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.