My TESL Journey

TESL 0130 This week we focused on how we can empower language learners to be more autonomous and self-directed in their learning. Our task was to think about how students can incorporate self-directed learning strategies to support reading and vocabulary and how we, as teachers, can promote autonomous learning in the classroom. We were to explore these ideas on our own and come up with a creative way to share our ideas. Below are the graphic organizers that I created as a result of my exploration.

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...

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...

 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...