I am mostly going to focus on observations from Heartland since while I was at Bloomington Junior High they were mostly doing testing and reviewing so I was not directly involved in the course this week. I will focus more on it next week.
Something that I noticed about the syllable stress and error correction activities like editor-in-chief is that the students get very involved in what they are doing, even sometimes to the point of arguing about the material that they are learning. I think the editor-in-chief is really difficult at times for them because the activities and errors are so nit-picky, in my opinion. I think that Sue even does not get all of the errors that the book lists for the activities. I think the ones that they miss the most are hyphenated words, content errors, and apostrophe usage like with possessives, mostly. They do tend to get the ones that are for contractions like 'you're' and 'I'm', but not so much for, for example, 'Tim's' because most languages do not have possessive apostrophe usage; I know for sure that Spanish and French do not have that, so the students understandably are very confused about the possessive. Sue even said that in their writing they still directly translate it to 'the dog of blank' and other similar structures. I think that the syllable stress activities they understand for the most part, but some that have learned British English in the past have some trouble because people who speak British English put the stress on different syllables. For example, they were talking about the word 'vitamin' in their syllable stress opener on Tuesday, and in American English we pronounce it VI-ta-min and they were pronouncing it vi-TA-min, which obviously sounded very strange to me and Sue. Sue pointed it out to the students pronouncing it incorrectly and they were very confused. She then asked about their learning of British English and they seemed a little less puzzled about why the pronunciation was so different. It is just such a common misconception about World Englishes like we talked about in class this week, that they can be so similar yet so different in so many ways. I just am a little puzzled at why some students get so frustrated and argued about pronunciation with Sue, because the pronunciation is pretty much unchangeable at this point but obviously language is ever-changing but things like pronunciation do not vary too much in standard English.
Some really awesome stuff that Sue does that I really would like to do as a future ESL teacher is that she always gives historical context for their genre readings, which I mentioned before. I just love that she always gives them the whole picture for assignments and for reading materials, because that is something that most teachers I feel leave out at times, especially with ESL learners and they need it the most! Also, Sue always takes as much time as possible to explain their activities and why she does the things she does with her lessons because they are very curious about the language. I feel like I never asked very many questions when I was learning Spanish at least until college because I never felt that confident about asking. I admire them for wanting to know as much as they can about the language. Sue takes as much time as she needs to explain concepts to them; in this case, they were having issues with the possessive apostrophe and she had to do a mini-lesson spontaneously about it since some of them had had no prior experience learning about how to use it. They also have a lot of trouble with the perfect and progressive tenses in English, which I find interesting because a lot of other languages have those tenses; maybe they just are not set up the same way as our system. Sometimes I feel privileged to know English because those tenses are just so innate to me, and I can see how hard of a time they have learning them, and I can sympathize with them because I felt that way and still feel that way learning Spanish even now. It is definitely a process.
Another thing that I love about observing this class is the discussion that they have about their genre readings; this week they were reading about the Great Pyramids in Egypt which was a non-fiction genre reading. I think it was so funny that they can get into this long discussion about how aliens possibly built the pyramids and I loved it because I watch the show on History Channel and had something to contribute to the discussion. I think it is really cool that they can get so into the readings and that they can talk at length about the topics. It shows that they have progressed so much since I have started observing. Their discussions used to be like 15 minutes, now they are at least 30-40 minutes which is awesome for them. It shows that they have more confidence in their opinions and speaking abilities, and I think it helps that Sue is very patient and always lets them ask questions about the material they are reading. She always uses the fact that she has internet in the classroom to her advantage and shows them pictures using Google so that they can have a visual about their material. I think it is especially important in ESL classrooms to give students the whole picture, not just bits and assume that they understand everything about their reading. I'd rather them not accomplish every chapter in a textbook so that they can really gain something from the class.
Side note: got their poetry book today. Going to put it in my portfolio!
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