Week 6 Readings-Brown and Kuma

Maximizing Learning Opportunities

“Teachers know that they cannot become prisoners of their own agenda.” Lesson plans and teaching go hand in hand, teachers need to hand in lesson plans weekly to ensure they are on task with the curriculum. But teachers should use lesson plans as a guide and if the lesson organically unfolds in another direction we should keep in mind it can be a natural and beautiful thing. Teachers can also get into funks with learning materials as well. Because the goal is to make progress every class period teachers sometimes get caught up in limitations, such as texts. I fully agree that teachers should texts as “a springboard to launch the interactive process in the classroom”(46). Teachers should be the ones with the responsibility to educate their students, and not depend 100 percent on texts. The limitations in the syllabus can hold back classroom activity and originality as well. When teachers chart out every minute of class time there is no room for the student. If there is not time carved out for students to discuss, debate, ask questions about what interests or confuses them then they are not being educated as well as they should be. Teachers should be encouraging students to get involved into beneficial conversations and pushing the conversations by asking quality questions.

Teaching by Principals

The principal of Automaticity places importance in fluency and subconscious absorption of language through meaningful use. This principal focuses on the use of language for genuine purposes in a classroom. Students need to practice patience in this principal because it does not come overnight. This is a great principal to teach students because it teaches hard work and discipline. It shows the students that language is a process, that using shortcuts will not give you fluency.  Another principal that stood out to me was the principal of meaningful learning. When students tap into their prior knowledge in a learning process then the learning is more significant to them. By appealing to the students interests or backgrounds the students have a focal point but this becomes tricky in language learning. It is important for teachers to avoid memorization and theories and focus on accomplishing the goals of the lesson while integrating new knowledge to the student’s schema. Intrinsic motivation follows this principal because again the student’s learning behavior stems from what the student wants to know and what they are familiar with. When teachers tap into this motivation, when students are interested in what they are learning, there is no need for outside rewards they are self rewarded. When a student begins to expect rewards from learning and only learns to receive rewards then the learning is not organic, it is not valuable anymore. Students that are motivated to learn, that have teachers that encourage and induce curiosity of learning are self-rewarding. Supporting students is a major role for teachers and the Language Ego principal values this. Hopefully with the support and understanding of the teacher the students will have a willingness to communicate and not feel silly using their new language and provide feedback and attain communicative competence.  

Strategies Based Instruction

It comes to no surprise that good language learning behavior involves the student taking charge of their learning, be organized, keep their goal in mind, making smart guesses, learn from their mistakes, and put themselves and their new language out there to practice. These can also be described for good learning behaviors of any subject because when learners have these learning qualities they are committed to learning. Part of this is being aware of weaknesses and strengths because how else would learners know what they need to work on to become better. Checklists, style tests, and most importantly discussions can help a learner organize and develop self awareness. As future teachers we need to learn how to encourage our students to use strategies. Being totally interactive with the students and getting to know them helps teachers understand the student’s wants and needs. Having learning centers in the classroom can help student focus their attention on a certain subject and help teach them to use these strategies independently.