My TESL Journey

TESL 0100 Unit 7 Reflection   One of the key ideas that stood out for me regarding classroom management was the idea of establishing rapport. One of the most important things a teacher needs to do at the start of a class is to build relationships and rapport with their students. It's okay if you don't get to the curriculum or lesson plan right away; more learning will take place if you, the teacher, have taken the time to get to know your students and allowed your students to get to know each other. Starting a new class with get to know you activities and ice-breakers in which students get to share about themselves and learn about one another will lay the foundation for future classes. Creating a warm, caring atmosphere in which students feel comfortable asking questions, contributing to discussions and taking risks is a key component to classroom management.  Another key idea of classroom management is the need to be flexible. Even though we may have the lesson planne...

TESL 0130 Do you remember studying content vocabulary when you were in school? In the past, teaching content vocabulary consisted of students being assigned a long list of words from their science or social studies chapter on Monday. During the week the students would be asked to look up the words, write definitions and create sentences with the words. They might also be asked to re-write the words several times or complete a worksheet with the words. Finally, on Friday, they would be given a matching test on the words to see if they had them memorized. I’m sure we can all attest to the fact that these methods are ineffective and do not help students to move content vocabulary into their long term memory. These methods should not be used in an ESL class either. As I began to delve into the topic of teaching vocabulary, the name that came up the most was Robert Marzano. Marzano is a well-known researcher in education and is the author of over 30 books and 150 articles. In h...

TESL 0100 Unit 6 Reflection Ah, lesson planning. This was the focus of Unit 6 of the Fundamentals course and it was jam-packed! We dove head first into all things lesson-plan related: envisioning a lesson, coming up with the goal and language focus of the lesson, planning the sequence of activities and procedures to follow, determining the amount of time each will take, predicting and anticipating any challenges/difficulties our students may have, as well as creating an exit assessment and transfer activity. Starting with the end in mind and doing "backwards planning" is an effective method for creating a lesson plan. A teacher must know why a student is doing each activity; there must be a purpose behind it that will lead them towards the lesson goal. Before even beginning to create a lesson plan a teacher must have a strong understanding of the ultimate goal: what outcome do the students need to demonstrate? The teacher then needs to take a step backwards and come up...

TESL 0100 So I kind of overlooked this assignment, or maybe I was procrastinating it and avoiding it because I am not much of an artist and was not really looking forward to attempting to draw my classroom. :) I tried to do some of the parts in 3D, but other parts are much more basic. It's kind of a mix of both. Attempting to draw a couch was the trickiest part! Anyways, I like to think of my classroom as a community of learners, which is why I used a circular table with me, the teacher (the one with the speech bubble), as part of the circle. When needed, everyone can turn their chairs toward the whiteboard for direct instruction, or to read sentence stems or discussion prompts. I would put our agenda on the board so the students would know what was in store for the day. There would also be a word wall bulletin board with high frequency words and words we had learned in previous lessons. The classroom would have a bookshelf with a wide variety of reading materials and games/...

At times, it may be necessary for a teacher to adapt a text in order to make it more accessible to their students. For the TESL 0130  R eading and Vocabulary class we were asked to consider how we might adapt a text so that it would be usable in our EAL classroom.  The text, from the British Council, contains reading skills practice and exercises regarding foreign exchange emails and is geared toward teenagers. It can be found at the following link: Reading Skills Practice: Foreign Exchange Emails The class that I have recently begun teaching is a range of   CLB 1-4 in listening and speaking, with many of the students at the Literacy level for reading and writing. This text is at a higher level than the students are currently working at and would therefore require some adaptations. I analyzed the text based on its suitability, exploitability, and readability and determined that I could use some of the content and ideas from the original text and make ada...

For the TESL 0100 class I had to create a 10-question quiz on the teaching methods discussed in Chapters 2 & 3 of our text, Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy and the Webinar, "A Trip Down the Memory Lane of Methodology." Click on the link below to complete the quiz. Good luck! TESL Methodology Quiz Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015).  Teaching by principles, An interactive approach to language pedagogy.  (4th ed. revised). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education. Chia Suan Chong (2012): A Trip Down the Memory Lane of Methodology  Link

TESL 0100 Unit 5 Reflection  I have been working in the field of education for quite a while and have used a wide variety of teaching methods, depending on the context I was working in. I have worked with students from pre-school to adult, and I have worked in public school as well as private institutes. Sometimes the teaching methods were dictated and other times I had more choice in how I conducted my class. For example, in an Intensive Reading class at a middle school in Florida I had to use a scripted text, where I read lines directly from a Teacher's Manual. In contrast, in an Advanced Reading class that I taught at the same school I was able to select a novel of my choice to study with the class and was able to prepare materials that I felt suited the needs of the students.  Over time, as various methodologies have come and gone, there are some teaching practices that have withstood the test of time and have come to be known as "best practice." Many of these...

TESL 0100 Unit 4 Reflection One of the popular ideas about language learning brought up by Lightbrown and Spada (2013) is that "The best predictor of success in second language acquisition is motivation." I think that survival is a huge motivator in learning a second language. When I went to South Korea to teach English I only knew a few basic words and phrases, such as  Hello ,  My name is Sheila,  and  I am Canadian.  The first school that I worked at was a small, private language institute and I was their first and only "native English speaker" teacher. I lived in a small studio apartment by myself, and during the week I had very few interactions with other "native English speakers." I needed to speak Korean to go to the store and buy things, order in restaurants, talk to my landlord, and give directions to taxi drivers. I was surrounded by the language everywhere that I went. I picked up a lot of Korean fairly quickly as it was essential to my su...

TESL 0100 At the private language school that I worked at in South Korea it was a policy that in conversation classes students were to speak “English only!” Since I was not fluent in Korean I was unable to translate directions for an activity or vocabulary words into Korean for the students. As an English teacher in a foreign land I made extensive use of TPR (Total Physical Response): facial expressions, gestures, motions and role-play were used extensively. A lot of information can be communicated in these ways, and it often brings about a great deal of laughter! It also helps to create a more relaxed and comfortable atmosphere. The students also made different faces and used various gestures and motions to get their ideas across to me, and then I was able to tell them the English word or phrase for what they were trying to say. It was a lot of fun and a learning experience for all. I do not believe that "English only" is the route to go in an ESL classroom. I taught i...

TESL 0100 In my school division the acronyms EAL and LAL are used to describe different types of students and these acronyms come from Manitoba Education. EAL Student: English as an Additional Language. English is not their first language. These students have literacy  skills in another language and have had formal schooling experiences. They may or may not require additional support in the classroom. LAL Student: Literacy, Academics and Language. English is not their first language. These students have not had much or possibly any schooling experiences and do not have a foundation of literacy skills. There is an EAL/LAL teacher in my division who works with a small group of secondary LAL students daily for half a day. She teaches them foundations skills in literacy, numeracy and life skills. For the other half of the day most of them attend high school elective classes.   I am also familiar with the acronym TOEFL: Test of English as a Foreign Language. When ...

TESL 0100 Unit 4 Reflection Brown & Lee describe eight principles of second language acquisition (2015, p. 66-87) The principle that stood out the most for me as I worked through Unit 4 was that of Transfer. This principle has come up several times in the coursework of the TESL Certificate program and is a key factor in whether learners acquire and are able to use the language that they learn. Transfer is the idea that if a student is able to make meaningful connections between what they already know and can do to new knowledge and skills, deeper learning will occur. Students will be able to note similarities and differences between ideas and "transfer" previous learning to new situations. As teachers, we want to move our students from surface learning towards deeper learning, and eventually, transfer. In an ESL class, teachers should build on students' background knowledge, as well as their interests, and make connections to students' real lives whenever p...

 TESL 0130 That was the big question we had to tackle in the first unit of the Reading and Vocabulary course. I have a lot of educational background and experience in literacy and I am currently working as a Reading Recovery Teacher, however, coming up with a definition of reading was no easy feat! Reading encompasses many sub-skills and is the process of combining them all together. The purpose of reading is to make meaning of text. A reader must integrate several different kinds of information together in order to achieve comprehension. This includes the visual information from the letters (and the sounds associated with them), the grammatical or structural information, and the meaning information, or what the text is actually about. In order to make sure that what they read looks right, sounds right, and makes sense, a reader has the complex task of sorting out all of the information presented. Reading is a problem-solving activity, which requires the use of strategies an...

TESL 0100 Unit 3 Reflection This unit was all about grammar, grammar, grammar! It was definitely a lot of information to process. One of the activities we completed was to go through Bolitho and Tomlinson's Common Areas of Difficulty from Discover English  to determine what areas of the English language we might need to brush up on. It was overwhelming!  I believe I have a great deal of knowledge and expertise of the English language as I have been working in the field of literacy in one way or another for close to twenty years. I do know a lot about grammar, tenses, and many of the other language features explained in the text and have taught some of them at one time or another. However, I was definitely confounded by some of the information that I read and by some of the questions presented! I can see that there are some areas I need to review and work on in order to be an effective ESL teacher.  In an ESL class, I don't think we as teachers would ever go into...

TESL 0120 Phew! I have come to the end of  the TESL Speaking and Listening Course and read, analyzed and internalized a great deal of information. As I have said in the past, I have taught English as a Second Language before, although quite a while ago. I have also been working in the public school system for about ten years. Reading the assigned readings and completing all of the activities for this course has been somewhat of a refresher for me, but some of the information has definitely been new as well.  Differentiation is an idea that is familiar to me as I have been working as a teacher for many years and it is considered best practice. As I reviewed the speaking and listening differentiation assignment, ideas on how to adapt the lessons for below-level learners and above-level learners came to me instinctively. Diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments were also not new to me as I have been incorporating them into my classroom teaching. As a result, I was a...

TESL 0120 Listening is definitely not a passive skill! This is a myth that was explored in Unit 3, Approaches to Listening Instruction . One key idea that resonated with me from the readings and activities this week is that context is vitally important in listening. As Wilson stated, "Listeners guess, predict, infer, criticize, and above all, interpret." (2008, p. 22) Active listeners need to be critical thinkers and infer and interpret what a speaker is trying to say based on the context of the situation. There are a multitude of contextual factors for a listener to consider when people are speaking, including the location of the conversation, the relationship between the speakers, and the purpose of the conversation. Not only does a listener have to hear and understand the words spoken, they often have to read between the lines to find out what the speaker is actually trying to say. As Wilson put it, "people do not always say what they mean or mean what they ...