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.

Week 8: Cary's Article, Brown 18 and 19 and Kumar 5

         I have enjoyed reading these chapters and the article because they focus on important factors that every teacher has to take in consideration when creating an appropriate curriculum for ELLs. We want students to develop meaningful interaction, to feel comfortable speaking a second language, to feel welcoming and share their own experiences to the classroom, and fully develop appropriate speaking and listening skills.Students are our learning partners and we need to make sure we do the best to accommodate them in our classroom. We, as future teachers, need to facilitate negotiated instruction by enhancing opportunities for meaningful interactions. We need to manage conversations and have flexible topics that are being activated throughout the classrooms, so we can appropriately help them participate in their own language development and shape their own path to success.
         The article emphasizes the need for teachers to learn the L1 of the student enough to create a nurturing environment that cultivates their culture and helps them achieve L2. Families are also our partners to help our students be successful. Incorporating them into our classroom will give us a great advantage, because students will feel appreciated for bringing their loved ones into their learning environment giving them the push they need to acquire the skills to develop language learning.The community, such as volunteers, also play a vital part in creating a nurturing environment for our children. But what about teachers that do not have the support of outside sources? What about those disadvantaged schools that lack the support of parents and community members? I know it is different for every community, some are able to get help, others do not have that advantage. Some parents are full time workers and cant afford to spend time in the classroom, other families have family members that stay at home and are able to interact with the classroom and the student. How can we reach the families and community without their actual presence in the classroom? I know they can help with homework at home (I guess a little is better than nothing), but how can we ask for more interaction within the classroom? How can we get volunteers to interact with our students in these situations?
         The chapters on how to teach speaking and listening skills give great emphasis on their issues and how these are intertwined with each other, what to do and what not to do, the different types of each, assessments and principles that can guide a teacher to create a curriculum that can effectively focus on these skills. In the listening chapter, it focuses on how listening comprehension is an interactive process, it is achieved though monologues and dialogues between the students and teachers.There are performance factors that can affect the process of speech. It is hard to assess listening because it is "unobservable", so we rely on our "inference in determining comprehension", but we can choose what we want to assess by following certain tasks (such as listening cloze, interpretive tasks, simple discourse sentences, etc). I enjoyed the different aspects that make listening difficult, such as redundancy (which is what I need to work on), performance variables (pauses, false starts, etc.), rate of delivery, reduced forms, etc...., because these allow me to focus on the way I communicate with anyone and from now on try not to use many of these, so I can start developing a more appropriate way of communicating with ELLs, and avoid miscommunication and incomprehensible phrases in future classrooms. In the speaking chapter, it states the importance of understanding the issues and concepts surrounding how to teach speaking skills. Fluency and accuracy are both needed to make one's speech comprehensible. Most of the same skills and types of difficulties to speaking are the same as in listening, because these go along with each other. These chapters serve as a guide for teachers to prepare them to teach in a classroom, and how important it is to focus on other factors besides grammar that affect the student's language development, I think teaching speaking and listening skills are a vital part for teaching and learning language.
      Another factor that affects student's involvement and achievement in the classroom is the amount of meaningful interaction and opportunities given to them when learning a language. Kumar mentions that if there is more input there is more enhanced opportunities to activate fundamental processes that are essential to develop L2. He focuses on three types of interactional activities (textual, ideational and interpersonal), and together "can stretch their linguistic repertoire, sharpen their conversational capacities, and share their individual experiences". These are key aspects creating an atmosphere that facilitates negotiated interaction, but without the help of the students, this cannot be accomplished. The microstrategies and exploratory projects are a guide for us to help learners maximize their learning potential. We need to be positive role models by showing appreciation to their culture and language, promoting negotiated interaction, enhancing opportunities for learning, focusing on listening and speaking skills, carefully managing the talks and topics being discussed in class, and allowing students to share their own opinions on issues that matter to them and that are given to them in a way that makes sense to them.