My TESL Journey

This week, we looked at how to choose an appropriate text as well as how to adapt a text to the class level. While reading the pages from Brown & Lee’s book, Teaching by Principles , they included many different ways to approach teaching reading while also stressing the importance of using a text that is right for the learners. The book also stresses the different types of items that can be used to assess reading (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.422). The different subcategories they bring to light are: perceptive reading, selective reading, interactive reading, and extensive reading (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.422). All of these categories include different types of activities for assessing a learners reading skills. The following table lists some of the possible activities for assessing reading. Item types Possible activities Perceptive reading Reading aloud Reproducing writing Multiple choice questions Selective reading Grammar/Vocabulary tasks Matching activitie...

While doing the readings for Unit 6, I had quite a few questions as the textbook brought up ideas that in my educational experience had told me the contrary. I decided to do this post to flush out the questions and ideas as well as giving a place for people who have ideas to add. The first main question or idea, is the idea of teaching from the textbook. According to Brown and Lee, on page 202, they discuss the idea of starting your lesson plan by teaching from the textbook. I have always known that using textbooks can help guide your lesson planning and your units, but the idea of following the textbook and teaching directly from it has never been suggested in my education. I was always told it was a resource and something that you can use to supplement your lessons or a resource in terms of materials to use for texts. When I came across that sentence in the textbook, I felt uncomfortable and not sure how to react. I see it as a similar question to “Should we teach to the test?” I ...

Unit 6 discusses the different types of techniques and questions that can be used in a classroom.  My personal preference is to focus on a controlled, open-ended technique for teaching that includes controlled questions.  I find this approach allows me to guide students towards the different topics they are meant to learn while also providing some leniency with how they get to the final goal.  This method keeps the students interested because they are not forced into a ‘one-size fits all’ approach and keeps them working in ways they find most interesting and what engages their brains the most.  However, an important part of this approach in my classroom is the use of classroom materials. I have to be prepared for many possible ways in which students will work and how they will interact with the topic I am teaching them.  Overall, I find this method to be very effective but I think it does require some extra work in the preparation and class materials aspect ...

Unit 1 included a great deal of information on reading and the views and understandings of reading. Throughout the unit, the authors discuss topics like the genres and characteristics of written language, previous research that has been done on the topic of reading and, in particular, reading in a second language (Brown & Lee, 2015, p. 389, 396-397). Whenever there is a discussion about learning, there is a discussion on the role of background knowledge on learning. In Brown and Lee, this topic is brought up often and for a good reason. While reading the different research about reading such as “Bottom-Up and Top-Down processing”, strategic reading, extensive reading, etc., the role of background knowledge and the “schema theory” is the section I find most interesting (Brown & Lee, 2015, p. 390 - 394). I do not find it interesting because it is a new concept, but, on the contrary, I find it interesting because it is an idea to which we always go back. The idea that we have a...

Lesson Plan 1 Date: October 10th, 2018 Class levels: intermediate/advanced Class Time: 1 hour Communicative Language Task Goal The learners will be working towards the Listening Benchmark - Comprehending instructions. The learners will be working to understand complex directions that have multiple steps and instructions. They will be working in situations that are familiar to them. By the end of the lesson today, learners will: Be able to follow instructions and directions on how to get to a destination. Be able to follow a podcast recipe for Macaroni and Cheese. Lesson procedure Lesson activities and procedure Language focus Language Skills Purpose of the activity Interaction Time Group discussion on how to follow directions. The learners will be going over the structure of directions and how the steps we need to take to correctly follow the directions. The learners will be working on their backgr...

Unit 5 discusses the history of the methods used in language learning throughout history. It is important to know the development of the methods and how they came together to make the methods that we know today. From the classical method (teacher-centered which focuses on memorization and translations), all the way through to Discovery learning and more, it’s important to know that these are what came before (Brown & Lee, 2015, Ch.2). They all have positive and negative assets that are important to consider. I have always been a teacher who has a more learner-centered instruction as I find that it keeps learners interested, motivated and generally more involved in their learning (Brown & Lee, 2015, p. 45). I try to find ways that the topics and strategies discussed can apply to them and have them also make the connections. For example, I had a student ask me what is the point of learning to make predictions and that they thought it wasn’t a skill that they needed. However, t...

During this unit, we discussed the similarities and difference between learning first and second languages and how these difference and similarities can affect learners in different ways.  This concept was very interesting to me because I was raised in a family in which my mother only spoke to me and read with me in English and my father only spoke with me in French. This created a situation in which I learned both languages as my first language but they are also both second languages.  Now, I work in an all French school with colleagues who only speak with me in French but my husband only speaks English. Yet again, both languages are acting as my first and second languages. This made reviewing the concept of first and second languages hard for me because I don’t have any memory of learning my languages and I am fluent in both so I don’t have the same experiences of learning a new language.  I have tried learning languages like Spanish but again I have two languages...