Youtube Video Link for class video
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Link to spinner website used to pick topics
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Lesson PPT not included as it was unable to be added
Lesson SIOP
Lesson Reflection
I really enjoyed teaching our lesson to the class. We taught English abbreviations that are used when texting. I think it was a good lesson, since many of the students will keep in touch through instagram or kakao, and then they might be able to understand any texting abbreviations we might use. I think grabbing their interest and learning the abbreviations went pretty well, but I wish that the note taking during the lesson was smoother. They seemed to get confused on what to write and why. After our observation I think if we were teaching other classes, we could have tweaked this to be much clearer by stating the objectives of the lesson.
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Many of the students met all of the objectives, but some who were less proficient did less or did not understand anything. We could tell from how they were working which students understood and could use the target vocabulary correctly. Some students would be writing the entire conversation while some would all collaboratively write and create the conversation. However, they were all able to read the conversations.
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Most of the errors made by the students were with the notes sheet. They were unsure about what to write and when to write it. This would have been solved by including an overview slide about the timeline of the lesson. Another common error was writing out the phrase or full word rather than replacing it with the abbreviation. There were not many other mistakes than that. I believe that they understand how abbreviations in English work a bit better now. They knew a few of the abbreviations before the lesson but did not know what abbreviations were until our lesson.
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I hoped that creative and correct use of abbreviations as well as understanding of abbreviations would come out of this lesson, and I believe they did. We decided on this topic because of a student’s suggestion. She was confused at what her american pen pal texted her, which was an abbreviation. Since many of the students want to keep in touch with us, I figured it would be a good lesson to leave with, since it could have very practical applications after the fact.
I think if I saw more examples on how the girls are used to being taught, as well as how to teach a lesson in general that I would have been able to produce a better lesson. It is generally difficult for humans to produce something they have not seen. Humans and AI are alike in this way. To get AI to produce something good, you have to give it examples that it interprets in its own way. When we did observe Greg’s lessons, they were less content focused and would mostly practice pronunciation and other language skills in the form of a game. It was really difficult to gamify our lesson, so we left out many parts that might have made the lesson easier to understand and follow. Despite this the students had fun creating their text conversations, and I think they would have the knowledge to navigate a text conversation in English when they see these abbreviations.
Lesson Narrative
The prompt is as follows :
The narrative is, in essence, a mini-research paper on the topic of EFL or ELF. The narrative will serve three purposes: First, to demonstrate your knowledge of the principles and practices of EFL/ELF as they pertain to the Korean classroom and second, to serve as an introduction to your two lesson plans that will follow. The narrative will have two sections:
Section One: This section will be the bulk of the narrative and will comprise the “research paper” part of the entire project. In it, you will discuss the principles and practices of EFL/ELF, both in terms of how it is explained in the literature (i.e., the articles and textbook chapters you have read) and how you understand it and experience it in the context of your own learning and development as a teacher.
Section Two: This section will provide a justification for the unit that you have developed and point out the key features of your lesson plans that follow. Here you will connect to the research that you just reviewed and demonstrate how it has informed the way you plan for language development and content learning to occur simultaneously for English learners. Specifically, this section will provide:
A description of the age/grade and content of the intended students, setting and why you chose this particular content for your assignment.
A description of the language level(s) and educational experiences of the students in your classroom. This includes addressing their home language (Korean), their English learning backgrounds (both formal and informal), and other potentially relevant information to understand the dynamics and demographics of the class.
A discussion of how the selected strategies and adaptations in the unit/lesson plans support English language development. You will preview what the content objectives are for the unit, how those objectives lead you to focus on particular language functions and forms so that ELs can achieve, how you will provide comprehensible input and elicit output from ELs, and how you will gauge the extent to which the ELs have met your intended language objectives.
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Before I took this course, I never knew how much depth was involved in language teaching. The articles and chapters that we read during this course opened my eyes to how vast the principles of language teaching are. As a language learner myself, the ways in which my teachers taught language seemed simple to me. I could tell when a teacher did well or when a class could be taught better, but I did not know how it could have been better in a practical application.
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In the first week alone we read chapters about methodology, communicative language teaching styles and the principles of second language learning. I did not personally read every word as we used our discussion time to share the most important part of each chapter. I did however read the chapter on communicative language teaching. I really found that this was an important chapter for us to read. We were preparing to teach a conversational English class, so it was extremely insightful to the strategies we can use in the classroom to get students engaged, talking, and ready to speak in English. Many of the methods were things I noticed my Korean language class instructor using with us. I also took a Japanese language class, and my Japanese class instructor rarely did this, in fact she mostly used English rather than the language we were meant to be studying. I think experiencing this contrast and then learning about the teaching behind it drilled the importance of these methods into me. I also noticed Greg using these in his class.
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We also learned a lot about practical ways to interact with the students in the chapters to come. I read about content based immersion, which is a method that focuses on content rather than simply grammar and vocabulary. In essence, you can teach language on a scale of content based immersion meaning you can teach real world information in another language to teach the language. I could also relate this to my Korean class, as we could easily learn about a topic alongside grammar and vocab related to the topic. It is proven helpful and effective because language can develop more freely and independently as a separate personality and knowledge database in the brain when taught content in that language, and become easier to switch into when speaking in the target language. This was one of the most insightful things I learned about language learning.
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In addition to this, I found the chapter on tools and techniques of effective language teaching to be the most helpful in the classroom. One technique that stood out to me was a technique I learned in a leadership class that I took for marching band in high school. It is the basis of being able to make good conversation with strangers as well, and it was described as teacher initiation, response, feedback, and re-initiation. I was taught a similar thing to use in conversation, to find something else to say or ask about the other person based on what they just said, and initiating a conversation. When I saw this in a classroom context I understood immediately that it was to get students to speak more, the same you would with a stranger in a conversation.
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My lesson with Sam takes these practical ideas all into consideration. We taught Texting Language and Abbreviations to the students. This was our content for the lesson, we then also helped the students to create conversations using this initiation, response, feedback pattern within their groups during the activity. We made it as fun as we could, and used some examples that we thought were funny to keep their attention.
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Every student had a different level in their language learning journey. As I do not know much Korean, I have no idea how well they could speak Korean in contrast to their English proficiency. Some students could speak English pretty well, but had troubles actually having enough creativity for our activity to create a conversation using the abbreviations and a topic. A lot of groups had to be given a starting point with the greeting, but some groups had plenty of creativity. A small number of the groups had creativity for their conversation but not enough English proficiency to make it come to life, which we helped them with the best that we could.
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Having the students read out their conversation at the end was great for the creative groups, and helped us to see how much they grasped the abbreviations. The main point I wanted them to understand was how abbreviations were made, often being the first letter of each word in a phrase, so they could see how it worked when they come across an unfamiliar one online. A lot of the English they might see is online or with penpals, so being able to recognize when there is an abbreviation can be very useful to them.
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I do not plan to be a teacher other than this experience, but I do plan to learn language to the best of my ability, and then share my own strategies to others who are learning. It is similar to teaching but less practical. This experience helped me to understand how language can be taught and learned, as well as how to teach myself better. The articles in this class helped me a lot to see the practical and social applications and considerations for language education, and will continue to be helpful to me in the future.