My TESL Journey

My goal:  My goal for this course is to find new approaches to assessment as well as learn different ways to evaluate learners so that I can vary the way I assess and evaluate learners. How am I going to learn it? I am going to work towards this goal by participating in the course reading and discussion forums as well as do my own research to go in depth and find something that works for me. How will I know I achieved it? I will know I achieved this goal by being able to apply it to my own classroom, as well as a trying new things in my classroom, successful or not. This will be a way for me to evaluate if I managed to achieve my goal or if there is more research to do. How will I demonstrate that I learned it? I will be able to demonstrate what I learned by being able to apply and modify it to fit in my own classroom. If I can modify the information and approaches learned to fit my learners and my classroom, it means that I understand it enough to be able t...

I have created a needs assessment for September in a grade 4 classroom. This needs assessment involves getting to know the learners as well as see their level of reading and writing. After they fill out the document, I would read through them and then do an interview/morning meeting with each learner individually to go over their likes and dislikes as well as how they learn best. For some learners, who may not be reading yet, I would fill it out with them through this conversation. Here is the link to the document:  Needs Assessment - Grade 4

Here is the link to the vocabulary journal that I created for this course. It includes grammatical terms that I needed to review as well as important concepts and vocabulary learned during this course. Vocabulary journal

This course has taught me much about the teaching of grammar in an ESL situation.  I have created a lesson plan for teaching grammatical issues, in this case run-on sentences, to French speaking elementary school students.  Click the link below to see the lesson plan. Assignment 4 document

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 ...