APLNG 595 Internship: Teaching ESL 015 and ESL Instructor Development Program

MeetingObjective: 1, 2, 6, 7

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Textbook for ESL015, Spring, 2012

ESL 015 (Composition and American Academic Communication II) is a required course for all freshmen who speak English as a second language (please refer to the “syllabus” and the “weekly topics” in attached files). The course aims at familiarizing students with American academic writing practices, such as paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing. Three genres—critique essay, compare and contrast essay, and argumentative essay— are introduced with these practices to expose students to the diversity of academic writing.

Before teaching this spring, I observed an ESL015 class for a semester and tutored a student from that class. However, real teaching is always beyond the observation. Although most of the materials were given and the main topics were all assigned, I still felt unconfident until I walked into the classroom. 

Class observation, Fall, 2011

I found my observation notes are really helpful in terms of locating students’ difficulties and modify the materials. For instance, when teaching APA format, I gave students samples and spent more time on hands-on reference writing (e.g., defining resource typeà choose the correct form) (please refer to the attached PowerPoints; these lessons are what I particularly satisfied with).

Reading texts for ESL 015

Meanwhile, teaching two classes taught me in terms of pacing, adjusting materials, and interacting with students. Although my two classes were very different in their language backgrounds and learning experiences, it was helpful to gather their reactions from one class and make adjustments in another. However, the most interesting but challenging part was giving feedback impetuously. I then realized that this experience can never be learned from teacher’s guides.

Going along with my teaching the development program was very supportive. The program’s setting was identifying one specific topic instructors would like to solve, collecting evidences, and developing a toolkit for dealing the problem (please refer to the file: instructor developing program). I worked with my colleague Kaushi, an expert writer and experienced teacher, to design toolkits for increasing students’ reading comprehension. Through meeting and discussing, I got her mediations, and got a more thorough understanding about why and what I could do.

Teaching ESL 015, 2012, Spring: Compare and contest essay

      To summarize, the internship helped me reorganize and reflect on my beliefs. Moreover, it involved the process of scientific knowledge goes down and everyday knowledge goes up. Without this internship, I would never know the other half of picture of learning teaching.       

With students from ESL015 section 009

WL ED 483 Evaluating Schools’ Performance & ESL Programs

Meeting objectives: 2, 4

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      This course familiarized future ESL teachers with the legal foundation of ESL programs in Pennsylvania school districts: who are English Language Learners (ELLs)? What are impacts of the No Child Left Behind Act? What are differences among ESL programs? By sharing her experience of teaching ESL in a public school, the instructor introduced many sociopolitical challenges ESL teachers will face outside the classroom.

Textbook 1.

        For the final project, I did a critique review of the standardized tests which ELLs need to take in order to be exempt form ESL courses (please refer to the attached file-final project). I reviewed four larger scale tests—English Language Development Assessment (ELDA), Comprehensive English Language Learner Assessment (CELLA), Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State to State for English Language Learners (ACCESS for ELLs®), and Mountain West Assessment (MWA)—their design rationales, objectives, test items, and evaluation methods. While doing this review, I reviewed what I learned from the assessment design class and became more familiar with the ESL teaching contexts in the United States.

Textbook 2.

        Another project was “teaching metaphor” (please refer to the attached file-teaching metaphor) in which I described my teacher philosophy after finishing the teaching practice in Ecuador. I found that, although the project overlapped a little bit with my developing teaching philosophy, this time, I focused on constructing a culturally responsive classroom  which demonstrated the influence of immersion learning in Ecuador.

        This course helped me become aware of the political factors of ESL teaching. In the States, ESL cannot be taken as a subject neutrally as other content classes. There are more and more legal issues related to new immigrants and local governments.
 

APLNG 587 Theory and Research in L2 Teacher Education

Meetingobjectives: 1, 3, 4, 5

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Let’s think about knowledge based teacher education as a social artifact, and teachers as learners of teaching.  

        This course was designed to help teacher educators evaluate and critique the existing professional developing programs and related issues (e.g., how policy or culture affects the focuses of teacher training). To go through these key issues, every week students should write a blog post to address the hot questions related to the assigned reading(s). 

I like this design a lot. In these posts, a topic was investigated from different perspectives with diverse examples. For instance, entry 3 discussed how teacher learners’ mental life should be evaluated from the perspective of teacher as a learner learning to teach. Entry 4 elaborated the topic that uses teachers’ narratives to reflect on their mental development process. In these two weeks, we investigated important parts of teacher development—emotion, identity re-construction, and dialectical development—which have long been neglected. In weeks 6 through 8, the topic shifted to teacher training programs work as mediation tools playing different roles in mediating teacher learners’ developing. From week 11, the focus was the broader context affecting the teacher learners’ development and program design (please refer to the attachments: Entry-week 3, 4, 6, 8, 11). By posting, I got mediations from peers and instructors and became able to talk these issues deeply.

The mediating partners!

The second project was writing a book review for some classical sources related to teacher education (please refer to the attached file: book review). I chose Language, Culture, and Community in Teacher Education which is a series of research investigating the role of community and culture of community in teacher education. It was my first time writing a review. While learning the convention of this particular genre, I explored the topics we had discussed with more detailed examples provided by this book.

Group work and presenting in-class

My final project was a further exploration of the topic in week 8—teachers’ language awareness (TLA) (please refer to the attachment: final project). This project combined a literature review of TLA and a course design which aims at developing TLA. Because of this project, I first put myself in the shoes of the teacher educators and considered more than “what do teacher learners want to learn” but “how to create mediations that make learning happen” by analyzing the context restrictions.

The course bought me the knowledge basis of being a teacher educator. Even though I may not become a teacher educator soon, the issues unfolded in this course introduced me useful sources for further reflections on my own professional development.