Reflection

As a beginning level TESOL professional, this semester was really a challenge to me, especially in the Introduction to TESOL course. However, through the immersing of the whole semester, I gained piles of knowledge concerning the TESOL field; what’s more? I purchased the overview of the most parts of TESOL field. I have a general idea of what I will work on in the follow semesters, even in my future teaching. Since I have read several of papers related to different issues and concepts, I become more confident when I talk about these issues.
I want to highlight some big ideas that really impressed me this semester. The first one which brought me in a new world of exploring the EFL teaching was taken English as “international language”. It no longer belongs to any nation or any culture; rather it belongs to the people who use it. Language can never be taken apart from the culture, so when English becomes international language I begin to think which culture I should use in my teaching. If I instruct the course based on the learners’ source language, it will be easier for them to access the knowledge. However, will they miss some of the essential culture from the target language? Then the conflicts come. What is the culture related to the target language which acts as international language? This is one of my big problems which I will try to find the answers in my future teaching career.
Not only the sufficient materials make me improved, but also some of the notions support me to be active and confident in this field. One of them is the notion of “native fallacy”. As a non-native EFL teacher, sometimes I really feel a little bit disappointed when I regarded as non-native speaker, which I can never choose and never have chance to change, no matter how hard I contribute myself in this career. It is really a sad thing if I always feel like an alien, expelled by some invisible “judges”, “notions” and “environment”. Therefore, after read some articles talking about the native and non-native issues, I was introduced to the general background of the EFL teaching field. I also found that the non-native teachers are showing their contribution to TESOL field which taken as a necessary part of major. I also found the prevailing status and advantages as non-native speakers in EFL classroom.
Another interesting concept totally changes my mind of what I thought of English in the past. That is the criticizing about “standard” and “non-standard” English. I really reshape and reconstruct this notion in my mind. When I trace back with this notion and think about my L1, I am surprised there is even no “standard” Chinese, the one I am familiar with. After that I am no longer puzzled about finding and learning “standard” English instead, I feel freer to acquire a language belonging to me. This notion establishes my confidence and encourages me to explore more in this field.
Above all, I am satisfied with all that I learned from this course and from my colleagues and my teacher. For me, the final assignment is not that easy to fulfill. Because I have to consider so many aspects of the lesson plan including what is the students learning outcome, how to achieve my planned language objectives, how to set up appropriated assessment for the students to evaluate their work and etc. After modifying my less plan for several times, I think the final lesson plans of my assignment is my best work.

Week 12 ----the useful guidelines for doing research

Every time, when I read Hall’s book I will find some new ideas. This time I come across the ideology “sociocultural perspective” of research which is viewed as a natural component of all applied linguists’ activity. I found an interesting idea “good research is dependent not on one’s professional role- that is k whether one is, say, a university professor or classroom teacher. Rather, it depends on one’s degree of research expertise.” (P139)

The ninth chapter from Hall book is really helpful. The six steps of research circle show me a clear way of how to organize my own research. The actions include identifying concerns and pose questions, identifying appropriate approach and sources of data, collecting data, analyzing data, reflecting on the findings and share findings and take action.
Before I read this chapter, I read the report from William Labov about the “what is a reading error?” From his report, I realize that the question or the issues the author concerns are really concrete and accurate. The participants should be spotted and all the research aspects need to be narrow down into sentence, words even phonetic symbols. So from the very beginning of the research, after the researchers entails identifying particular concerns or issues arising from one’s professional life as an applied linguist.,(P160) the researchers can be priorities according to their importance or significance to the researcher, and for this ranked list a specific topic for investigation can be identified. (161) There is one thing that I never thought important before was when we are concerning about the questions the researchers should consider whether they are reasonable in light of any constraints he or she may have in terms of time, and availability of resources. (P161) However, the final goal of the research was to present the feedback to the readers or to be used into the practice situation. The final step is sharing the result with others where appropriate, taking action.

Chapter ten is talking about the contexts of research. Instead of teaching how to do a research, this chapter is talking about how we might identify topics and questions that are appropriate for empirical investigations. The examples form this chapter is really helpful for me, a newcomer to the field who has no idea of sociocultural perspectives to get some idea of the range of possibilities for exploration.

Week 11 Response to Dave’s ESL Cafe

Last week, we read and discussed the ad from Dave’s ESL Cafe in the classroom. The main two requirements almost appearing in every ad we found are “native speaker” and “working experience”. These really terrified me. The major I chose for bachelor and master are both focusing on English teaching. It is obviously that I will probably be an English teacher after graduation. From the ads and the overviews of the teaching fields, I found no chance to teach in expanding or outer countries at all, except my own country. It doesn’t matter where I am going to live or work, but I felt, to some extent, we NNESTS being ignored and denied by some sort of concepts, some unknown scholars and some notion. Does it mean that all these years what I learnt and expected are meaningless?

First of all, I am not a native speaker, but I am innocent, since I cannot choose my parents and their nationality. Or when I gain the chance to choose I cannot abandon my parents due to the language they speaking. I can try my best to be a native-like English users but no chance to change my accent and the living experience along with me. If I insist to be a teacher, then I need to change me major to Chinese teaching, then I become the first-choice among my entire colleague. Second, I cannot find the door or even a single window for the new teachers to enter the gate of teaching field by the barriers of “working experience.” So I really wonder how I can begin from an experienced teacher from the very beginning. I cannot forget those happy times that I spend with my assistant teacher who is young and just graduated from school. Those new ideas and attractive activities impressed us; since we can never gain from our previous teacher by his regular schedule. But it seems that I will never have the chance to share my learning experiences with my students.

Week 9 ---- Who worth more? ---- NS or NNS

These days, we talked a lot about the NS and NNS which I didn’t quite think about it before. For me, I think it is obviously that the NSs gain the predominance place on English teaching and will be more efficient than NNSs do, since they achieved a high degree of proficiency. For those native speakers, I think, no matter how worse their English is will be better than I do. But after I read my articles my point of view begins to change. I found it is true that sometimes NNSs are more suitable and more proper than NSs in English teaching.

I like the points the author sited in the passage. Only non-NESTs can serve as imitable models of the successful learner of English. Non-NESTs can teach learning strategies more effectively. Non-NESTs can provide learners with more information about eh English language. Non- NESTs are more able to anticipate language difficulties. Non-NESTs can be more empathetic to the needs and problems of their learners. Only Non-NESTs can benefit from sharing eh learners’ mother tongue. (P346) All of these advantages show me a clear way how to be a qualified teacher and who to balance the deficiency with NSs in English teaching.

In recent class, the topic reminds me thinking about my own experiences when I was in middle school. We have different foreign teachers for each academic year or only for a semester. We get along well with both the NESTs and Non-NESTS. I think they have a very clear division of their focus on teaching. For the text book which mainly talked about the vocabulary and grammar, we depended on the local teacher. They can give us a more accurate explanation and show us good examples; also sometimes we can negotiate in Chinese a little bit. The Chinese teachers can provide us more efficient materials and even some rules about how to understand it. The most important thing is that we can use all of these in our exams. That’s the point! The foreign teachers will become the most popular teachers when we have some speech competitions or if we need to perform a kind of shows. They really help most of the time, correcting of the pronunciation and intonation, helping us to be heard like native-like speakers. They help us find some plot which appropriate to be performed. Especially when we come across some cultural issues, the foreign teachers play unique and important roles. In this case, they acted perfect, but from the bottom of my heart, I don't trust or depend on my foreign teachers compare with my Chinese teachers. That does will make me feel freer and more willing to work with my Chinese teachers. The Chinese teachers will definitely be the first choice for the students even though the students know that the NSs may gain a higher proficiency in English. That’s funny! We have been doing this with the concept of NSs would be a better choice.

To be honest, this makes me feel more confident to be an English teacher when I go back to China. And now I know what an ideal non-NEST is according to the author. This will really helps in my future career.

Week-8

Pronunciation is always my favorite topic about the English teaching. I will have a further investigation about the pronunciation teaching and learning in my final paper. So, I was so excited when I come across this article. And in the passage the author really talk about some issues that may have serious implications for ELT pedagogy. After illustrating the current background of the overall view of the pronunciation role in ELT field and his own view of the teaching English pronunciation as international language rather than foreign language, the author begins to demonstrate his research model and the analysis of it. And then the author gives us his proposal for ELT pronunciation teaching: a syllabus of NNS focusing pronunciation teaching.

These days we talk a lot about taking English as an international language. In the beginning of the passage, the author introduces the changing circumstances and changing pronunciation goals. It is the fact that English is now spoken by a considerable greater number of NNSs than NSs. In Mckay’s book we know that the English users in outer and expanding circles take more percentage among the whole international English circumstance. It is obvious that recent study has begun to shift from NSs based to NNSs based research. The scholars believed that “language teaching would benefit by paying attention to the L2 user rather than concentration primarily on the native speaker.” The author also shows us a clear distinguish between taking English as EIL and EFL. In this case, it will be helpful to clarify his position as regard the appropriateness of regional accents in ELT.

When I begin to learn English, I remember my teacher put a lot emphasis on the pronunciation, and we try really hard to imitate the native-like pronunciation. I think, it is ok to learn standard pronunciation at the initial position since the learners have no input before. However, you will find that we have a very serious problem to correct the wrong or fallacy pronunciation if the speakers have already own their individual pronunciation system. And to my surprise, sometimes, the imperfect pronunciation won’t be a problem for communication. This will probably happen when they talk to native speakers. Happily, I found that author also has similar idea appear in the passage and the research data also prove the situation. This remained me of the teachers’ certification in China. These years, there state a new policy for Chinese teachers who want to gain the certificate or those have already got the certificate. The entire teachers have to pass the exam of psychology, pedagogy and standard mandarin. This can be really funny in the case for those experienced teachers or professors. It really doesn’t matter if they are math or chemistry teachers even thought they are lack of standard pronunciation of mandarin. And for those who have already in their forties or fifties. How can you improve or change their accent easily? But it is still important for those teachers who will teach mandarin especially in primary and middle schools. The requirement for standard mandarin becomes severe these years due to the low level of mandarin for those Cantonese teachers working in the south part of China.

I appreciate the last part of the passage. The proposal shows me a more concrete plan to improve the level of pronunciation with the direction of these theories and ideology.

Week-7 CULTURE IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE

In McKay’s book chapter 4, we have a review of the international language that talked about in chapter 1 and also explore the important role of culture in language teaching. It seems that language learning and teaching have a tight relationship with culture; no matter it is the target language culture or the source language culture. In this chapter, the author gains a conclusion about the primary rationales of culture in language teaching: 1) that culture is embedded in the language itself, particularly in the semantics of language; and 2) that cultural content is motivating in language learning. (P100) Also, the author highlighted the three principles that should inform how cultural content is handed in an EIL classroom. First, the materials should be used in such a way that students are encouraged to reflect on their own culture in relation to others. Second, the diversity that exists within all cultures should be emphasized and finally cultural content should be critically examined so that students consider what assumptions are present I the text and in what other ways the topic could be discussed. (P100) And this is what impressed me most the culture including in the material in EIL teaching. The question of which material is a proper one to choice among the source culture, the target culture, or an international culture has come to my mind.

Talking about the material containing different culture, my own experience makes me feel confused. I remember when I was in middle, high school, the topic given by the English teacher either foreign or local teacher were mainly about the western culture. We have special events to celebrate Christmas and Halloween. We talked about the softball and baseball even though almost no one play them or watch them before. We are familiar with, we thought, Jake-o’-lantern, trick- or-treating, costumes, bonfires, mistletoe, and we got along well with Santa Claus. However, these are only the vocabularies memorizing in our mind. We only use it when we have to find a topic to begin our dialogue with foreigners. What’s more? When we go deeper about the topic, they begin to ask about the questions of Chinese festival, like spring festival, dragon boat festival, mid-autumn festival, etc. Then, we keep silent… Funny! Right? But it is true that most of us were involved in such situation. Of course, we keep silent didn’t mean we know nothing or litter about it, or we lack experience about all of these festival. I guarantee that all of us will dash down our opinion about these festivals if we use Chinese. During the learning process, I found it will be much harder to describe the events or objects from outer and expanding circle. Sometimes, direct translation doesn’t help much. So here comes the problem, what we are learning for in our daily life? And if we begin to think about the role of culture, what kind of materials we are using in the past? What if we begin to talk about the Chinese festivals in the class and expand the vocabularies of all words concerning about Chinese Culture? We can’t deny the advantages about gaining information of western culture, it really helps a lot. However, I think we are losing something, which have close relationship with our life, our country, and our culture.

But such situation really changes a little bit, when I teach in the middle school last year. I found the students were capable to introduce the Chinese traditional festival more easily to their foreign teachers whenever they want. And they begin to search for various cultures from all over the world, not only stick in the western culture. International culture flourished in the materials. You begin to see some faces appearing in the text book have black hair not always blond. From the feedback of the students, they like such diverse culture than only western culture. In this situation, learning English becomes more practical and make the students feel more confident. They are no longer afraid of speaking to the people who are not from inner countries. They have more options to choose the way of communication and how to handle the problems they meet in their life. Still, I concern about the percentage of the culture occurring in the learning materials among the source, target and international culture. How to balance them and benefit the teaching?

Week-5 Comments on “Borrowing others’ words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism”

The word “plagiarism” is the most serious word my teacher told me before I came here. What my teacher’s notion is that I should be very careful about “borrow” others words, sentences or ideas when I do the written work in the USA. Since my teacher finished his PH.D abroad, he knew about the directors or the professors are particular about “borrowing words” in USA. While he told me about this, I was doing my thesis which was really hard for me and for most of the Chinese college students. When the teachers were talking about the thesis, I think they were missing the most important part about distinguishing the writing of your own by citing others ideas or words and avoiding plagiarism. We do know don’t copy from others and create by ourselves. But how to cite or borrow properly has been totally ignored. This is a very important part of construct a passage, I think, especially for undergraduate students who are novices of writing academic papers. What’s more? For most of the undergraduate students they don’t own much about the academic theories or research results on their own, so how can they fulfill the whole passage just by the descriptions of the topic? Just like what Franklin said “why should I give my Readers bad lines of m own when good ones of other People’s are so plenty?” (P208).

When we do thesis, it is necessary to find articles or ideas to support our views. But for Chinese students they have two big problems, I think. The first one is, for most of the students in China, learning English is a kind of memorizing words and recited articles. This happens in many L2 learning environment and cause an impact on weakening the ability of creation as L2 learner. This starts from the initial learning period and continues until they are involved in the problem of creating their own work. You can imagine the difficulties and struggle from the students. Actually I understand we need some imitation or copy from others at the very beginning of learning. But the problem goes worse when the students keep on imitate and borrow from others at the time they need to be done by themselves and product their individual ideas or theories. It seems like that some of them are losing the kind of ability or in other word, the creativity and curiosity has been killed with such learning environments. It really sad to talk about it, since to some extent; I am one of them and need the improvement of finding our own way. But it is getting better, more and more fundamental schools are beginning to change their methodology and concept to avoid such problem. And we can get the information from the passage the”such views, with Chinese learners cast as passive, imitative memorizers, to be enlightened by the advent of the creative West, echo down to the present”. (P220) Since the individual views emerged in the recent years, it is easy to see alternative learning practices and relationships to text as little more than backward, outmoded learning strategies. (P220)

And then here comes out the second problem about standardizing the citing system and clarifying boundary between the “legally borrowing” and “illegally Plagiarism”. “A number of quite challenging issues were raised by several students, showing that many of them, while sometimes unsure about the rules of textual borrowing, were nevertheless aware of issues to do with texts and leaning.”(P22) If the clear rules have been positioned, students can, to some extent, avoid involving in the plagiarism situation.

Week 4 – Comments on Cultural Stereotype and its Perils

I would like to say that I really enjoy reading the Kuma’s book and like the stories which he cited in each chapter. In chapter four, the air crash certainly reflects the cultural deference to command authority of Korean. Also the “melting pot” from Ford company, which I heard before but know very little details about it. So after reading the story, what impressing me is language is not innocent at all. I have such idea because of the examples from the passage concerning the stereotype. Before I come across with the word “stereotype”, I didn’t realize it has such a broad influence of our life, culture and education. Both the negative and positive function of stereotype can help me better understand the cultures around me.

The stereotype reminded me another word “cookie cutter” that I met in the former reading. Cookie cutter refers to the same style students who are taught by the same teacher using the same materials and methodology, influenced by the same culture ideology. Stereotypes represent the outward expressions of hidden beliefs and values of the members of a particular society, or a community within a society (p51). By influenced of stereotype, people will first stereotype others and then see them; this will probably bring the misunderstanding and prejudice and may even cause serious problems. This situations always happens in the classroom, the teacher will classify the students into different groups with special labels on them and neglect the improvement and achievement they made. My mom is a P.E teacher, once she told me about her dissatisfaction with the students’ P.E class criterion. The standard required the students to achieve the same level of each activity without thinking their individual health conditions or other physical qualification. That seems impossible for some shy and weak girls to run as fast as the boys who are strong and likes playing football games.

In the part” obedience to authority”, I saw the prosperous thoughts from Confucius like, “jun jun chen chen, fu fu zi zi” and “yi re wei shi, zhong sheng wei fu”. It is true these kind of saying influence the Chinese people not blind obedience to teachers and elders. But what I want to point out is, although it advocates the obedience to the authority it doesn’t mean infatuatedly admiring. It just stands for the central meaning of respecting to the elders but not the thoroughly implement without consideration.

But Chinese students really have the problems with lacking of participant in the class, especially when they are doing as L2 learners. So sometimes it is quite difficult to distinguish which situations are they involved in. Being the class leader, you have to consider the students’ willing of learning and then set up the communicative activities to get them involved. That’s what I mentioned in the beginning of the passage, stereotype can really help if the teacher can define his objects accurately.

Week 3 comment on TQ Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning

I was really happy to find that the passage with lots of theories comes out with a concrete case. It does help with my understanding of the abstract theories. Through the case they study in, I got not only a very clear idea about what are the research questions and the theories they used, as well as the analysis which address the question, but I know how a kind of survey should be like and what to focus on different topics.

First of all, let’s start with several concepts concerning SLA. We know that this article is a discussion of the complications of the study for classroom teaching and current theories of communicative competence (p9). Some argues that SLA theorists have not adequately addressed how relations of power affect interaction between language learners and target language speakers (p9). Other theories of SLA focus on social rather than individual variables in language learning (p11). And also the three defining characteristics of subjectivity, outlined by Weedon, are: the multiple nature of the subject, subjectivity as a site of struggle; and subjectivity as changing over time (p15).

When I read the story from Eva, I first thought it was funny and little bit ridiculous, but later on, after reading the following the parts, I know such situation would probably happen at the very beginning of the study for ESL learners. And Eva was described as the l2 speaker who is unmotivated with a high affective filter, and she might be portrayed as a poor language learner who has not developed sociolinguistic competence (p10). This reminds me of the first article I read in the class which says that the L2 learners are defined as the deficient communicators who struggle to overcome an underdeveloped L2 competence and strive to reach the target competence of an idealized native speaker.

What I am thinking is that the great social culture gap between the language learner group and the target language group might really requires the learners to struggle to interact with the members of the target language community. Here comes my own story, I have two roommates who are native speakers. When I chat with them, spontaneously they want to talk with me in a very suitable way of our “international conversation”, I can easily know what they talk about and what they want to express to me, even though I always come across with lot of vocabularies beyond my fields. It seems that we have no problems of communication. But everything changes when they begin to talk to each other or when they exchange the ideas about the TV shows or stories of their friends. I am totally stucked and dropped out of the conversation. This let me think about the theories appears in the article saying that the L2 learners should enhance their communicative competence, that is to say to fight for their rights to speak.

Something about APA style

I found a very useful website about APA. I hope it helps !

http://www.apastyle.org/

Big Ideas

One thing that makes me happy during the study process is that I will meet some of the words, sentences, concepts, theories and people again just after I read, learn or know them a couple of days or hours ago. That makes me a little bit satisfied about what I learn and what material I choose.

Last week, this situation happened. When I just have a general idea about the Post-method from the methodology class, I come across with the three-dimensional post-method pedagogy: particularity, practicality, possibility. This is what we call big ideas in Dr. Seloni’s class. I really like it and this is what I didn’t know before. Let me add more details about these concepts. For the particularity, it refers to the advancement of a context-sensitive, location-specific pedagogy. It is based on the particular time with particular educators at particular place. From the practicality, I gain the ideas of every change is possible. The action and reflection from the students form a kind of recycle. The possibility covers more aspects of the background of both teachers and students. The learners may be influenced by the teachers’ political status, the economic views or even the values.

The second exciting event I want to share with you is my own experience of the “U-shaped cultural phenomenon”. When I read about this I was so surprised, because I was really involved in such situation. When I was nine years old, I migrated from north China to the south with my parents. Although I was still in the same country, since the language was quite different from the north and south, it was a big change for me including the environment, the weather, the food, the teaching method in my school, etc. So everything comes out naturally as Kuma mentioned in his article. The process is just like a “U” shaped. What I was thinking, before I read this article, was just concerning my own experiences, but without any relationship with the culture globalization theories. And now I know this is a very natural development for a new comer.

Actually, last week was the first week I began to read the TESOL QD in detail. I found it gave me a broader view of the same article or the same concepts. It also helped me finding deeper meaning of some theories. Since most of us didn’t read the original article, we didn’t go deeper about this article. And here comes a question like this, why the concept of method in language teaching is politically structured and delivered. Does it mean the language is not neutral or it is influenced by the teachers’ backgrounds? I will try to find the answers after I finish reading the article.

Till now, I have no idea about the Hall’s book, like Cindy said, it was a heave book and it was really challenging to most of us. So I will spend most of the time in this week to finish reading the chapters and then find out some questions or big ideas sharing with you all.

Have a nice week!

On Discourse, Communication, and Fundamental Concepts in SLA Research

Before I finally finished reading the whole article, I couldn’t imagine what I regarded simply and direct way of teaching and learning containing several theories, ideologies and thoughts concerning psychology. I was really surprised and excited about the process of purchases so many significant concepts and methods of the field I researching in. Just like the author says SLA research broadening the traditional SLA data base. In fact, it did the same thing to me; the article helps me exploring the field of SLA.

For me, this long article is a really hard target to achieve. But it is true that I gain a lot from it. First of all, from the very beginning of the passage, I have a crystal clear impression of the two views of SLA, cognitive and mechanistic orientations and social and contextual orientation. It is true that as foreign speakers, we have to struggle for the meaning of words and sentences. I think the speakers are naturally becoming the defective speakers during the learning journey, but I want to claim that these have no relationship with the capability of the communicative competence. Since the leading status of the view of cognitive and mentalistic, the article has sought to argue for a reconceptualization of SLA that would significantly enlarge the ontological and empirical parameters of the field and dissolve the imbalance of them.

Reading the article, just like a revision of the linguistic history. In the “DISCOURSE AND COMMUNICATION” part, there comes so many linguists and their predominant views, assumptions show up while I was trying really hard to recognize and remember them all. The linguist tycoon, Chomsky shows up first, which gives me some hope of understanding the article, because I met somebody I knew before. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Later on, after I read several lines of his assumptions, I come across with formalistic, context free, grammatical competence. I was really confused about all these concepts. But by Hymes’s concept of communicative competence, a more social and contextual view of language rooted in my mind. According to Gregg’s views, more concepts added to my mind: acquisition is an individual phenomenon which rooted in humans mind and brain.

In the part COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES, the exact example of a CS occurs. It illustrates how the interlanguage communication happens. It is an example between one native speaker and one nonnative speaker. And two factors I understand from it are (a) when FS have the difficulties to express by using the foreign language they will choose some familiar words which they regard as the same meaning with their native language and (b) the misunderstanding of the key words may not be the problem of the communication between the two speakers.

I think people born with capability of communicative competence no matter what language they obtain. We Chinese students put too much effort on the grammar and exercise and the test! We lost the truth of the learning and missed the joy of acquisition another culture. So it seems the imbalance is everywhere, I really hope the study of TESOL will help solving the problem and do contribution to my further teaching.

http://xiaokun-xiaokun.blogspot.com/

Hi there!
Welcome to my blog! It is a really nice afternoon. I successfully set up my individual blog and found the eight pages article Dr. Sharon given to us!

Assignments are coming！ wake up everybody！