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.