Lesson Planning

Lesson planning is an important part of teaching. Laying out a set out path or plan is a must to be able to keep up. While lesson planning I believe that there should be different levels of planning a yearly, weekly, and daily plan. I liked the quote by Baily (19960 " a lesson plan is like a road map which describes where the teacher hopes to go in a lesson, presumably taking the students along". A key word in that quote is "hopes" not every lesson will go as planned and it needs to be recognized by the teacher when it is not working and they need to derive the plan. This is not alway apparent to the teaching when something doesn't work out how they would like. Student feedback could be very benificial to find out if the lesson has worked or not worked.

Cultural Consciousness

Cultural consciousness and language go hand and hand. The goal of a teacher is to get the teacher have the learner see the culture through a native speakers perspective. In order for this to happen I think the teacher should first do the same thing for their student’s culture. It is important for the teacher to have a understanding so they can understand any discourse their student might have while learning the target language. It is a two way street in learning cultures teachers and students will be learning things from each other. The importance of a familiarity of the target language is great. It will not only help with language development but is needed to interact with others in the native language. Culture can be embedded throughout all types of teachings and need to be regularly used.

Integrating Language skills

We have been learning about the importance of the primary skills of language od listening, speaking, reading, and writing but it becomes difficult the intregrate all into the learning. We have talked about the importance of authentic examples to be cordinated into the classroom but we have found there are some obstacles in doing so. As ESL teachers our goal isto help our studnts become competent in each area so we need to finds particular ways to use all at once. I really enjoyed some of the proposed projects and microstrategies that are offered to promote the integration of all of the skills. The main problem is that we ask ourselves how realistic is that these projects can be used in the classroom. There are always time restrainsts that teachers have to face. Also tachers face the always daunting fear of approval from the principal to create projects that do not follow the curiculum.

Ch 24 and 25

One part that really got me thinking was a very small mention in the beginning of ch 24 about learning inflections of a new vocabulary word. This was not a major point of the chapter but it caught my eye.  After reading this, I though about some experiences with second languge learners and this is a are they seems to be a struggle. The English inflections are not like other languages. Throughout Englishes' history the amount of inflections have decreased and has become more unlike other languages. For example, the romantic languages (spanish, italian, french, ect) have much more inflections. I know when I started learning Spanish coming up with the correct inflection form is something I really struggled with because it is so different from English. Teachers should not only teach new vocabulary words but expand and really emphasize the inflection involving the words to help the student gain a full grasp on the vocabulary and the context it should be used in.

Kuma Ch6

Kuma's Ch 6 goes really well with the discussion we had as a class on Tuesday. I want to touch up on the topic of learning how to learn again. In high school I felt that I had no organized pattern of learning. If I did have a strategy for learning I would use it for every subject that I had. Once I came to college I came to understand the importance of implementing affective learning strategies. It took me about a sememster of college but I found out what strategy I needed for each subject.

We touched upon this last class meeting but I want to reemphasize the importance how teachers of atleast the high school level should explicitly or inexplicitly begin to teach students how to learn. Also as ESL teachers we must be aware that some strategies of learning may not fit with everly SLL. We should show and incorporate learning strategies into the framework of the classroom. We must also be aware is it is not working effectively and show a new way that might work better

Writing Skills

In the chapter about the second language writing process I found important. Native speakers struggle organizing their writing i their first language. For second language learning students this much be an even larger obstacle they face. It shopuld be a focus for the students learn how to organize their ideas and be able to translate those ideas into learning. I know personally organizing my thoughs into writing is not a strrong point of mine and process writting has help me. Group brainstorming could be very beneficial especially 2LL because it gives them opportunities to hear others speak and they might have similar ideas but do not nessesarilly know how to say it the language. Proccess writitng is a skill as like anything else so the opportunities the students are exposed to the process they can only improve.

project proposal

I am going to do the research project.