Learning Portfolio

Learning Portfolio

by MarĂ­a Catalina Fonseca Teaching English to Young Learners ULACIT 2015

INDEX •DAP •LEARNING STYLES, TEACHING STYLES, ELEMENTS THAT INFLUENCE THE TEACHING STYLE, TEACHING APPROACHES, CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT, AND PLANNING. •TEACHING LISTENING TO YOUNG LEARNERS •TEACHING SPEAKING TO YOUNG LEARNERS

INDEX •PLANNING SESSION FOR LISTENING AND SPEAKING •TEACHING READING TO YOUNG LEARNERS •TEACHING WRITING TO YOUNG LEARNERS •TEACHING VOCABULARY TO YOUNG LEARNERS

Entry #1

DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE INSTRUCTION (OR PRACTICE) This kind of instruction (DAP) refers to teaching in a level and way that is the correct one for kids’ age, abilities, level of cognitive and mental development, and of course, giving all the required materials, steps, and help needed for having a good learning process.

Keeping this type of “idea” in teachers’ heads is good for teachers, and for students. It is a win-win relation because teachers don´t get frustrated of activities that simply don´t work out as they were planned, or students don’t get anxious when they can’t complete a determine task because it is too difficult (or they get bored when it’s too easy).

“Good preschool teachers maintain appropriate expectations, providing each child with the right mix of challenge, support, sensitivity, and stimulation. With their knowledge, skill, and training, teachers—in collaboration with families—can ensure that programs promote and enhance every child’s learning.” (National Association for the Education of Young Children) Also, a very good definition of DAP is: “DAP involves teachers meeting young children where they are (by stage of development), both as individuals and as part of a group; and helping each child meet challenging and achievable learning goals.” (National Association for the Education of Young Children) It is surely relevant for teachers who want to teach this way is that we have to keep watching, analyzing, researching, making chances, adapting, and much more, our planning and activities so they can match most of our students in classes. We have to match the social needs, the cultural aspects, the cognitive level, the age of kids, the possible special abilities, the individual differences, and of course, the appropriate level of difficultness.

Entry #2

In this class, we studied: LEARNING STYLES, TEACHING STYLES, ELEMENTS THAT INFLUENCE THE TEACHING STYLE, TEACHING APPROACHES, CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT, AND PLANNING. Starting from the first topic, the learning styles; we have eight different learning styles, which are: interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical-mathematical, naturalist, spatial, bodilykinesthetic, and musical. This is a theory developed by Dr. Howard Gardner, back in the 1980s.

The theory raised popularity in the U.S. because he thought that intelligence wasn’t being fully measured in schools because they were focusing only in the logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences, when there were other possibilities. (American Institute for Learning and Human Development) All people have these eight types, but only one or two of them are dominant. No matter who learns through which learning style, always remember that learning in one or other form won´t make anyone less intelligent.

Then, we have the teaching styles that should be the way, the approach to match those learning types. In this case we have five teaching styles, which are: delegator, expert, formal authority, personal model, and facilitator. This last one is the kind of teaching that should be present in every classroom because it has the right and adequate balance for giving students with the correct amount of help and guidance, and with a good quantity of independency.

I think that a teacher should always try to be a facilitator. Obviously trying to have the good qualities (as knowing the subject, being able to let kids do things on their own, to be strict and to have rules, etc.), and also trying to avoid the excess of help, the excess of rules, and those tough attitudes towards the classroom and students. A facilitator is way more meaningful as a teacher, than any other kind of educator. This person strives and tries to do their best to meet students’ needs at all times, giving more diverse opportunities to learn than in a normal-type of class. This is possible and easier when you have more experience and you know your students, because a teacher can be as focused on those details in activities (like including every intelligence, or including every skill in the planning) and less in the part of classroom management that comes after some experience.

We also saw some elements that influence on the teaching style, like the career-stage factors, curriculum factors, knowledge factors, personal factors, professional factors, and institutional factors. It is very interesting how the education and some other preparation and experience teachers have before teaching, influence on the way they will do it. Of course, personality takes a huge role here because it will always interfere with the teaching process. The way we react in specific situations, or the way we see problems, or even the attitude toward life in general.

Besides the previous topics, there are some others that are important. The teaching approaches are divided into student-centered and teacher-centered, and the main difference is that in the first one students are on active role and they take the biggest responsibility for their own learning, and in the second one, the teacher is in charge of the whole process and they lead and share the informational process in the lesson.

Also, we watched a video about classroom management, and we commented and shared some very useful tips, which were: • Reinforce positive things.

• Give rewards like stickers or take the class pet home.

• Set clear rules, and make them no more than five.

• Make a classroom routine.

• Involve students in every activity.

• Always have a plan B, and extra activities.

• Praise in public, call the attention in private.

In the part of the lesson planning, we studied the main elements that should be included, such as: • General and specific objectives • Contents • Activities (very detailed and by steps, and matching the different learning styles) • Materials

• Timing • Assessment • Special needs, special abilities • Have the plan in class

Entry #3 TEACHING LISTENING TO YOUNG LEARNERS In this topic, we went through these aspects:

•

What is listening?

• Things to do before, during, and after listening • skills

Steps for the development of listening

•

Classroom techniques and activities

• Rules of listening in young learners’ classes •

How to be a good listener?

What is listening?

It is the ability to accurate receive and interpret messages in the communication process.

Also, without listening, messages are easily misunderstood. There is a big difference between hearing and listening (in the first one is only hearing sounds, while in the second one people need to be focused, paying attention, and being aware of verbal and non-verbal messages).

Some important factors about listening are: • Listening depends on how people perceive and understand (own perspective and knowledge).

• Listening involves a sender, a message, and a receiver.

• Listener must cope with sender´s vocabulary, structure, rate of delivery, and overall knowledge and abilities.

• Listening complexity is greater in the context of second language, this due to the receiver has incomplete control of the language.

Things to do before, during, and after listening Before listening: • Plan the literature task. Do not make a listening activity just because, plan in advance.

• Set a purpose or decide in advance what to listen for.

Again, plan in advance.

• Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed. Know your students to do this!

• Determine whether to enter the text from the top-down or from the bottom-up approach. In the first approach, the importance is in the overall meaning, while in the second one is on the words and phrases.

During listening: • Monitor comprehension. Make pauses, ask questions.

• Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses. Wrong answers are clue of misunderstanding, or distracted students.

• Decide what is and is not important to understand.

Overwhelming students is not the idea.

• Listen / view again to check comprehension. Ask questions regarding the listening.

• Ask for help. If you are not sure of how to implement or check listening, ask for help form someone who knows well. If not, do not do the activity if you are not able to handle it completely.

After listening: • Evaluate: • Comprehension and strategy use • Comprehension in a particular task or area.

• Overall process in listening and in particular types of listening tasks.

• Decide is the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and the task.

• Modify strategies if necessary.

Classroom techniques and activities • Songs for circle time • Oral instructions and commands • Songs or videos to introduce new topics • Use songs or videos as weekly reward

• Do not forget to include listening in the planning • Include and foster storytelling • Encourage show & tell presentations • Bingo • Games like “Simon says”, or “Red light-Green light” • Background music • Conflict solutions • Create a comfortable sharing space in class • Listening with your whole body • Auditory discrimination Different listening tasks: • Listen & do

early steps

• Listen & draw • Listen & color

pre-k

• Listen & mime • Listen & predict • Listen & respond

kinder

• Listen & write

needs literacy

• Listen & identify

may need literacy

• Listen & match

may need literacy

• Listen & complete • Listen & read

prep

needs literacy /

model for pronunciation

How to be a good listener?

•

Raise your hand to talk

•

Eyes watch

•

Ears listen

•

Mouths wait to talk

•

Hands on your lap

•

Face forward

• Brain thinks about what is going on •

Cris-cross, applesauce

Entry #4 TEACHING SPEAKING TO YOUNG LEARNERS Within this main topic, we went over: •

Development of Speaking Skills

•

Mean Length of Utterances (MLU)

•

Overgeneralization of Errors

•

7 Principles for Designing Speaking Techniques or Activities

•

Audio-Lingual Method (ALM) and its Characteristics

•

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

•

Conclusions

In the classroom, it is very important that the teacher has a correct and clear English because kids learn from her. The teacher’s English will directly influence students’ pronunciation, intonation, and confidence. Teaching speaking by example is important, but the teacher should not expect that all kids learn and speak English equally because there are different abilities, expectations, and motivation level between students. Always try to encourage kids to start speaking so they can express their feelings and share their needs, which is highly relevant in a learning environment.

Development of Speaking Skills Take into consideration the following aspects: • Kids are young and they are not fully developed. There will be some limitations in speaking, such as language problems.

•

Children have advantages in pronunciation when they learn English in a very early age.

•

There will always be difficulties with some phonemes.

•

Letter “r” is the most difficult sound or phoneme.

Mean length of utterances (MLU) It is a linguistic measure in kids. A high MLU will indicate a higher level of language proficiency. But the expectations for children have to be at the level of their development, asking for more than they are able to do, can put them into high anxiety situations.

Overgeneralization of errors Kids are so smart, and they can tell when something is having a specific structure, but when they get that pattern, they usually over-use it, and they make mistakes. During the English learning process, these mistakes are very common. Our role as teachers is to correct them and give them the correct use, no matter if we think they are “too young” for that, they always deserve an answer and an explanation.

7 Principles for Designing Speaking Techniques or Activities 1.

Use techniques that cover the spectrum of learners need, from language-based on accuracy to message-based focus on interaction, meaning, and fluency.

2.

Provide motivating activities.

3.

Encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts.

4.

Provide appropriate feedback and correction.

5.

Capitalize on the natural link between speaking and listening.

6.

Give students opportunities to initiate oral communication.

7.

Encourage the development of speaking strategies.

Conclusions •

Speaking is playing with words and utterances.

• Speaking is important in children’s development, but they still have limitations in MLU and pronunciation.

•

Every known method has their advantages and disadvantages.

• As a teacher, you should correct errors, and not only behaviors. This means that not because they are little kids only, they do not need to be corrected.

• Speaking activities lead to high noisy classrooms, so manage your group correctly, and have strategies to fight that excess noise

Entry #5 PLANNING SESSION FOR LISTENING AND SPEAKING In this session the activity was planning ten activities, one daily, for the listening and speaking skills. In this plan, there had to be objectives, contents, activities, materials or resources, and assessment.

I learned that an activity can perfectly has one single objective and that fine. Also, that to achieve an objective, you must have like two or three activities.

It was difficult to plan all those activities without extra resources (like internet), but at the end was very exciting to see that I was able to plan lots of activities in two hours. I usually plan activities in my house, with internet access and some extra resources, like previous planning, to help myself making the objectives and assessments, which are the most difficult parts of planning for me. In that day, planning in the classroom was a pretty difficult task because it was not my “natural environment” to do it, I didn’t feel 100% comfortable. And of course, I’m very slow at it, so the “it has to be ready before 6” kind of put the work harder.

At the end, I felt I did a good job. I could have done it better of course. My activities were some that I already made with my kids and they were obviously easy to do, but the new ones were brain-breakers.

In the teacher’s feedback, I knew that I had to organize my activities from the simpler to the more complex, in a logical order, so I can have a correct learning process.

First, teaching the most basic things, then adding more and more complexity to my activities.

Entry #6 TEACHING READING TO YOUNG LEARNERS What is reading?

It is the process of looking at a series of written symbols (letters) and getting a meaning from them. When we read, we use our eyes to receive and our brain to convert the messages. Also, if there is no understanding of what we are reading, there is not a full reading process there. The main reason to the reading is because it will be needed forever and for everything. Reading is a silent activity, which can become into a hobby or leisure activity.

Background • Exploit reader’s background knowledge • Build strong vocabulary base • Teach for comprehension, not reading for reading.

• Work on increasing reading rate • Teach reading strategies • Encourage readers to transform strategies into skills • Build assessment and evaluation into your teaching • Strive for continuous improvement as a reading teacher Development of reading skills • Prediction • (Identify) characters • (Describe) character similarities and differences – vocabulary • (Recognize, identify, and describe) setting – spatial relationships • (Identify) sequence in a story – order • (Identify) plot in a story – beginning, middle, and end • (Recall and retell) story events – structure (sentences) • (Distinguish between) realism and fantasy – real life (do this at the beginning to show kids that stories are invented, and that monsters, aliens and scary things do not exist in reality) • (Model-first and apply-second) classification and categorization – clean up toys, clothes, groceries • (Recognize) the main idea of a story – learning main event • (Apply) compare and contrast – structure, differences & similarities, description, vocabulary, make choices, put in someone else’s shoes • (Draw) conclusion in a story – consequences, put in ideal situations • (Apply) cause and effect – consequences

How to teach reading?

• Prepare kids for the context of the text (pre-reading). Use visuals that are related to the story, like to put kids “on the mood” for that book • Think about vocabulary that will appear in the text (and find easy words to explain it) • Discuss the text before answering questions (do this process to verify understanding before getting kids to answer questions, also to clarify some doubts from the story)

Entry #7 TEACHING WRITING TO YOUNG LEARNERS What is writing? Writing is a method of representing language in a visual way. But, as the nature of expectation for literacy have changed, so the nature of writing. This is due to the development of technology and children incorporating to these changes • Everyone can write. Teachers can help students to become better writers • Developing writers need -constant- support. This can come through carefully designed writing instruction oriented toward acquiring new strategies and skills • Writers can benefit from teachers who simply support and give them time to write. Instruction matters!!

Development of writing skills • Writing is a productive skill that requires concentration and effort • Writing requires practice to do it well • Writing is a process. Revision is always part of writing • Good writing goes hand in hand with reading

• It can be a struggle to explain punctuation, spelling, and grammar without hand gestures or intonation • Find a way for their voice to come across on a piece of paper or a computer screen • Easiest way to teach writing is reading to kids, have discussions about the readings, and break down a story into parts.

Process of writing development 1.Introduce students to good writing 2.Motivate students to write about the world around them (having a journal is great) 3.Emphasize that good writing in a series of steps: • Brainstorm ideas first • Organize ideas into groups • Write a paragraph around each group of ideas (main idea + 3 or 4 ideas to support it) • Revise your work Classroom techniques and activities • Creative writing • Peer writing • Journal diaries and storytelling • Cooperative writing • Cartoons • Book projects • Tracings

Entry #8

TEACHING VOCABULARY TO YOUNG LEARNERS What is vocabulary?

It can be defined as the words we teach in the foreign language.

But the real meaning of vocabulary is not words only, it is also a meaning and a context (know how and when to use the word).

• Languages emerge first as words.

• Vocabulary is still widening every day, in our mother tongue, or in the foreign language.

• There are two main obstacles or difficulties that language learners come across when studying a new language: making the correct connections between form of the words and their meaning, and using the correct form of a word for what they are thinking. This means putting correctly their thoughts into words.

Mainly when language learners are beginners and they think in their first language to then translate that into the target language.

• To achieve and get over the challenges, learners need to acquire a big quantity of vocabulary to produce and understand, be able to recall them easily, and develop strategies for coping with gaps in word knowledge.

Which words and what should be taught?

• The most important part of the process of teaching vocabulary is to make a good selection of words to teach to children. Teachers should always start with simple, frequent, and concrete vocabulary. Then, start to go further than that, little by little.

• Take advantage of the study unit to include vocabulary. Also, explain clearly the concepts.

• Teach the right quantity of words, not too much or too few.

• Teach kids how words sound (pronunciation), and how words look like (spelling).

• Grammar can be taught of course, but in context.

• Knowing the word and understanding the meaning go hand in hand to have a complete learning.

• Start from concrete concepts, then go with the abstract ones.

Vocabulary presentation • Pre-planned lesson stages in which learners are taught pre-selected vocabulary words.

• To know how many words you should present take into consideration the following: o

Level of kids

o

Familiarity with words

o

Words difficulty

o

Easily demonstration of words

o

Use of “realia”

o Can pictures be used to elicit vocabulary?

• Teach vocabulary in oral way first. So kids do not pronounce it as it is written.

• There are methods and approaches that are more appropriate for some types of words. For example: for actions is better to include mimics and gestures.

• Always keep in mind children’s age.

Do not show too scary or too real pictures to very young kids.

• Translation is “allowed” with very weird or difficult words. This should be avoided.

References • Aesop. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved December 6th, 2015, from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aesop109734.html • American Institute for Learning and Human Development. (n.d.).

Multiple Intelligences. Retrieved September 25th, 2015, from http://www.institute4learning.com/multiple_intelligences.php • American Institute for Learning and Human Development. (n.d.).

Multiple Intelligences. Retrieved November 26th, 2015, from http://www.institute4learning.com/multiple_intelligences.php • Burns, M. (2013, April 10). Introducing Mobile Technology Into Your Classroom: Structures and Routines. Retrieved November 26th, 2015, from Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/introducing-mobile-techstructures-routines-monica-burns • Gill, E. (2013, January 5th). What is Your Teaching Style? 5 Effective Teaching Methods for Your Classroom. Retrieved November 26th, 2015, from Concordia Online Education: http://education.cuportland.edu/blog/teaching-strategies/5-types-of-classroomteaching-styles/ • Holland, B. (2014, June 17th). The Future of Learning. Retrieved November 26th, 2015, from Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/the-future-of-learning-bethholland • National Association for the Education of Young Children. (n.d.).

DAP with Preschoolers. Retrieved September 11, 2015, from naeyc: https://www.naeyc.org/dap/preschoolers • National Association for the Education of Young Children. (n.d.).

DAP with Preschoolers. Retrieved November 26th, 2015, from naeyc: https://www.naeyc.org/dap/preschoolers • National Association for the Education of Young Children. (n.d.).

Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP). Retrieved September 11, 2015, from https://www.naeyc.org/DAP • National Association for the Education of Young Children. (n.d.).

Technology and Young Children. Retrieved November 26th, 2015, from https://www.naeyc.org/content/technology-and-youngchildren/preschoolers-and-kindergartners