English 345: Tuesday, September 27

"Some severe criticisms of the approach have been summarised by Kelly, and he puts out that the most fundamental criticism is that philosophically it reduces people to the level of automatons who can be trained to behave in particular ways..." the Anthology states in regard to the curriculum plan of Reconstructionism (72). Pretty harsh if you ask me, but I can see how that could happen if an instructor uses only this type of curriculum plan and takes all of the "unambiguous" descriptions of the behavior to be performed to the absolute literal in every lesson plan. However, I just cannot see that happening; there is bound to be gray area when a person is teaching.

That being said, I find that the process model of curriculum development to be especially useful for language learners--or learners in any classroom really:  "The goals of education are not defined in terms of particular ends or products, but in terms of the processes and procedures by which the individual develops understanding and awareness and creates possibilities for future learning" (73). In this approach, language learners are not graded just on that finished project, a research paper for instance. Rather, they can also be graded on just how much they learned by working on that paper regardless of what the final project may look like. This process approach takes into account the cultural differences that language learner always bring to school assignments, including the research paper. How one does a "research paper" may be different in every country, and the "way" we do it here in Illinois is very much culturally constructed. Considering that process, how much they learned, also alleviates some of the pressure from the students, as the final outcome is not all that counts; how much they learned and what they can apply to further language learning matters, as well.

I appreciated that the chapter on lesson planning opened up with an "Alice in Wonderland" quotation, one of my favorite books and words that ring extremely true when planning a lesson. However, this chapter left out an extremely important, often difficult, concept that all high school or middle school teachers will have to deal with: Lesson planning for different sections of the same class (for examples, having four different classes of regular freshman English). These classes themselves, although labeled the same and working on the same projects, may need less or more time on different activities (or just may get off track more). Thus, adapting lesson plans also means making sure that each class is on the right track and remains with those educational objectives. While this may sound easy, making sure to tell each class the same thing--especially if the lesson changed can also be extremely challenging.

English 345: Thursday, September 22

I find today's readings interesting, partly because I believe that both content-based instruction and sheltered instruction should be ESL techniques that the content area teachers themselves in middle school and in high school should not only be aware of, but should attempt to enact in their own content classrooms. "Most schools are not meeting the challenges of educating linguistically and culturally diverse students well," the article featuring an introduction to Sheltered Instruction notes. One challenge that arises from these diverse students is that teachers who teach these students--both ESL and content area teachers--need to talk to each other about what is going on in either classroom in order to provide the most effective education for those second language learners. However, in my experience in various high school settings, I have rarely ever seen the content area teachers and the ESL teachers communicate. It has been almost like those ESL teachers were on a language island all of their own. This also may have been because, in many districts, the ESL teachers must shuttle between different schools during the day due to budget contraints--but that is an entirely different issue.

What is positive about both CBI and SI is that they somehow "force" these groups of teachers to interact. If an ESL teacher wishes to create a sheltered classroom, he or she would have to communicate with the English or the science teacher, for example, through something like weekly meetings in order to create an authentic classroom atmosphere where the ESL students are learning both the content of the course through modified instruction of the language.

These programs could then, as the article suggests, become a bridge to mainstream classrooms. Ideally, the mainstream classroom teacher, through that communication with the ESL teacher, would have learned more about language acquisition and, for example, sheltered instruction so the appropriate amount of scaffolding could continue to go on in the content classroom, but the students would then become more socialized into the high school's fabric.

English 345: Tuesday, September 20

Just what is a task? That question continues to pop into my mind despite having read numerous articles about task-based instruction. If one is simply researching a “task,” these “activities” may be short (and easily observable). If one is using these tasks as a teaching method, they may be longer, perhaps a few days or an entire unit long.  

Or not.

And therein, situated neatly in that “or not,” lies my confusion. Just what really constitutes a task? Does it always take into account some sort of form as well as the meaning of language? But then what is this balance of form versus meaning within those tasks?  “Opportunities for production [of language] may force students to pay close attention to form and to the relationship between form and mean,” write Beglar and Hunt in the anthology (97). Ok, that seems to make sense… so task-based language teaching utilizes both to help students become successful language learners.

 And yet, this very same anthology disappoints me as I read a few pages on:  “Second, and more worrisome, is the fact that no task-based program has been implemented and subjected to rigorous evaluation” (102). In seeming agreement with this anthology, Skehan’s article notes multiple areas of task-based research, but this research is often vitally different from the actual task-based instruction seen in the classrooms, especially the example in the Japanese school given found in the anthology: The focused task (likely meaning shorter and to the point) is more of interest to experimental researchers and testers while those tasks that take of up an entire class period are more of interest to teachers and non-experimental researchers. Skehan also writes that many tasks, as the critiques mention, are missing the “inevitable social dimension of language use’” (11).

So, as I continue to consider just what a task is, just how to implement it, just how long to implement it(and so on and so on), I begin to realize that I may not have the answers because, truly, no one has the answers—even those famous researchers getting paid to come up with those said “answers” for all of us. Surely this blog post doesn’t do anything to move scholarship forward—and I’m okay with that.  I was hoping that, as I wrote this post, I would have some sort of epiphany, and the answer (there’s that word again!) to my task questions would come to me.

One didn’t.

But I’m okay with that, too. Because, in nearly every case, we teachers will never really know the “right” answers to anything, anyways. We may have others giving us suggestions, but those, too, are simply suggestions. Sometimes, we just have to go against what all those famous researchers say and just do what feels right. Besides, we know our students better than those other guys do, anyways.

And if all else fails, we can give the students a task to do… if we can ever figure out what that really is.

English 345: Thursday, September 15

“The Communicate Approach is the way to do it, no matter where a yoare, no matter what the context” (281). While Bax notes that no person explicitly comes out and says this regarding CLT, the author writes that this way of thinking about teaching language is still deeply imbedded in the minds of many people. Perhaps it is because I have been exposed to many different approaches and methods, but I just cannot believe that some educated people would take such a stance in regards to thinking. It seems like common sense to me to take the context of the teaching, to take where a person comes from and the ideologies that go with that, into account. But, as I said before, this is perhaps just because I have been exposed to many different ideas.

And yet, even great institutions such as the Chinese government apparently do not understand the idea of taking into the account of the context of their own people. Hu’s article highlights just how different the Chinese school system is from that of the one found in many places in America. Our “student-centered” way of thinking here is replaced with a “teacher-centered/almost absolute authority” approach over there. “Normal” activities in the U.S. such as discussions and debating amongst ourselves are replaced with the “normal” thinking that true knowledge resides in written texts, that true learning comes from reading books, not from discussions.

Neither way of thinking about learning is correct. What is highlighted above simply goes to show, once again, that one single method can never work for language teaching. There are far too many factors involved for that to ever work—with context being an extremely important one. I believe that what both of these articles indirectly do is place great importance on the use of critical pedagogy, on examining social, culture, and political factors that surround all forms of education, including language learning.

English 345: Tuesday, September 13

"Activities that are truly communicative," Larsen-Freeman's article notes, "have three features in common: information gap, choice, and feedback" (129). I find that Communicative Language Teaching, at its heart, appears to be a good idea. Language learners should know when and how to say what to whom, not just learn language in a vacuum in the academic classroom. However, the "information gap" noted above represents one of the issues that I take with this method, especially in relation to the examples given in the article.

The article features a high-intermediate level of adult immigrants in Canada, so, as adults, doing "real world" things such as looking at newspaper articles and deciphering what real world situations are represented on picture cards appear to be a good idea. However, I am rather unsure about the use of role playing, a technique that the article seems to consider an important part of CLT. I can see the good in role playing, of someone being the worker and someone being the boss, getting to practice dialogue that would be used in those situations. However, I just cannot see this being that effective in the classroom. A language learner knows that the person whom they are talking to is not really their "boss," so, no matter how hard they try to make it "real," real life situations such as the one mentioned above simply cannot be duplicated in the classroom.

A better way to create these "real life" language situations is brought up in Kumaravadivelu's Chapter Three. The authors gives examples of some learning opportunities outside of the classroom, ways in which language learners can connect to the outside community. These examples, such as following a local news story then interviewing local citizens to get their reactions or having the students choose one student service group and talk to people about that, appear to be much better real life language situations--because they truly are real life language situations, ones that take relevant issues in the community and allow the learners to get involved while still working on their language skills--a combinationt that "critical pedagogy" would be proud of.

English 345: Ibrahim, "Becoming Black: Rap and Hip-Hop, Race, Gender, Identity, and the Politics of ESL Learning"

"We identify ourselves more with the Blacks of America. But, this is normal, this is genetic. We can't, since we live in Canada, we can't identify ourselves with Whites or country music, you know. We are going to identify ourselves on the contrary with people of our color, who have our lifestyle, you know,"an African teen who has recently immigranted to Canada tells the researcher in the six-month critical ethnographic study asking how different raced, gendered, sexualized, abled, and classed social identities enter the process of learning an L2 (361).

What is interesting about this study is that here, these twelve students chose to have a marginalized linguistic norm as the target rather than the one spoken by the majority--and by nearly all of their new peers in Canada. They chose a norm that they saw in popular culture, that they seemed to find some sort of reflection in. "Becoming Black [my notes added here: they were not seen as such in Africa], I have argued, was an identity signifier produced by and producing the very process of BESL. [....] In becoming Black, the African youths were interpellated by Black popular cultureal forms, rap and hip-hop, as sites of identifiication" (365)

Within this interesting study of why and how these Blacks chose their "new" identities were some suggestions made by the author/researcher on how to include transformative pedagogy in the classroom in order for these students to see themselves reflected in the curriculum somewhere. He places rap and hip-hop as sites of hope and possibility, with that hope that all learners can see multiple ways of speaking, being and learning through these genres. "To put it more broadly," Ibrahim writes, "maybe the time has come to close the split between minority students' identities and the school curriculum and between those identities and classroom pedagogies, subjects and materials" (367).

English 345: Thursday, September 8

Because it represents only the introduction to a special issues on the issue of Critical Approaches to TESOL, I assumed that this article by Pennycook would be more of a quick overview of the articles to be found within that issue--more of a simple synopsis if you will. So, I was very surprised that the article in itself was extremely interesting; a few points that I will discuss here were especially intriguing.

I will first start with a point at the end of the article, a quotation that I made sure to highlight as I pondered various issues in the article's pages. "Gee suggests that "English teachers stand at the very heart of the most crucial educational, cultural, and political issues of our time","  the author notes on page 346. When I first decided that I wanted to be an English teacher, the overwhelming reasons were that I loved to read and write and found satisfaction in helping others learn; unlike many of the others in this class, I had little desire (or knowledge about) in teaching L2 learners.  Yet, in the few years since then, I have found those reasons evolving, with the ideas suggested in this quotation at the "very heart" of my new reasons in wanting to become an English teacher. Yes, I still love to read and write; however, I have also found now wanting to teach others about all of the implications that come with various Englishes in use, those cultural and political applications that any piece of English--spoken or written carries with it. Even a genre as simple as a text message can be situationed in some sort of cultural and political background, and I want students to consider these implications as they learn.

A second interesting point from the article comes on page 332, in the description of Ibrahim's article within this special issue. He writes about "becoming black," about how non-English-speaking African backgrounds garner this new description once they enter "the racialized world of North America" (332). This point is pretty obvious, but it is always relevant to point out that characterizations such as race are really socially constructed as well, changing as a person changes and moves into different cultures. Considering ESL classrooms in the United States in this light, very likely most of those students are dealing with "new" social classifications in this country as well as a new language, once again emphasizing the political and cultural forces that always go along with teaching English.

English 345: Tuesday, September 6

"It has been suggested that there is no substantial difference between common sense and theory, particularly in the field of education," a quotation that seems to get at the heart of chapters one and two (Kumaravadivelu 17). In the first few weeks of class, we have come to problematize various words often used in teaching, including method, task, and the aforementioned word, theory. Likely throughout our own education classes and our experience in the classrooms, these words have been brought up, as well... often as things that some educators appear to willingly accept simply because some "higher up" told them to.

When I was student teaching, I had to do daily phonics drills each day to help the "remedial" English class of high school freshmen read English better. These drills came out of a book called "Rewards," a pretty self-gratifying name for a book I suppose now, and were extremely monotous. The methods used mostly consisted of me saying something, the students repeating, and so on and so on. Most of the class were ESL students, and they seemed to get it (although I could never be sure that anyone was actually saying anything)

Then, I did not think much of it except for the fact that it was really boring. Now, I would wonder about a few things, namely:  How is it a good idea use a blanket method for all students? Sure, they all improved some, but could they improve much more with a diverse approach? Finally, how would using some of my "common sense" discussed in the chapters have changed my thoughts on this method?

Ideally, I would look for more bottom-up processes that start with the teacher, "generate location-specific, classroom-oriented innovative strategies" (33). This use of diversity in lessons makes "common sense" to me. However, the crux of my situation was that I really had no choice. I was just a student teacher given a bunch of lessons that the administration wanted me to try. The situation would also have been no different if my coordinating teacher had been in charge then. The administration continued to search for that one no-fail method that would work for all of the children.