stress and intonation are not right or utterances are not mentioned at the appropriate contextual setting. L2 learners come from different cultures with different norms, so we need to teach them the norms of the new culture by encouraging them to focus on the context of culture and situational setting when engaging in linguistic activities. It is necessary for them to learn the norms of interpretation within the culture to appropriately interact with the community. They will benefit by avoiding to stress intonation on the wrong words or asking a question without sounding rude. It is interesting to read about teaching the appropriate cohesiveness features in sentences that ensure propositional development. This will help the students develop situational context making an interactive exchange communicatively coherent. Even if the communicative interaction between two individuals has utterances that lack cohesiveness, it can turn into a incomprehensible phrase. I enjoyed reading these chapters because this is what I have been learning in my curriculum and instruction classes and using throughout my school years. These chapters offer a variety of ideas and activities that I can use in my future classroom.

Week 10: Brown 22 and Kumar 7 & 8

      I found all the chapters very useful and made me think about topics that I would have not considered while teaching in an ESL classroom. I liked the quote in Kumar's book about language: "We use it, misuse it, and abuse it. And yet, we seldom think about it" (156). This is an eye-opening phrase, and as future teachers it is necessary to start fostering language awareness, so our students can understand the role of language in their lives. Teaching general language awareness is not enough by itself, we need to consider the sociopolitical aspects that surround language itself.  General and critical language awareness are both essential and need to be taught together. Besides teaching the content, such as literacy skills and grammar, I have to get students to be aware of their own language development and issues surrounding that language. Power and control surrounds language, and students need to be aware and understand the effects of it within society. Another useful topic this week is the importance of activating intuitive heuristics. I was not familiar with the word heuristics before reading this chapter. I liked this chapter because it focuses on guiding learners in a way that they can learn by themselves and from their own experiences instead of following directions. I like the idea of teaching the students to be independent learners. If I construct the right strategies to do this, they will be able to discover the rules of the linguistic system by themselves and become aware of their own language development. Episodes 8.1 and 8.2 caught my attention because these examples show me what not to do as well as the correct way of teaching them to be independent learners. The teacher in episode 8.1 focuses too much on teaching grammar, uses a textbook and does not create sufficient intuitive heuristics. Just by looking at the dialog, we can see that the teacher is not creating affective communication in the classroom and missing the opportunity to allow a positive learning environment. In contrast, the teacher in episode 8.2 uses a variety of questions and phrases that guides them in creating a meaningful conversational interaction, uses a fun text, and then at the end introduces the main topic. The learners are allowed to think outside the box and become independent learners. In brown's chapter, the section on the issues surrounding how to teach grammar provides some guidelines and conditions that are helpful to future teachers, like myself. Brown states not to explain something that is unknown, instead let the student know that the information will be researched and the answer will be brought the following day, we do not want to create confusion and give false information. It is ok to correct grammatical errors as long as there is a communicative flow between the students and the teacher to improve learner's language. All of these chapters focus on language and to create a positive learning environment where students can learn by themselves and understand the issues surrounding language within society. These chapters were helpful and interesting, but I am still wondering should I introduce sociopolitical issues surrounding language (the critical language awareness) when my students are at a beginner level? Wouldnt it be complicated for them, language wise?

Week 9: Brown chapters 20 and 21 and Myth article

      As well as listening and speaking, we need to teaching reading and writing. Brown's chapters discuss important points about each and how we can develop better and appropriate ways to teach these areas. In chapter 20, there was some familiar information I had learned from curriculum and instruction courses, such as the bottom up and top down processing and silent reading, and from bilingual education courses, such as the semantic mapping and SQ3R sequence. It is interesting to see that I can use the same instructional techniques and ideas from regular education courses and apply them to ESL courses. This chapter gives great strategies for reading comprehension and principles for teaching reading skills. It is important to choose texts that can help students achieve strategic, intensive or extensive reading that are authentic and readable, in the student's proficiency level with some lexical and structural difficulty to challenge them. Using a variety of materials and topics, such as essays, newspapers, articles, webpages, is important to attract the student's interest in reading, especially for pleasure and to read for understanding. The book discusses topics, such as the SQ3R sequence and prereading, during-reading and after-reading phases, that were interesting because ESL students can use these techniques to reach comprehension and improve their reading skills.
       In chapter 21, the author taps into the techniques and principles for teaching writing skills and what caught my attention was the process approach. The process approach involves the idea of revising, editing, organizing, and sharpening your own ideas to make a successful written product, such as an essay. Everybody writes in different ways at different speeds, nobody is at the same level. It is important to give them time to create their own ideas, to revise and analyze their own mistakes and give them opportunities to correct them, as well as to discuss their writing with other peers and get productive feedback. Teaching writing is a long process that involves a lot of feedback from peers and teachers, helping students understand their own composing process, helping them create their own writing strategies and giving them ample time to write and think about their ideas. In the classroom, there should be a balance between academic writing and writing for enjoyment, and authentic writing, such as writing a newsletter. I often observe in elementary classes that there is a lot of journaling going on because students need to practice and develop good writing skills, and I believe that practice makes perfect. When people practice by doing things over and over again (especially in different ways), they get used to it and develop mastery in the content.
      It is interesting to think about the myths surrounding ESL students. One of them are discussed in the article "myth 5: students learn to correct all their own writing errors" written by Joy Reid.  As an advanced second language learner, I do feel like I am able to correct a lot of my English writing, but when I turn in papers, teachers always find a few misspellings or phrases that are unclear. I still have to use a dictionary (English to Spanish dictionary, and Thesaurus to locate more words to include in my vocabulary). When writing in English, I usually edit my work various times to make it more understandable and get my information across. I have been able to develop better writing skills throughout the years, but I still feel more confident speaking and writing to others in Spanish (but I also have misspellings and unclear phrases in Spanish as well). After more than 10 years learning English, I still struggle communicating in my L2. Second language acquisition does take time. The article discusses Prop 227 (no bilingual education), which used to put students in structured English immersion classrooms for only a year thinking these students will achieve L2 in 12 months, that's not even close to the truth. I think there will always be political conflicts involving education if education laws are run by the government. They make decisions that are not appropriate for the student's needs, they are focused on the overall achievement of the students as a whole (a "one size fits all" approach) and do not have the ability to think about each student as an individual with different needs and learning styles. They should not be making decisions in the education field, if they are not educators. Moving to another topic, the article mentions "even teachers' and students' best efforts at error correction do not result in 100 percent accuracy". Teachers are not perfect, so trying to correct all the students' writing perfectly is not even possible, but we can help them achieve what is expected of them by teaching good editing strategies, giving lots of error feedback, allowing them to take their time, and creating time to share with other peers. It is always helpful to see examples from books and articles that show us, future teachers, activities that we can do to help our students achieve better writing skills and other areas as well.