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.

Class Oct. 4th, 2011

I began this blog entry the first time by lambasting Kuma for adopting the arrogant, Chomsky-esque persona of one whose intelligence vastly outweighs all others because he adopted, for the whole chapter, a very technical way of describing the making of information relevant to learners’ self-discovery and application. “Activating a learner’s intuitive heuristics,” seems like a really, really complicated way of saying, “Let’s pique their curiosity.” I decided that I had nowhere to go with that entry, however, and so I left it alone. Though I was frustrated. What should be considered now, though, since I’ve finally, sort of, kind of gotten myself away from what might be diagnosed as an inferiority complex, is the aspect of teaching that really would get might students on a heuristic kick in regards to, well, learning in general.

The connections between the two (or is it four?) readings certainly aren’t lost on me, as we should probably be considering the potential for making reading something that our students love, cherish and become very, very good at. Usually the first to components are enough to birth the third, but this can’t be considered for all cases. Anyway, I really, really liked the idea of Extensive Reading in the classroom because it fosters just this mindset- it gets the students interested in reading, hopefully founds in them a lifelong love of reading which, in turn, promotes critical reading strategies that will help them become more strategic, more academic learners.

That having been said, I don’t think that the ER approach can be used in anything other than a young learners’ environment. I don’t think the approach that involves working through things aloud with others would work as well in an environment where the students are worried about saving face and acting cool. Also, by middle school and high school, I feel that most learners have it cemented in their minds that they either love reading or they don’t, and this approach could fall flat face-first into mud if the students just don’t read- a potential outcome no matter how much extrinsic motivation you throw on the intrinsic.

I think, though, that the intrinsic heuristics for a number of students could be “activated” easily enough with a tiered system of extensive and intensive reading curricula. If the ER approach is used in elementary school to create a community-wide love of learning/reading, as well as forming a foundational vocabulary, then once students have achieved a certain level of achievement within that framework, upper level classes can focus on the more specific and complicated task of intensive reading. I feel like this would increase learning as well as prepare students for more complicated language skills.

Ultimately, though, this process would take a lot of official involvement to become realistic, including a top-down approval that sees an overhaul of antiquated (and, because of this, sometimes viewed as “correct”) educational systems and a boatload of money to produce enough and varied materials. It’s a nice idea, though, and, even if I disagree with Kuma on his delivery of the information and opinions on learner autonomy, the benefits of promoting a more learner-centered way of doing things are only increasing as more studies are done.