Blog 4

Reflection

Understanding English Language Learners:
Since English is my second language, I can understand how ELLs think when they learn English in a classroom environment.  According to Brown and Lee (2015) the knowledge I learned from this course, I learned there are the differences between teaching young ELLs and adult ELLs. For the adult, according to these scholars “they have superior cognitive abilities that can make them more successful in certain classroom endeavors (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.117).”  When teachers teach children in English, they need to think about their intellectual development, attention span, sensory input, affective factors, and authentic, meaningful language (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.110-113).
Strategies and Techniques to instruct and assess ELLs:
From this course, I learned many methods and strategies for teaching English. I think about the ESL courses that I have taken before; I can identify what methods my ESL teachers used right now.  My English teachers in my country would like to choose translation methods to teach English.  It is an effective way of teaching language, but it is a teacher-centered classroom focused around memorization of grammatical rules and exercises.  However, students will have a lack of expereince speaking in English and feel bored in the classes.  After taking this course, I learned that teaching English based on proficiency levels, should care about students’ background, introduce culture and sociopolitical contexts, use different instructions for different levels, and so on.  Before ESL teachers teach a lesson to students, they need to choose instructions according to different levels in their classroom.  Next, it is important to prepare materials that are related to ELL’s background and age.  For example, teachers can know about students’ home language and prepare information that your students may understand in the class. In ESL teachers’ lesson plan, they always need to modify different instructions and have modifications for ELLs.
Teaching philosophy:
At the beginning of this course, I said my teaching philosophy is to practice.  After I learned about ELLs and how to teach ELLs, I think practice is not the only way to teach.  It is also important for teachers to teach individually, or individualize the experience for each student.  Everyone has different needs, so they need different methods for them to learn.  This course forces me to think about research articles.  When teachers require students to learn new knowledge, they should know it is important for them, as teachers to learn more new methods as well.  On the other hand, I learned that sometimes it is not easy for teachers to plan lessons alone, so they can have peer coaching, team teaching, collaborative curriculum development and revision, presenting at a professional conference, joining a professional association of teachers, and informal local teacher support groups (Brown & Lee, 2015, P.560-563).  I like the ESL teacher interview assignment, because it allows us to know about ESL students.  After we watched everyone’s interview, we can understand what kinds of methods ESL teachers would like to use right now.  We know about different ESL programs they have.  In the future classroom, I may not become an ESL teacher, but I think I know how to help ELLs to learn knowledge.  I would like to become an bilingual certificated teacher in the future.  I think this course helped me understand how to learn another language.
Brown, H. D., & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: an interactive approach to 
language pedagogy (4th ed.). White Plains, NY: Pearson Longman.