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My Learning Journey
Feb. 18th, 2005
11:15 am
We had a good class today. Students seemed tired at the begining. I thus moved around the classroom constantly and spoke a bit louder and tried to keep the class move at a faster pace. One student appeared to be a little quieter than usual. He used to be very active. I am a little bit concerned and called on his name several times.
I noticed the tone mistakes were increasing when they spoke. I kept crecting them, hopefully this won't upset them too much. To practice the sentence pattern “可adj", "...引起...", I used William Hung, and Yaoming as examples for them to practice. For example, one question is "why William Hung attracted attention from people?" They all seemed like the question and answered in a natural way.
Besides designing interesting and authentic questions for students to answer, I will put more efforts in moving the class at a faster pace. This the lesson I need to learn. I found myself to be too patient sometimes and giving student too long to think about answers.
Feb. 16th, 2005
11:25 am - effective question
I had a new class today. The total number of students is eleven. I taught most of them last semester. Only one student is new to me. One thing that I noticed was that they seemed to have forgotten lots of words that we learned before. When I asked them questions they were thinking actively but had hard time retrieving the words. It would be a good idea to recycle more words that we learned before in next week’s lesson plan.
I also noticed that the questions designed are kind of awkward for them to answer in a natural way. For example, to practice the pattern “ A…; zhiyu B jiu … le ( A…; as for B…)” The sample question designed in the lesson plan is : Ni huishuo waiyu huo yong diannao ma ? (Can you speak foreign languages or use computer?”) The answer provided is : Wo hui shuo zhongwen, zhiyu diannao wo jiu bu zenme xingle . (I can speak Chinese, as for computer, I am not very good at it.) Since most of students can speak at least a foreign language, and using a computer is commonplace for college students, the answer is unnatural for them. By asking the question, we are forcing students to produce something that is not realistic. I changed the question and simply asked them: Ni huishuo shenme waiyu? Riyu haishi zhongwen ? Then it is much easier for them to come up with the realistic answer: Wo huishuo yidianr zhongwen , zhiyu riwen jiu bu hui shuo le. (I can speak a little bit of Zhongwen, as for Japanese I don’t speak at all.)
Other similar problematic questions are : Ni juede Yinda de shenghuo huanjing, fujin jiaotong zenme yang ? ( What do you think about the environment and traffic in IU?). Since the environment and traffic in IU are both good, the question can not help students to produce natural utterances. A better replacement for this question would be : Zai meiguo shenghuo, chide he zhude zenme yang? ( What do you think of the food and housing conditions in America?)
I hope by making questions more natural and authentic, students will focus more on the meaningful interaction rather than just produce correct answers.
The activity for this lesson is a role-play on interview. The topic is relevant to the text. Looked like they enjoyed doing that.
Feb. 2nd, 2005
11:43 am
The class went smoothly today. I didn't quite like the original lesson plan (prepared by another teacher), especially the game part, so I made some adjustments. Threw in more real life questions for them to use the target sentence patterns. I was able to have their attention. However, the class pace is a bit slow. In retrospection, one reason for that is because i didn't have enough time today to assimiliate the lesson plan. :(, the other reason is because two or three students were having trouble with one of the sentence patterns. So we spent more time doing that. In general, their answers to my questions were a bit short. I tried to throw in more questions for them to think more deeply. However, my efforts were to no avail. This has been a concern of mine. Last semester, when they had less vocabulary words, they produced longer sentences. I kepting thinking about this. One of the reasons I guess is because they forgot some words after the winter vacation. Another reason may be the quality of the questions. The questions we designed were not thought provoking enough. How can I change this in my next class?
Jan. 28th, 2005
11:59 am - heritage learners again
The class went smoothly. The air conditioner kept making noise. When can we be assigned to a better classroom? Two heritage learners sit together and they always finished the tasks much faster than the other students. I asked them to change their seats so that they may help the other students. However, apparently the conversation tasks were still too easy for them. I asked them to read the mini-dialogues with their partners if they finish early. They were cooperative and willing to participate. Still, I feel rather uncomfortable when I found them stopped talking when they finished while most other students were still in the middle of heated discussion.
Jan. 26th, 2005
11:28 am - questions
In today's class, the questions that I designed are around the text that they learned yesterday. I don't usually do this. However, last week when I designed the lesson plans, I thought it would be a good idea if I could use the general situation provided in the text and ask related questions since the book is all about Xiao Gao's trip to Beijing and Taiwan. This is a kind of "killing two birds with one stone" way. We not only reviewed the content of the text but also the target words. For example for the word "xi ying"(attract), I ask students, is it true that in Xiao Gao's trip to Beijing, the thing that attracted him most is ancient architechtures? To make the question more relavent,after they answered the first question, I also asked them " If you have the opportunity to travel to a foreign country, what would be things that attract your attention most?"
The result is a little bit beyond my expectation. Students appeared to be not familiar with the text. This makes me wonder whether I should do this or not. I definitely do not want them to have the feeling that they cannot answer my question because they cannot remember the content in the text. My goal is for them to use the words correctly in mini contexts that I created for them. My way to remedy at that time was to show them flash cards as cues, so that it would be easier for them to come up with an answer.
Another quetion that came into my mind is that if I continue doing this, will they pay more attention to the text content when they first be introduced to it?
Jan. 14th, 2005
11:32 am - Another Review Day-heritage learners
Today we reviewed lessons from L8-L10. Just like last class, they remembered most words. I designed some questions for them to disscuss in pairs. The questions are closely related to the theme of the lesson so that they may have opportunities to use the words. It seemed to me most students enjoyed the discussion. However, two students stood out by not willing to talk in details. Their answers to the questions were always curt. Both of them are heritage learners. During their discussion, I stood by one of the heritage learners and threw in questions challenging him to talk more.
What would be a better way to make him put in efforts?
One way that I can think of is to talk to him after class and tell him he should help teacher by actively participating in pair work and throw in questions to encourage his partners talk more. He needs to take notes as much as possible and report what his partner said. Will this work. We will see.
Jan. 12th, 2005
11:36 am
The class went smoothly I should say. One thing that made me a little annoyed is the condition of the classroom.I don't understand why we were assigned for such a classroom. The room is exceedingly huge for my current class size (9 students), it could probably hold 60-70 students in it originally. The air conditioner kept making noise. Makes it hard for students to hear each other. I tried my best to speak loud. However, when students talk they do not have the habbit of speaking loud. It is definitly not an ideal place for learning foreign languages.
Today is the first week, according to the plan, we will devote the whole week for reviewing. Today's lesson centered around the first three lessons of last semester. They seemed still remember about 60-70% of the vocabulary words. That was not bad. However they seemed to be reluctant to talk more on certain topics as I had expected them to do. Is it because they are not interested in the topic or they are not confident to do that? I remembered the two questions appeared in my mind in the process of teaching. It was my intuition that they are a bit tense. What should I do to change this situation?
Nov. 24th, 2004
06:04 pm
The other day, Xiao Hong and I were debating over the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese education system and American education system. To me , I personally think of Chinese education system as being pure behaviorism,putting too much weight on rote learning, and that learners'differences are not addressed at all. However, Xiaohong thinks that rote learning has its advantages too. According to her, have kids memorizing materials that they do not understand could help them in the long run. As they grow up and gain more experiences, they will develop understanding to what they have already memorized. She said herself benefit from such an education system. I just could not agree with her. Through my experience, I saw too many kids educated in this way can not think independently and critically. Perhaps there are some successful ones, however, compared with the student group that is left behind, only a very small number of people achieved that success. Under the pressure of tests, many students lost the true joy of learning and studies only for the tests. Quite a few students did not develop any hobbies along the way including me. To me, such an education system is far from satisfying.
Nov. 22nd, 2004
09:37 pm - Advance Organizer
Advance organizers are introductory materials provided in advance of the learning materials. It could be a short story, pictures, songs, anything that could serve the goal of "bridge the gap between what the learner already knows and what he needs to know before he can meaningfully learn the task at hand." (Ausubel et al., 1978, pp. 171-172)
Last week,in a one and half hour presentation that me and my other two classmates did for another course,we used a simple skit as advance organizer to help the class understand the new learning materials and draw connections between theory and reality.
Basically what we need to do is to read six articles and lead a whole class discussion. The topic for that day is language and meaning. The articles are very abstract and difficult to understand. According to our professor, they are probably the most difficult articles for the whole semester. After we read the articles, my group decided to do a power point presentation in 15 minutes. Each of us will take turns illustrating the main ideas of the articles. And then we will perform a skit that is concerning a communication misunderstanding due to the separation between language and context. And afterwords have the class to do group discussion using the terms that they just learned in the articles. After the session, each group will come up with their own skit and invite the class discussion.
I should say the skit is a great success. It allows the class to draw connections between theory and reality and pushed them into deep thinking and triggered heated discussion. More important, it makes the articles become easy to understand.
Nov. 21st, 2004
09:45 pm - mnemonics
One of assignments that we ask our first year students to do is to creat mnemonics that can help them to remember the pronounciations and the forms of the characters. Each student is responsible for coming up with four mnemonics for four characters. It is interesting to see how they tried their best to draw connections between the radical parts that they learned to the new characters. Some of the mnemonics are really creative and effective, and thus are very helpful in terms of tansferring new materials from short term memory to long term memory. I also think it is a good practice for raising their awareness on developing good learning strategies.
Nov. 18th, 2004
12:06 am - Automaticity
One of the important concepts in Cognitive Information Processing Theory is Automaticity. The definition of it goes like this: "When tasks are overlearned or sources of information become habitual, to the extent that their attention requirements are minimal, automaticity has occurred."
To me, this is a very important theory. I use it quite frequently in my teaching. It is my belief that in order to help students to transfer new materials from short term memory to long term memory and in the end reach the level of automaticity, sufficient amount of repeated practice must be done in a meaningful way. The goal of language teachers is to help students achieve automaticity and the role of teacher is more of a facilitator.
In the actual teaching, I tried to design lesson plans that recycling old sentence patterns whenever I introduce new ones. New vocabulary words are also practiced in contexts that consist of learned words. Through recycling, students are provided opportunities repeatedly and are able to internalize what they learned before.
Nov. 16th, 2004
01:02 am - The application of Multiple Intelligence theory in language classroom
This afternoon I have been reading an article on Multiple Intelligence Theory for my On Line Library. It is a very interesting idea and very new to me. While I was reading, I kept thinking about how should I apply it in my own teaching setting. It is my feeling that as language teachers, our teaching methods seem to benefit and favor students who have more of linguistic intelligence than learners of other intelligences. If effective teaching should be learner centered, then develop teaching methods that satisfy the various needs of learners who have different types of intelligence is a must. It is my thought that it might be a good idea if I incorporate more varieties of activities and use more pictures, music, movies and even games that involve the learners physically in my own classroom. Of course, all those activities should not be done without definite teaching objectives.
Nov. 11th, 2004
11:00 pm - conservation task
In week 7, we learned about piagiet's theory about children's four development stages. According to Piaget, children progress through an invariant sequence of four stages. One of the tasks that Piagetians often do is conservation task in which, preschoolers often fail to understand the equivalences that are presented to them.
Out of pure curiosity, I called my Mom and had her do the same task with my three year old niece Ding Ding. Could she be an exception?
The results show that like her peers, Ding Ding is still in preoperational stage. She pointed at the tall glass and claimed that that glass holds more water even though my Mom poured the same amount of the water from the short glass to the tall glass right in her face.
Isn't this interesting?
Nov. 9th, 2004
09:23 pm - More thoughts on Schema Theory
It is my experience that some times, it is not the language itself that constructs difficulties in communication. It is the lack of schema or background information that causes difficulties. Before I came to United States,I thought I am quite fluent in speaking English already. However, after I got here, I found myself being a bit slow in communicating with people in daily contexts like shopping, ordering meals, etc, despite the fact that I got almost a full score in TOEFL.
I still remember when I first came here, I went to Macdonald's and when the cashier asked me: here or to go? I was not quite sure about what he really meant by that. On the contrary, I did not find it as particular hard in communicating with professors and my fellow classmates in academic settings with which I am quite familiar. I should say the difficulties that I detected are due to the lack of the necessary background information (schema) that can only be acquired through life experiences. It might be helpful if we develop courses that address this problem. Perhaps movies could be a good resource to turn to.
Nov. 8th, 2004
10:33 pm - What is the difference between situated cognition and constructivism?
Today, We discussed this question in class. The following is some of my thoughts.
I think for situated cognition theory, learners are learning from the real life context itself.
Take teacher training for example. It is common sense that no teacher training can be called effective, if actual teaching opportunities are not provided. It is in the real classroom context, facing real students, dealing with the challenges that generated from the context, will a novice teacher learn the trade.
Whereas, for constructivism, learners are mainly learn from peer interactions, from mistakes . It is my feel that the context here should be smaller in scope and it is simulation rather than real life situations.
Nov. 2nd, 2004
02:00 pm - Is she Taiwanese or Chinese?
In today's "Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language" class, one of my classmates (She is also from China.)did her 5 minute teaching demonstration. The focus is on a first year grammar pattern: bushi... ye bushi... ershi ...(neither...nor...but...) She first did a demonstration by pointing out the color of a student's clothes using the pattern : Tade yifu bushi lansede yebushi huangsede ershi baisede. (The color of her coat is neither blue nor yellow but white.）Then, she pointed a student from Taiwan, asked me to answer the following questions:
Q: Ta shi Ribenren ma ? (Is she Japanese? )
A: Bushi. (No.)
Q: Ta shi Hanguoren ma ? (Is she Korean? )
A: Ye bushi. (No.)
Q: Ta shi na guo ren ? (Which country does she come from? )
A: .....???
How could I answer the third question as Chinese? I paused, refusing to speak anything that is against my will or force my own opinion on others. Another Taiwan student jumped in and quickly responded: Ta shi Taiwan Ren(She is from Taiwan),clearly indicating Taiwan as a country.
The above scenario really put me into thinking for some time. I know in this world, people just have different points of view and the essence of democracy is to allow people express their voices no matter how different they could be. It is important not to force your own opinions on others. However,the voice should be heard when other perspective is presented. If a difference will unavoidably be making in the future, and it affects the interest on both sides, then, to voice opinion is specially important. A good example to illustrate the above point may be the heated ongoing presidential election in America. Every American needs to make his/her choice. Similarly, on Taiwan issue, everyone involved should take stances. Avoiding making choices or allowing other perspective to be presented soly is not constructive in solving the issue in the long run.
I am basically a very traditional woman. I always hate to take stances and sometimes have tendency to dislike women who have strong opinions and speak strongly:) However, I come to realization through life experience that when an opinion is not expressed and a result is being made, it would be more destructive than having both sides heard even though the same result is being made.
The teaching demo today is really good in terms of methodology. However, the question is really inappropriate to ask. I agree with Situated Cognition Theory which promotes that teachers should develop understanding towards students'cultural backgrounds and try to incorporate differences and make the classroom an open and accepting learning community. In this sense, the mention of controversial topics like Taiwan issue in classroom setting will serve as a separating factor which immediately divide the class into different camps. In Chinese teaching profession in America, the Taiwan issue is a question that constantly hanging over teachers' heads. Chinese teachers from different backgrounds voice their opinions in their lesson plans directly or indirectly. It is my opinion that we should avoid such mention in classroom setting, and should especially avoid confronting students on the spot. It is my thought that language learners are specially vulnerable in settings like this in that they are lacking of appropriate language skills to voice their opinions.
Nov. 1st, 2004
11:56 pm - Does teaching cause learning?
To answer this question, we should first define the two key words here: teaching, and learning. If we are talking about teaching as effective teaching and learning as a true understanding towards the learning object, then I will say effective teaching may facilitate or foster true understanding, however, a direct causal relationship does not exist between the two.
I am actually thinking about the time when I was in middle school back in China where almost all of the new materials are learned through rote memory. Subjects like physics, chemistry, history, geography are all learned this way. Did I learn the materials? Yes, I did, if the only way to assess the learning is through traditional tests. Did I gain a true understanding of the materials? Probably not. It is not unusual for me to find myself forgot everything I "learned" through rote memory right after the tests. If the goal of education is as Bruner put it: to make the learner as "autonomous and self-propelled a thinker" as possible, which I agree completely, then the education I received through rote memory did not help me achieving the goal.
It is my belief that more often than not true understanding comes with experience. In this sense I agree with situated cognition theory which claims that "knowledge accrues through the lived practices of people in a society" and that "knowledge remains inert and unused if taught in contexts that separate knowing from doing." To know the printed words on the textbooks and being able to repeat does not equal to real learning. As teachers, we should bear the goal of education in mind, provide ways for students to learn from doing and learn by themselves instead of passively "transferring" knowledge to them.
Another good example to illustrate my point would be teacher training. Novice teachers can be trained through courses like pedagogy, teaching methodology, etc. All of the knowledge remains inert and irrelevant to them unless they are provided opportunities to teach and then only then could a real understanding of the profession be fostered.
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curious01:38 am - Teaching is fundamentally an individual act or social act?
We discussed this question in class the other day. To me, I used to think that teaching is an individual act. I remember one of my teachers once said that "as soon as you close the door of your classroom, you own it,and you are the king." However, over the years, I gradually come to realization that when you teach, the teacher alone can not generate the best result. Teaching is a process that requirs joined efforts from both teachers and students. Perhaps this is why nowadays, more and more teachers are paying more attention on learning theories.
My own experience of team teaching also tells me that a good teacher is the one who is a good resource finder and in the mean while is willing to share teaching ideas with others. Through sharing and cooperating with other teachers, we can enrich ourselves and thus benefit from it.
Oct. 28th, 2004
02:25 pm - Self efficacy
Chinese language has been enjoying its reputation of being extremely "difficult". Sometimes even Chinese teachers think this way. It is not unusual to watch students under great stress and struggle a lot after learning Chinese for two or three weeks. Some of them expressed the fear that they may never learn the language since it is so difficult. How can we improve students'self efficacy is the question that often lingering in my mind. It might be a good idea if we provide opportunities for students at different levels to meet and communicate with each other. In this way, the lower level students will have a clear understanding as to where he or she will be at after one year's study. Watching people who share similar background and achieved a lot may greatly encourage students and improve their self efficacy.