Final blog post

This course I found extremely helpful in learning about teaching methodology. It’s strange to me that though I’m surrounded by teaching every day, and have been for my entire life up to this point, all it took for me to become more aware of teaching methods was 4 hours’ worth of consciously focusing on how I’m being taught a foreign language.

The thing I found the most helpful in this course was the way Miranda presented new words, as well as her overall manner during lessons. She was always right there, up in front of the class, teaching us directly. We were taught straight from the source – there was no messing about with a textbook or tons of outside materials. She created her own materials with the vocab and grammar she wanted us to know. Overall, I found this method to be more engaging, and I really appreciate the amount of effort she must have had to put in in order to teach us like this. Miranda was a very accessible teacher as she taught – I always felt like she wanted us to learn and would teach us anything if asked. She was always engaged, demonstrating how certain words were said and correcting mistakes, asking us to say the things we were learning – she didn’t leave us to figure it out on our own.

Methods in this course that I didn’t get anything out of were the part of the handouts with the list of words and their translation. It doesn’t help that I, personally, never really look at vocab lists in the first place, but with the formatting (translation spaced very far apart), the length, and the apparent lack of reasoning behind the order they’re listed in, I found the lists particularly ineffective. Although the handouts in general were good (having the dialogue written out on them, and afterwards short lists of phrases and how to construct them), this part always threw me a bit off.

I think it would have been really interesting if Miranda had taught the sessions only in Dutch, as if we were taking a Dutch as a Foreign Language course (if they have that?) in the same way that many of us will be teaching EFL learners while having no common language with our students.

My general impression about teaching a foreign language is that it’s a lot of work. Preparation is key. Having your own materials is important, as it not only makes you a more effective teacher, since it allows you to design the course as you want, but also shows students that you’re putting the time in to teach them and that you actually care that they learn. Obviously, this isn’t always possible, whether due to time constraints or the policies of the school where you’re teaching, but I think it should be done whenever possible. Learning how to teach, I think, is a lot about examining the methods that were used on us and mashing together the ones that were good and avoiding the ones that weren’t. This course was a good opportunity to take a step back and start that process.

ILT Blog post 3

This week, our lesson focused on learning a few new phrases and the rules governing those phrases. Materials and activities were pretty similar to what we’ve been doing in the past lessons, with a few new additions. Miranda used the computer and projector to write (taking out the potential difficulty for students that a teacher with poor handwriting presents) and gave detailed handouts for learners to look at throughout the lesson and take home, something she’s done in every session. These I think she includes so we have something to refer back to. I have a hard time remembering everything, so having it in front of me is great.

My favourite material in the lesson was the colour-coded phrases Miranda used during the phrase presentation. This helped me pick out the patterns a lot easier – I could see the way the same vocabulary and grammar was used in different ways. Miranda clearly did this on purpose, and it was very effective.

There were roughly 4 parts to this lesson, structured really well so the easiest material was in the beginning and the harder was at the end. There was a warm-up, going from easier material to more difficult, which is a good way to teach a subject that students don’t have every day or very often. It allows the students to be reminded of what they are supposed to know. I think Miranda structured the class the way she did so we could ease into the material. Once we got to the harder stuff, like figuring out the rule of how to put phrases together, I was ready.

Something I noticed and really appreciated that Miranda did was give the literal translation of some of the phrases. That’s something that I’ve never had a language teacher do, but something I always end up doing for myself. Overall, I liked this lesson a lot. There was a lot of variation and it was really engaging. It’s interesting to me how a lesson that’s very well-structured like this one doesn’t really appear to be—from the student’s side, it’s a seamless lesson. You would never really know how much prep goes into it. It’s completely necessary, though, as this kind of lesson is the best for students.

Blog post 2: The Role of the Teacher and Student

12/11/15

The second Dutch lesson I found a lot different than the first. It had a similar structure, but the teaching style was a lot different, reflective of the different learning goals. As students of language-teaching, we were to focus on the student and teacher activity during the lesson.

In the first part of the lesson, a review of what we’d learned already, we went around the room snake-style saying the questions and phrases we’d learned to one another. The teacher’s role was to facilitate our use of and learning of the language. To do this, Miranda didn’t talk as much or teach us vocab and language rules – she let us try the phrases out on each other and figure it out on our own.

The most significant activity we did was with a handout. In pairs, we had to try to guess the rule for making the present tense of regular verbs. Miranda stood back and watched, letting us puzzle over it. Like the reviewing part of the lesson, she didn’t play an active role as teacher, something I found effective and useful. She allowed the learners to learn on their own. We were in charge of our own comprehension and it was up to us to put effort into making connections.

The teacher’s role was much more passive in this lesson, allowing us to learn actively and engage with the language and each other. When she stood back, we were forced to try speaking on our own (though there was a bit of looking to her for assistance as we struggled to pronounce certain words) and try it out. While she did help when we were stuck, we primarily had to remember and listen to each other to pronounce correctly. The teacher and learner’s role was the same with the worksheet activity. Miranda again stood back and let us work it out on our own. The amount of STT to TTT I found really good – we did most of the talking, and Miranda did a good job facilitating that.

While the activities were effective in facilitating learning, I didn’t think they were supremely varied or interesting. Although the question-answer review style is a good way to get everyone in a classroom to participate in the language, there was just a bit too much of the same thing. I got a little bored after the second time. The handout activity was also a bit dull, as it was pretty simple and the answers were obvious. However, the most important thing in the lesson was achieved – through the activity, I learned (basically) the rule of conjugating regular verbs.

Dutch Session 1

There was a lot I got out of the Dutch session last week. I’ve become a much more conscious language learner as a result of this class, something I see in my Italian-language class, and getting to focus completely on how we were being taught and how I was receiving it was a great way to apply what we’ve been learning.

The very first thing Miranda did in the lesson was give us a quick outline of what we’d be doing during the lesson. As someone who’d just gotten out of a lecture and about to go into one immediately following our lecture, I really appreciated knowing what was about to happen for the next hour. I was already feeling a bit of the “mental fry” that comes with jam-packed days, so I really liked having an outline in my head of the lesson. As bad as it sounds, my thought was, “Oh I can do this. This sounds so easy.” I could wrap my head around the lesson, something I’ve found that I personally need as a student.

As we went into the next part of the lesson, the alphabet and dialogue, my knee-jerk, unavoidable reaction was to relate it all to English, my first language. To my happy surprise, I found Dutch to sound very similar to English, though I can already tell I’ll be confused by spelling. Nothing is as it seems it should be, and as a potential learner, this scares me. “Can I do this?”, definitely went through my head, thinking of the distance I have from where I am now, knowing nothing of the language, and then thinking ahead to all the work that (would) need to be done to become fluent.

Though the first lesson is a little exciting, it also holds a lot of promise – promise of learning something completely new, something useful and interesting (it’d look great on a CV right!), and promise of a whole lot of work, something that, as a student, I have come to know and hate.