Week 6: Brown and Kumar

This week’s reading had me thinking about my feature classroom. During this time I kept asking myself questions such as “what will I do? How will I conduct my classroom? How do I know which type of questions to ask? How will I be sure to maximize the learning opportunities for my students? How will I make sure I don’t let a learning opportunity slip away like the teacher from episode 3.2 in Kumar? How will I help my students to develop intrinsic motivation, become good learners and develop great strategies investment? All these questions bounced inside my head nonstop. I believe that in order to understand my teaching style/s I must understand the approach I am using. It is Task-Based, is it CLT, or is it Audiolingual, or it is a combination? Having knowledge on which perspective I am using will help me understand why I choose certain techniques over the other. It will also help me to better evaluate why certain techniques work and others do not. With this thinking in mind, I wondered which learning principle I can envision myself using in my classroom. Principle number 2, meaningful learning, stands out to me because I believe that if this can be establish students will be able to surpass other barriers. Meaningful learning makes a difference between your everyday rote memorization and actual uptake of the information in order to apply it to previous knowledge. The author mentioned this can be done by appealing to the students’ goal and interest which I completely agree with. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a co-worker about how her teacher wondered why she never performed as well as she could on the exams. My coworker explained to me that she simply was not interested in the class, in was not appealing to her. I always thought that if a student had the capability to perform great he/she should be able to do so no matter the circumstances. I believed appealing to students’ interested was used to facilitate the learning or even help those struggling in the classroom.  But now, as I am typing this, I am realizing that those students with capabilities but interest were most likely doing rote memorization instead of connecting the different ideas. I believe this principle goes well with the microstrategies that Kumar explains in his chapter because meaningful learning comes in different ways, shapes, and forms. I can make meaning learning happen in my classroom by connecting the learning with the outside world; make that connection between what my students are learning and what the outside world demands of them. This might be on a campus, local, or global community. If the students can see the connections, they are more likely to internalize the information.

Another principle I found interesting was principle number 7: language ego. Like the previous example, I believe that working on this principle can open other doors for the learners. When I was reading this principle, I began to think of “how can I lower the affective filter in my classroom? How can I lower students’ anxiety? This can and will be a challenge because this struggle applies to first language users and it is even worse for second language use whose linguistic abilities are limited. I remember a teacher’s story of his quest to lower anxiety in his classroom. He was often frustrated because no matter how hard he tried, his students were always afraid to make mistakes or take risks. The students’ driving force was the search for the right answer, the answer that the teacher wanted; this mentality blinded them to use logical reasoning. Many times students and teachers see errors as a sign of failure and inadequacy. How can I change that in my classroom? Do I show my students that even I make mistakes? (How do I do that? It is definitely by not making language errors intentionally.)  How do I show them the power of mistakes? This risk taking behavior is one of the reasons younger learners seem to acquire the language faster than adults. Also by lowering the affective filter of the learners, I can give my students opportunities to explore their learning experiences from within. I believe that when a student is truly immersed in his/her learning they are willing to see what works for them (of course with the help of the teacher) and are able to developed true intrinsic motivation which can go far. As research has shown, motivation is the second most important factor when in come to determining how successful one can be in acquiring a second language.