Class Nov. 15th, 2011

I decided to focus on Chapter 34, “Nontraditional Forms of Assessment…and so forth,” for this blog because I am completely invested in the crafting and teaching of writing for my profession. Or, at least I think so. In this economy, though, one never knows where Death might be lurking. And by Death, I mean one’s next job. Don’t worry, none of this has to make sense because I make the rules- at least, that seems to be one of the concessions highlighted in this chapter. No, I don’t mean that teachers should, for the sake of alternatively assessing their students, throw the rules out the window and just let them fly freely fettered in parametrical chains. That’s moronic on oxycotton (i.e., oxymoronic). But I do feel that too much of the issues arising in this chapter are based on higher concerns that don’t regard the beginning learners.

It is important to see how things work. It is important to understand what one sees, as that is the only way to solve the problem of, “Well, how does this work?” I’ve argued this before, and I will again: when dealing with beginning learners, it is important that the teacher curb them just a little bit to highlight the patterns and consistencies in, well, any area of language. In the writing of English, it is important that young/early learners are taught how to craft a sentence. Or a paragraph. Or an essay. These are building blocks, you know. So when we dive into the argument of whether or not traditional testing/assessment has benefit in an ESL context, I think the whole thing foolish. There is a benefit to every form of assessment that has ever come (speaking from a limited knowledge pool here, I can only splash at that possibility with my floaties- forgive me for leaping) and will ever come because the core value of such procedures is meant to inform and to aide.  Sure, some folks may have gone about it in a poor way, perhaps too inefficient, perhaps too lenient, too hard, off topic, whatever, but that merely laid the groundwork for the next idea that one-upped it. And traditional ways of testing are traditional for a reason- teachers have gone back to them time and time again. Are they right for everyone? No, and I’m not saying that. But for some, individually or grouped, these tests are both relevant and beneficial, and I think it folly to turn our back on them and leave them crying at the restaurant.

Finally, I liked the ideas that the author of that article was bringing to the table, the different approaches to assessment. Writing has been a tricky thing to assess, whether in a student’s L1 or L2, so the multitude of ways to navigate such a tripsy path can only be beneficial. But I have to draw a line when theorists begin telling teachers what they can and cannot say to students in regards to their work, as if teachers don’t have brains or don’t understand the psychological implications of the words that leave their lips and make impressions on young and sensitive psyches. I’m nitpicking at this point, but I can’t help it. That was a dumb thing to even put in a scholarly article, and if there is a population of educators out there that does actually intentionally and consistently make those mistakes, they should be fired, because they’re dumb too. Academic discussion here, right? Can’t help myself, I’m all jumped up on coffee and you’ve given me a free forum. Anyway, theorists should keep their thoughts and profounditites public, while also keeping their interpersonal advice private. People work through those things without the help of omniscient academia, and it’s arrogant to assume that they can’t. That is all.

Class Nov. 8th, 2011

Chapter 11 in the Kuma book resonated with me quite deeply, as I’m planning on doing my research paper on intercultural rhetoric. Making our teaching socially relevant to our students is one of the most important practices we can incorporate into our profession. After all, no one wants to be marginalized and then have it rubbed in that they’ve been marginalized. That’s just plain rude. We have to realize that our students are unique individuals with distinctive pasts and histories that have made them who they are over the course of however many years, and that these students cannot just toss that personality and that reality aside just to be accepted in a classroom. That’s doing them a disservice, as well as every other student in the class.

Not only is it selfish and colonialist to disregard our students’ cultures and heritages, but it also could have an incredibly negative effect on their learning. I don’t mean just in regards to them checking out of the lesson because, assuming they can say this, “Man, that teacher is an ass.” I mean that without considering the cultural context from which our students grew, we cannot know the special hold-ups and translational issues that they will have to deal with. We won’t know how to approach the pragmatics of their L1, and so we may doom their L2 understanding to that of the Perpetual Foreigner. Without showing them how their L1 can affect their L2, they’ll possibly never reach fluency.

It would be elitist to deny our students their culture within the classroom, and it would be a travesty not to highlight for them the ways in which the world works. Students not only need to be aware of how their native language affects their learning of a second language, but they also need to know why they’re learning that L2 in the first place. We need to educate our students with a sensitivity to their culture and their heritage while also highlighting the institutions that made that linguistic culture and heritage secondary to the standard. Students need to know of the struggle of powers in the world, and they need to understand the history of the spread of English.

We need to take our students’ cultures and make the prominent in the L2 learning context, while also showing them why we needed to make it prominent in the first place. We need to foster in our students a pride for their heritage that the necessity for learning a Standard English seems to seek to vanquish. It is on teachers to do this in the classroom, while in conjunction with parents doing so at home. Ultimately, we need to wed the idea of a rich culture with the necessity of learning a global lingua franca. This may not be easy, but it is certainly our call to arms.

Oct. 25th 2011

I think that the pros and cons list of why we should or should not teach grammar is absolutely fascinating. On the one hand, we should teach grammar because it is a linguistic element that helps a learner understand a language and be taken seriously in the professional and cultural realm. On the other hand, we shouldn’t teach grammar just for the sake of grading, because we place importance on it, or because it empowers us as teachers to know more than our students. So it seems to me that we should teach grammar based on the relevance it has for learning a language (go figure), but we shouldn’t teach grammar for the wrong reasons. Sort of like when you’re in a long relationship and you don’t know whether you should break-up or not; you shouldn’t if it’s just to change things up, you’re kind of bored, or that one hot chick checked you out, but you should if you ain’t got that love anymore. Or something.

The fact, though, that some teachers teach grammar simply because it makes them feel powerful, now that’s difficult for me to believe. Like that’s their only motivation, to show students how much more the teacher knows than them. It seems like that may be the by-product of several of these other motivational factors, such as, “It Made Me Who I Am.” After all, if it was emphasized when you were young and now you’re an expert, it’s got to feel good to show off your expertise, yeah? But I just can’t believe that some instructor somewhere plans to focus on grammar on a certain day for the sole purpose of showing those little snot-nosed young’uns just how much Mr. Williams happens to know, thank you very much. If that is the case somewhere then Mr. Williams needs to go climb a tree and never come down.

I feel that most teachers emphasize grammar for the more realistic reasons presented in Chapter 13, and I feel that the most profound one is the grammar as a security blanket. I can speak from experience this summer on that count. I was team-teaching with two friends of mine at UHigh in a writing class and we were gathered together to discuss what we wanted to do with our lesson. We chose a fancy writing assignment that promoted all kinds of neat creative fiction elements, as well as a portion that would make the students’ written works come alive in a mini-play at the end of the unit. The problem was, we were about a day short in content. What was our answer? Grammar lesson. It’s easy to teach, easy to assess, and some argue that it is important in some capacity. Now, this wasn’t an ESL classroom so the emphasis of the grammar took on a degree of levity, but the point holds true: if my fellow teachers and I barely gave grammar enough credit in a freshman-level writing class, how can teachers around the world give it more credit than the “Security Blanket” or “Tidy” and “Testable” descriptions already have. It’s systematic and controlled and, consequently, easy.

I think grammar is an important foundational tool that students can use to build their body of language understanding, though I don’t believe it is the only tool. Also, I don’t think teachers use that tool correctly for the best understanding of their students. Rote memorization and practicing can be useful in trying to drive home a certain concept, but not an entire system. Promoting tasks that actually get students to think about the underpinnings of grammar rather than just filling out practice sheets to know the procedures, this is the direction grammar teaching should be going. Until we find a way to make the system more user-friendly we need to keep experimenting until we find some form of balance that takes our students’ grammar knowledge, both new and old, and makes it useful to them.

Class Oct. 20th, 2011

I find myself struggling with a desire to attempt one form of teaching while balancing that desire with a dose of reality that tempers any urge I have to teach at all. I’m speaking of Freire’s critical pedagogy approach to teaching, and, more specifically, its implications for learner autonomy. Before I delve too deeply into this whole issue, let me first say something that I’ve been meaning to express since the first week of class: I am not training to be the head of an ELL classroom. I have never had experience in a bilingual environment, nor do I think I am qualified to. My aim is to teach English to those who already know the language. These TESOL classes are for context-building and to help me if I ever come into contact with a student who has limited communication in the classroom. It’s not that I don’t like students who don’t speak English- far from it. But I will most likely never be the teacher in a class wherein the students don’t have a fairly good understanding of English. Thus, putting each of my examples in class and reading these lessons and articles to mirror an L2 context, these are as foreign to me as English is to those students. Therefore, I will provide this example in a context that is familiar to me, and comfortable.

I think it is incredibly important for students to become autonomous learners, for them to “become authors of their own worlds.” (Kuma 142). But how- and I cannot put enough emphasis on that word- how can we attain this when there are standards, measurable and measured standards, that we are required to meet? I know this is an age-old question which, again, boils down to the age-old dichotomy of ideal vs. practical. It would be ideal to teach about things that interest our students and promote their learning rather than their knowledge. Let me explain that. We view, under the scope of standards and standardization, knowledge as equivalent with learning. Students are considered learning so long as they can reproduce knowledge, and students are knowledgeable if their aims are directed towards the abstract of learning. One leads to the other. If knowledge = learning, and learning = knowledge, then the two are at a one-to-one relationship and are, consequently indistinguishable. I refer to this, broadly, as knowledge, and it’s what tests and testers are interested in gaining a measure of.

The ideal would be to concern ourselves with our students’ learning, which would be how they process information, what connections they make to the information, how this information applies to their lives and the lives of their friends, family, fellow citizens, what-have-you. This is the aim of critical pedagogy, to develop in our students the capacity to understand their place in their society, culture, and their world, and to understand the powers that help and hinder them in that tentative position. The approach is about teaching students how to think to pursue their own learning even outside of the classroom, and who could argue that this is the ideal? Having the ability to think through any problem rather than a specific content knowledge that helps one work through a specific problem only is far more helpful in life and in school. But, as I said, this is ideal. We would like to think that it is practical too, but bad news: we, as teachers, don’t determine what is practical for our students and what isn’t. The government, the testing centers, specific schools, each of these entities and more determine what is practical for our students to know and understand, and the bad news is that this practical application of education is defined by what we can measure to make sure that everyone who journeys through our school systems can work through the same specific problems and know the same knowledge about World War II. We can’t argue with this; we need the measure. We need to make sure that everyone has, at least, some basic knowledge with which to get through life. But that is the crux of the whole problem!

Because standards are important and necessary to make sure that no one “falls through the cracks,” this is why we continually struggle with the fight between learning and knowledge. It is also why I grow more and more disillusioned when the question is begged, “what can we do to make our students better and more informed?” That question depends solely on the context of who’s asking and what are their interests. As the number of contexts are myriad, we could never come to a complete and full answer, even with a million years to find the root of it all. What, then, is the damn point? We’re fighting for our students, yes, and how noble of us indeed. But when there is a need for standard knowledge and a need for critical, original thought, how can we possibly balance the two to see our educational system through to the other side?

I know that there is no single answer, and nor could there be. But it seems the issue lies in the pursuit of the ideal- namely, that several different parties have different ideas of even that. How do we define a good student as opposed to how a testing center defines a good student? What qualities do we agree on and what don’t we? If we can’t even agree on the image of what our students should be attaining, it is impossible for them to attain it. It’s a pipe dream. All that we can keep doing, I guess, is plugging along and hoping against all hope that we change at least one life before we die. The only issue is that, even that legacy becomes questionable depending on who is viewing our achievement and through what lens. It’s enough to make me scream and rail and fight and fight, and I suppose that is what defines a good teacher, at least: one who isn’t content with their students becoming what anyone thinks they should be, but one who bleeds for them to become what they need to be.

Class Oct. 13th, 2011

I'd like to begin by highlighting a phrase found in the latter half of chapter 22, "The Changing Face of Listening": "We focus on the product of listening when we should be interested in the process- what is going on in the heads of our learners." This sentence did a lot for me in contextualizing the issue with listening in second language acquisition, as well as aligning this chapter, finally, along with my own perceptions of teaching.

First, the contextualization: Up until this point, I had only an idea of what these chapters had been talking about. Listening comprehension was viewed in my second language classes (in high school) as something that naturally progresses as one achieves further proficiency in the language. Looking back, this also appealed to me as I already employed several of the learning strategies the anthology discusses (clinging to key words, crafting meaning from the inter-connected vocabulary that I already knew, etc.), and so I figured that was how listening fit into the equation. But the chapters also got me thinking about my native language and how, even now, I need to focus on finding meaning through intensive listening simply because someone has an accent or arsenal of slang that I don’t know yet. Finally, it sort of just clicked for me that, of course it isn’t about what we say we hear, and consequently hope to God it’s true. What is important lies in how we make errors and then correct those mistakes, or how we go about deriving a certain meaning from a sequence of sounds and utterances.

This finally fit well again with how I’ve always felt about learning and teaching- namely, that the importance and the meaning of all of this is found through a journey of self-discovery, not with correctly answering B when A, C, and D (and possibly E) all could have been fine answers, save one simple detail. The teaching of a skill such as listening is so hard to assess from a right-or-wrong position that it’s almost a waste of time, and really, all that we teachers want from our students is for them to get better and better, day by day. In listening, this is especially key, as it helps build the foundation of understanding in everything from everyday conversations to official hearings, meetings, and even understanding important commands in transportation hubs (bus/train stations, airports, etc.) and emergency drills.

Another thing that us teachers need to understand, and then help our students understand, is found in yet another passage I thought interesting. This, from chapter 23 now: “Spoken language is not written language spoken aloud.” This ties into the ideas listed above because that sentence itself entails a process that must be viewed with patience and understanding. Students will need help trying to divorce the idea of text dialogue and informal conversations, and given that they will be studying the two, most likely at the same time, it is important that we work with them, rather than grade them, on how much they understand and how much more we can help them to.

What’s the age-old saying? Life’s about the journey, not about the destination. So, too, is education, both ours and theirs, mine and yours. It’s imperative that we package our information as such to get our students passionate about learning, as well as fostering in them the skills that we seek to grow so healthily. If that requires changing the thinking about teaching listening or the curriculum, then I say we bash the old ways to pieces and start fresh. You know, with liberty and free popsicles for all. Or, well, at least some better educators and a better education.