Reflections - TESL 130

Unit 4 - Passing the Torch to Students: Empowering The English Language Learner.

For our last and final unit, we explored the area of Metacognition which is the ability of the learner to be aware of his/her learning while the brain goes through the process of acquiring language. This skill requires to be taught to the learners so they can pay more attention to how they think and learn. Metacognition needs to be modeled first, giving the learner opportunities to practice the skill which eventually it will become natural and an automatic process for the student. Some examples of metacognition are activating the learner's prior knowledge, provide opportunities for reflection, have students make predictions if a story or text is being read, etc. I enjoyed reading about this approach as it empowers the student to take responsibilities to his/her own learning and how the teacher leads his/her students from behind, guiding them through their learning process. By developing the skill of autonomy on the students, we are developing the strategy of self-guided learning which by the way we had to put it in use on the following activity as part of this unit.
As one of the activities in this section, we had to make an analysis of two lesson plans. In the first lesson, we had to identify the autonomous learning strategies that were already in place and in the second lesson, we had to choose a lesson plan with few or none opportunities of autonomous learning and how to add some of these opportunities to the lesson.
Another activity was to work on Smart Art and create autonomous learning strategies coming from the point of view of the student and another one coming from the point of view of the teacher. Both activities were posted on Padlet. I think I've got a bit better and more comfortable using Smart Art now - It's not bad after all...
And now, for the big and final project, we had to create our own lesson plan trying to integrate all the strategies that we learned throughout this course. Something I liked and that I appreciated it a lot was the opportunity to post my lesson plan on the discussion forum and have my classmates give me feedback on it. This was so useful to me because others were able to see what I couldn't see. Having your peers evaluate your work is important as this is what will help you to improve and do things better.

Unit 3 - Which Comes First: Reading or Vocabulary

Unit 3 begins asking the question "what comes first: Reading or Vocabulary?." Which of these two skills is acquired first. I wouldn't know - it's hard to say. Something that we had to do in this unit was to read the article  "What 80% comprehension feels like?" The first time I read it, I went, huh? This is what the article says, “Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan 
(I have shortened the article to just show an example of it). 
Now, this is how I read it...“(something) for help!” you shout. “This (something) is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her (something) is not (something). You take out your (something) and (something) 119, the emergency number in Japan."  Oh, my goodness! No idea of what I just read! I was not familiar with the 20 % of the words used in the article - not a clue! I knew that "something" had happened to someone and that this other person was calling the emergency number for help. I have to admit that I had to go back to the text a couple of more times (it is a small text) to see if I could pick some other type of information that could give me more, but not much luck there.  Now, what does this tell me as a reader? It tells me that I do not need to know "every" word that it is written on a text. I can keep reading and connect the words that I already know and hope to get a better understanding that way - oh, yeah. I can also stop and get a dictionary and look for the meaning of those new words.
So, how can I improve my reading skills? As mentioned in Brown and Lee, reading skills can be improved with the use and practice of various strategies like Pre-Reading: making predictions, what's the purpose of the text, and who wrote it, While Reading: skimming, scanning, still making predictions, looking for context, re-reading, etc., and Post Reading: paraphrasing, summarizing, discussing, adding new vocabulary. These strategies are essential, especially if you are teaching this skill to L2 students and as mentioned in Unit 2, you have to take into account the suitability, exploitability, and the readability of any text that you will use as part of a lesson.
To put in practice the above strategies, we had to do two different activities.

First, we were divided into two groups, and we had the task to analyzed an article on Aboriginal peoples and Residential Schools - Manitoba Memo article. One group was assigned to develop Skill-based strategies on this article and my group, was assigned to develop Task-based strategies in the same article. It was quite neat to work online as a group. There was a lot of collaboration and contributions to the assignment. You can see our group work here and read all the great ideas that our group had for this particular text.

Second, we had to take the same activity that we worked on- Manitoba Memo, and add a vocabulary focus activity to it. You can see my vocabulary lesson posted on my blog for more details.

...And this is how we end Unit 3.

Unit 2 - How to Use/Adapt Materials For Teaching Reading and Vocabulary

For our second unit, we were introduced to a readability app which it gave us a very detailed report about a text  - "Laughter and the Brain." This app gives you precise information about the level of readability of the reading text. It gives you the level of CLB students that the reading material could be used for and how appropriate it could be for them.
Thinking of texts that are suitable for your students is very important as it is to pick topics of interest for them. Does the text cover or relate to the lesson being taught to the class? and is this text too easy or too difficult to read for my students? We must take into consideration the suitability, exploitability, and readability of any text that we want our students to be exposed to. Keeping these three criteria is useful to a successful lesson.  
Another activity that we had to do as part of this unit was the Think Aloud activity. We used a different type of app called Screencast which by the way is free of use if you only keep the basic service. In this activity, we were given an article on residential schools in Canada, and with the use of the app, we had to record ourselves as we read through it. The main idea of the activity was to give our thoughts almost everytime we read a paragraph from the text or any points of view we had about it. I didn't like much sharing my thoughts about the article as I kept relating the experiences that I had with some of those situations cited in the article. However, I think this app is an excellent tool, and it can be used for other activities in the classroom.
To finalize this unit, we are to post an adaptation of a reading sample for LINC students at level 4. I will do that post separately from this one to keep things simple.

 Unit # 1 - What Does Reading Involve?

To begin our unit, we were asked in the discussion forum what is reading? And this is what I wrote…

For me, reading is definitely a process of internalizing symbols (letters) to sounds, from sounds to words, from words to sentences to finally create context. We are continually reading and cognitive active everywhere we go. 
In my opinion, L1s learn to read in a much natural and less stressful way because it is part of their culture and the exposure to the language is everywhere. As for L2s, reading becomes more conscious with more effort in trying to find meaningful connections so they can internalize it and understand it. I don't know...what do you think?

I gave the above statement before even doing the assigned readings for this unit, Brown and Lee, chapter 17(pp. 398-400).

It is clear that there is so much to reading than just internalizing symbols or letters to find meaning. As I read this chapter, I encountered with the Bottom-Up and Top-Down processes which I had previously seen in other sections from the same textbook. These two approaches are used to help us organize the way we perceive things - language in this case.
The Top-Down strategy or conceptually driven processing, help us access our "intelligence and experiences" for us to understand a text. Nuttal (1996, pp. 16-17) compares this process as "an eagle's-eye view of a landscape below." To me, this is like scanning through any text and detect words that I already know from previous experiences along with their meaning. The Bottom-Up process is the opposite. The reader "first has to recognize a multiplicity of linguistic signals like letters, morphemes, syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues, etc. and then use their linguistic data- processing mechanism to impose order on these signals." So from all this data, the reader becomes conscious of it and selects a signal that makes more sense to understand that "mean." Nuttal (1996, pp. 16-17) also compares this process with "the image of a scientist with a magnifying glass or microscope examining all the minute details of some phenomenon." The key word here is "minute." This is to show how detailed and sophisticated the Bottom-Up process is.
Both methods are of great importance, and because one cannot overlook the other, a balance of both is necessary while using them in the classroom. This is what the text refers to "interactive reading." In my personal opinion, all learners should be exposed to use these two methods and see which one develops better than the other. As an L2 learner myself, I wasn’t familiar with these two methods before; not until I began taking my TESL courses this year. Now I make the connection with the type of texts that my English teacher used in our classroom. They were definitely a combination of both methods and then some. I remember once, before going for Christmas holidays, we had a big celebration at school, and each classroom had to present something as part of the show. Our class sang Mary’s Boy Child from Bonney M. This was my very first Christmas song that I had ever learned in English!-talking about making reading meaningful, right? Well, here you go.

To listen to the song click here.


P.S. Please note that there are so many more strategies and methods that are mentioned in this chapter that I found very interesting, but the ones that stuck the most were the two methods mentioned above :)