Assessment

The article stresses the importance of discourse as a part of communicative competence. There is a need for testers to come up with different ways to assess discourse skills. I thought the quote at the beginning by McNamara was very true. It spoke about how oral assessment models focus on a candidate instead of on how they interact. Since the language tester is seeing how the candidate can orally communicate, it is important that the tester is studying the interaction part. Assessments need to be in context, because if they aren't  the tester cannot truly understand how the candidate communicates. The use of direct tests proves this. When a candidate is orally tested using a direct test, he/she uses more elaborate and indirect language and involves more pragmatic and social devices.

            Chapter 23 was about language assessment. It outlined different assessment types, such as performance based. These portfolios, projects, and experiments show how students progress without them having to memorize facts to copy down onto a pencil/paper test. Even though traditional testing offers higher levels of practicality, those types of tests are not individualized. This does not mean that they cannot be used. More authentic assessment types take longer to create, implement, and grade. I suggest placing more emphasis on alternative assessment methods because they show more of what a student is capable of doing.

            Brown’s chapter 24 went into detail on classroom based assessment. It also gave practical steps to creating a test, my favorite one being “form your objectives, draw up test specifications” because it gave a sample outline of a test. It encompassed many domains by including listening, multiple choice, and writing production. When it comes to alternative assessment types, I think that portfolios truly show the progress of a student from the beginning of the year until the end. It allows the student, instructor, and parents to see the work of the student in the beginning of the course and how/if they improved with various assignments.

Teaching Quality

Brown’s chapters 9-11 are all about course/lesson planning. I enjoyed the way Brown gave a concrete example of all the different steps of planning a curriculum. It made it easier to think about. A valid point he made was about the quality of teachers. Many times the successfulness of a course is dependent on its instructor. Since I have decided to become an educator, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of teacher I want to be. There’s an important balance between being an approachable teacher and one that facilitates knowledge acquisition. It is important that the students feel comfortable enough to ask questions, but not so much that the teacher is seen more like a friend than an educator. Students might give high rating to “nice” teachers, but even though they have friendly personalities, did they cover material? A stern teacher might get more material covered. I want to make sure I have a balance of both in my classroom.

Lesson planning is the topic of chapter 10. When teaching ELLs it is vitally important to allow time for the students to communicate and interact with each other to produce language. Therefore, teacher talk should be at a minimum and student talk should be strongly utilized. This does not mean that teachers should not talk at all. They should ask the students questions and facilitate discussion. But, students should have many opportunities during class to produce the language. Also, I feel that it is important to over-plan when it comes to lesson planning. If the lesson is to end early, the teacher should still have activities in mind that she would be able to do. Otherwise, students are missing out of prime learning time.

The dialogue in chapter 13: Monitoring Teaching Acts in Kuma’s book helped me to understand one way of evaluating how a teacher presents her lesson. In the beginning of the chapter, the sections seemed theoretical and unclear. After reading the dialogue, I had many critiques that were addressed in the evaluation of the lesson. The part that was the most upsetting to me was the numerous times she passed up learning opportunities. When a student repeatedly asks a question, usually they genuinely want to know the answer. I bet it was difficult for the observer to watch the teacher and not say anything at the time about that. If you were the teacher, would you have addressed the housing issue of homeless people living under the bridge? To me, it is acceptable to get off topic if the students are still learning and if it is somewhat related to the lesson. For example, I got through 50% of my last lesson at the ELI on schooling. However, the reason we were unable to get through the lesson was that the students had things to add about what we were talking about. I had no problem going on a tangent because they were interested in the topic and asking questions.

Cultural Awareness

Kuma’s chapter “Ensuring Social Relevance” was about Standard English and the use of L1 vs L2. One time last semester, I took my conversation partner to a speaker about education. When the speech began, we quickly learned that English was the speaker’s L2. He was from India and my conversation partner was from Korea. I could barely understand him, and I knew that she couldn’t. This brings up the question, should ELLs be taught in Standard English? I feel that they would benefit from it, but not to the point of totally excluding exposure to other dialects. Non-natives varieties are present in the English-speaking world and people need to acknowledge them and not see them as less valuable. When that happens, it’s degrading because language is part of identity. This also applies to L2 use in the classroom. However, many times teachers don’t know how to speak the L1 of the students and the parents of the students don’t want it spoken to their children. But, the student will feel more valuable if the teacher connects the classroom activities to the student’s home language and/or culture.

Raising cultural consciousness is important in the classroom so that students know more than just the society in which they live. The first day of classes at the ELI, I had my students make bucket lists of what they want to accomplish at in class, ISU, and their lives in general. All of them stated that they wanted to learn about the cultures of others. How many Americans have you heard that have said something like that? My guess is not many. It’s refreshing to be around people who appreciate cultures other then their own. The chapter states that, “there is no one culture that embodies all and only the best of human experience”. So much value is given to the American culture that I fear it’s gone to people’s heads. There’s a difference between patriotism and ignorance and I hope that people become more knowledgeable about other cultures.

An interesting section in Brown’s chapter “Teachers for Social Responsibility” was Hot Topics in the Language Classroom. In general, I encourage raising student awareness about controversial issues so that students can be mindful of what is going on around them. However, my opinions on it were challenged when it happened to me in the classroom. During a class at the ELI, we were having an unexpected talk about religion. It was a learning experience for everyone so I told my students that we could continue the discussion at a later time. For the next time we met, I had prepared an article for the students to read about women’s role in religion. Right before class, a student asked me not to bring up religion in class because of differing religious views. I had a back-up article, so we analyzed that instead. When she asked me not to talk about religion, I wondered if it was something that I shouldn’t have brought up in the first place. After reading the chapter, I now know that it depends on the way in which I bring up controversial topics. How should I have presented the topic of religion in class? As the chapter title indicates, it is our job to teach about issues such as these. By choosing to be teachers, we are agents for change.

My paper is going to be about culture and rhetorical strategy in ELL writing. Originally, it was just going to be about how to teach writing, but after meeting with Dr. Seloni, she helped me tie in culture to how to teach writing, which is a large factor in how ELLs write. I will be using Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric. The article is about how Intercultural Rhetoric builds on notions of the importance of difference based on culture and language in ESL writing patterns, but incorporates a more dynamic and pluralistic perspective on cultures and writing structures. A Comparison of English and Farsi Rhetoric and its Impact on English Writing of Iranian Students by Sasan Baleghizadeh and Azar Pashaii shows that there are significant differences in the use of these three elements between native speakers and Iranian students. It is argued that this is due to different thought patterns between the two languages claimed by Kaplan’s (1966) contrastive rhetoric. Lastly, Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Basic Technical Writing Course: A Survey of Our Current Practices and Methods by Natalia Matveeva provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum.