My TESL Journey

Throughout the past few years of my working experience, I have been developing my own preferences for different plans and approaches to teaching information.  These experiences have convinced me that task-based education is my most prefered approach to teaching, however I recognize that it is important to include both skills based and present-practice-produce approaches to create a deep and rich learning experience for the learners.  I have discussed before my experiences with using task-based learning in my elementary school classroom so I would like to discuss in this post what I see as the benefits of task-based learning in adult classrooms. First, and foremost, I believe the use of task-based learning brings in real-life experiences and needs to allow the learner to not only learn English language concepts of grammar, vocabulary, and speaking but also allows learners to practice other aspects of their lives in the classroom.  This means the learner may be able to lea...

The author of this passage had multiple types of mistakes they were making throughout the writing.  Throughout the text, the author uses incorrect verb tense, incorrectly uses articles, fails to pluralize certain nouns, genders nouns incorrectly, and uses confusing statements that can sometimes be disconnected from the rest of the sentence.  Despite these many mistakes, the instructor of this learner should focus on only certain ones, as not all are as persistent as the others. The most prominent problems in this work are the gendering of nouns that should not be gendered, the incorrect use of verb tenses, and the prevalence of confusing statements or incorrectly ordered statements.  Incorrect gendering of nouns can prevent readers from truly understanding the author’s argument, as in this case it could be understood that capital punishment only makes society safer for men based on the author’s writing. Verb tense is immensely important for understanding an argument a...

One of the most interesting aspects of Unit 3 for me was the discussion of corrective feedback.  I have learned multiple somewhat contradictory things about corrective feedback and its place in teaching English as a second language.  In my opinion, corrective feedback is very important to the teaching of English but it must be done in such a way as to not demotivate or undermine the learners attempts to use the language.  When discussing speaking, it is important to not interrupt the learner when they are attempting to use the language but instead provide them the necessary scaffolding they need to complete their ideas.  After they have completed their idea, it is important to then help them work through some of the difficulties they had. In writing, it is important to correct mistakes that the learners make without filling the paper with ‘red-marks’ indicating they struggled with certain aspects of the language.  Given that grammar is present and important in ...

As an elementary school instructor, I think about the different methods of teaching grammar based on how I believe my learners will best understand it and what methods will keep their attention and help them to internalize the information.  As a result, I tend to prefer more communicative approaches to teaching grammar with a combination of both inductive and deductive learning approaches. Experiential learning is a major part of my teaching style and informs many of the lessons I plan.  I like to give students the opportunity to make decisions and experiment with whatever field we are discussing as a way to get their minds engaged and their interests peaked. However, I do still see the importance of me presenting them information that they may not otherwise be able to learn through strictly experiential learning.  This is why I prefer to combine deductive and inductive reasoning in my classroom rather than placing an emphasis upon one over the other. There are many ...

Here is the link to a grammar activity that I created in order to help learners with sentence structure. In a way, it is a game that can be used both to practice vocabulary as well as to give them to chance to practice their writing and grammar. This activity can be done orally or written depending on the intent of the lesson and the needs of the learners. Grammar Activity document

I am definitely a teacher who uses technology in my classroom. I use different applications like Seesaw and Kahoot, as well as using it as a means of going paperless. My students absolutely love using the computers and iPads and even though they are using them for work, they don’t seem to mind as they get to use the computers. I have 3 big questions, however, about using technology in the classroom.  This follows Graves’ idea of “problematizing” during course design (in Brown & Lee, 2015, p. 184). These questions help to raise the many problems that can arise out of using and teaching education in the classroom. How do we keep learners safe? The first is “how do we keep students safe?” While this question is vague, it is important for learners to know the difference between credible websites, as well as the possibilities of scams. Unsafe websites can lead to not only computer viruses but also can use ‘phishing’ methods to obtain personal and financial information. ...

The structure of this test is interesting. The validity, reliability, and practicality of this test and these objectives seems to generally be positive, however there are some aspects of this test that could be changed to be more useful to the learners involved in the class. Overall, much of the information present in the test seems to be validly related to the subject matter that is described in the objectives (Brown & Lee, 2015,p. 492-493).  However, there do seem to be some aspects of this test that, although related to the objectives and course, are more obscurely related to the learner’s knowledge and has the possibility of creating confusion and frustration in the learner.  This frustration is similar to what I experienced as a high school math student. We learned a concept in our math class but when it came to the test it was assessed in a way that was completely different than anything we had experienced in class and as a result I was very frustrated with t...

Grammar 3D needs assessment This is a needs assessment that I do in French with my students. In our school, we use the Grammar 3D approach. This involves colours and shapes to determine word types as well as sentence structure. The first thing that I do with my grade 6 students, is give them a dry-erase board that has three shapes at the top. These shapes refer to nouns (square), adjectives (triangle) and verbs (circle). I also give them a word list, where they must then sort the words into the right category. Once they have put all of the words on the dry-erase board, I get them to take a picture. I then give them 5 sentences to work on. With the five sentences, they must circle the subject in blue, the predicate in red and complements/objects in green. Since they work with these symbols since kindergarten, it is a review for some as well as a needs assessment for me to see what still needs to be worked on. With each sentence, they take a picture once they have finished circlin...

This Unit was extremely interesting to me.  I have spent a good amount of time thinking about the importance of teaching grammar explicitly in education.  This is a topic that my colleagues and I have discussed many times and we tend to have deep conversations about the importance of explicit grammar education.  Prior to reading the documents in this section, I was solidly of the opinion that grammar is important and has its place in the classroom but that it does not need to be explicitly taught with the vocabulary that is usually used.  Some of my colleagues believe that this use of vocabulary to discuss grammatical concepts is immensely important and use many of the methods that were used when I was in school to teach these different concepts of grammar. Through the readings for this discussion, I am more firmly of the opinion that grammar, while important, does not need to be taught as explicitly as it used to be.  Through experiential learning and task-...