Kuma Chapter 8

Consciousness-raising was a section in this chapter I found to be relevant in my own theory of teaching. Like it said that traditional grammar teaching is almost the idea of tabula rasa, or blank slate. I do not agree with this idea, I do not believe that teacher's are the only knowledge holders in the classroom... I feel every body in the classroom plays a role in teaching and learning. I believe that students come with information equipped for them to build upon and make connections, we are learning facilitators in that if we raise the students consciousness about what they already know and tie it into what were talking about in class they will have a better grasp on the knowledge and will make more meaningful connections to the information around them. Consciousness-raising is drawing the learner's attention to the information they should be grasping, so instead of filling in the information on a blank slate you are actively promoting them to be self-taught and give them the opportunities to learn as much as they want... giving them the tools to succeed. This ties into the bigger picture of this chapter talking mainly about heuristics because heuristics refers to the process of self-discovery on the part of the learner, the teacher gives them the tools they need but its up to the learner to take the information in, and that's what consciousness-raising basically is. If all teachers taught in this manner I feel it would provide a better learning atmosphere for all the students in the classroom.

SIOP Book ch. 1+2

I enjoyed reading about the differences between content based ESL and sheltered instruction in chapter 1. I feel that these subjects were a good review for me though because being a bilingual major we talk about these topics on a regular class basis. But the talking about the characteristics of the students and the statistics they listed was what really caught my attention. You hear about how the affects NCLB has on classes and schools but when reading it on paper in a profound textbook is scary. NCLB is not helping our students or schools, its hindering them.
Chapter two on lesson preparation was interesting to read about also because I liked knowing all the different content objectives for EL's. Ive briefly touched on this in other classes but learning about the standards that are aligned to state, local and national was interesting to read about. Something it also touched on which I feel is necessary in any classroom is to incorporate supplementary materials that are suitable for any given lesson plan. In the book it talked specifically about EL's but I feel it's necessary to have that for any child because you should be about to adapt lesson plans or incorporate as many things as you can to gain the most purpose out of your lessons.

End of Semester Project

So far, we had our meeting monday morning. We (Tina and I) are looking at doing a dual teaching mini workshop at the ELI. We will observe a couple times and write an observation report looking at student interactions, teacher responses and do an informal interview if we can with the teacher of the classroom to see whether her plans before she came to class went as she thought and if not what changed and how did she/he adapt to the change in plans. We will then compose a mini workshop in three sessions, the first being an introductory session where we will meet the class and let them know what we expect or to gain from this experience and visa-versa. We will then teach two lessons on different occasions that tie into each other with lessons/activities to enhance the knowledge they are already learning about in there classroom. I want to get a better feel for teaching in this environment and kind of get my feet wet per say in the teaching atmosphere and I think this will be a good opportunity to do that.

Minimizing Perceptual Mismatches

I really enjoyed this chapter of Kumaravadivelu's book because it looked into the mismatches you could encounter in your classroom. There can often be mismatches between teacher perceptions and learner perceptions of what is available to learn according to Kuma, and I fully agree with him. The way the learners percieve the usefulness of classroom events plays a big role in perceptual mismatches in the classroom. Most perceptual mismatches occur between teacher agenda and learning outcome. According to Kuma though most of the time these mismatches can be corrected right away, he has 3 pedagogic insights about mismatches that are they are unavoidable, they are identifiable, and they are manageable. I believe him that they can be changed to correct the mismatch in the classroom. There are 10 different mismatches that can occur which are cognitive, communicative, linguistic, pedagogic, strategic, cultural, evaluative, procedural, instructional, and attitudinal. Kuma then ends the chapter explaining to us some microstrategies for minimizing perceptual mismatches. This section of the chapter I always love, even though we have only had a couple chapters so far with this at the end I find it very useful to see where these microstrategies can be applied in normal daily life.

Kuma Chapter 3

In this section of the Kuma book, I found it very interesting and relevent when they were talking about how teachers and students need to utilize learning opportunities inside and outside of the classroom. I highly agree that as teacher we have more of a responsibility to utilize learning opportunities inside the classroom. When a student asks us a question that we can further expand on and explain for other students who may not understand also, we are utilizing learning opportunities. Learning opportunities can go as far as answering a question or creating a lesson from something your student is struggling with. As a teacher we are often served learning opportunities on a silver platter per say. We need to learn when these opportunities are presented and how we can use them to further educate our classroom.
Learners on the other hand need to utilize learning opportunities outside of the classroom. Obviously, our teacher isn't always with us and as future teachers we can't always be with our students monitoring their every move outside the classroom. It takes initiative as a student to use learning opportunities outside of the classroom to further the knowledge process and be all you can be. I really liked this section of the book because you often hear of a lot of learning opportunities but rarely do you utilize them or see teachers utilizing them. By understanding the different learning opportunities out there no matter how big a learning opportunity or small we can use it to our advantage to help educate or learn.
Lastly, in chapter 3 I also liked the examples of different lessons and activities you can use in the classroom. They were interesting to read and invision. I could see myself using some of these in my future classroom such as "3.2.1 ask your students to read a target-language newspaper, or listen to radio news broadcasts, or watch TV news coverage focusing on stories of local interest-any act or event that excites or agitates the local community. Ask them to select any one news story that interests them, and be prepared to talk about it breifly in class" (pg. 65). I like this because it brings in outside news and things going on in the community while also promoting their target-language. This is a good way for the students to work on gaining local knowledge and practicing their target-language. I really enjoyed these helpful activities.

Powerpoint for Presentation Ch.1+2 of book and Kuma article

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Chapter 2 of Kuma Book

      During my reading this week I found chapter 2 of the Kuma book to be very insightful into a lot of information that is relevant to TESOL today. I like how he touched upon the different approaches that we were talking about last week and he starting going into information that we only just started to talk about which was learner-centered, learning-centered, and language-centered. It was nice to read about them and to get a better grasp of what it is that we will be learning more in class. The thing that struck me most interesting though was the Post method pedagogy section of chapter two.
     I found reading about the post method pedagogy was engaging to me because I had never heard about it before. It has three sections which are the paramerer if particularity, the parameter of practicality, and the parameter of possibility. Seeing what each of these parameters were was excting and interesting to me. I got kind of confused when it came to the section of macrostrategies and how they worked and were implemented into the classroom but truly macrostrategies are implemented by the smaller lessons called microstrategies. There was a list of ten macrostrategies and a brief description of what each of them were which helped with understanding what it was that they were talking about. This chapter was really interesting to me but mostly learning about the post method pedagogy. Pedagogy in general is a big and interesting topic but this put a new spin on things and I enjoyed reading about it.

Language Approaches

       I have seen a few different language approaches being a student of a second language. I have seen the communicative language approach where we would engage in a lot of role-play and dialouge activities. We would work in groups a lot and we were pushed to communicate in the target language. I have also been taught in the grammar-translation method where little instruction would be given in the L1 and we would focus on the grammar aspect of the language. We would read texts and have to translate sentences from our L1 to our L2 language. The third approach that I have been taught before in was the direct method. We wouldn't be able to speak in our mother tongue and lots of pictures were used to understand what it was that we were reading. The last approach that has been used in a classroom that I learned in was audiolingualism. It had a lot of emphasis on dialogues and speaking. We would have to do a lot of memorization and we would learn reading, writing, and speaking more seperately than integrated. There was a lot of emphasis on pronunciation and our errors were corrected if we spoke wrong.
        In personally felt comfortable with the communicative language approach and the grammar translation approach. I like the communicative approach because I like role-play and dialouges because I feel you can practice situations that may happen in real life and role-play is kind of in the moment and thinking quick off your feet which I like. I also like the grammar translation method because I like to understand the meaning of a sentence and see how it's being formed. It helps me to have a better grasp of the language I feel. I do not think there is a best method that fits the needs of all the students though because everyone learns differently and has different methods that work better for them. I think for a teacher to be a good teacher they will integrate all of the methods as some point to engage the thinking and minds of all their students so everyone has an equal opportunity at learning.