FINAL ESSAY

                                   TEFL CLASS ''CASA GRANDE'' UNIVERSITY

                                         ASSESSMENT - FINAL ESSAY

                                  

I have learned to  do E.S.A Planning  which is using the language through goals, objectives and strategies are made to change the way a language is used in communicative English learning  planning is about teaching the language in a ways that it  makes it easier or more attractive to learn a language. Through learning how to plan I`ve been able to balance up the three ESA elements which are engagement(pre-teaching) and ensures me to include study events built into the plan and leave the student with the opportunity to use the language in as realistic sense as possible by activating what was priory learned. I have done many planning since starting this course in the TEFL classroom and in my work classrooms where I have focused more on making engagement and activity more realistic and not as much academic but more attractive to students as they feel that the language is not just a subject they study. One example of this was when I showed my students a one minute video of me in a Romeo Santos concert and the students could grasp how to use the present perfect by saying “I`ve seen that singer many times live” as the present perfect was the grammar topic in a reading activity. In many cases planning is based on a text book as in my case “FUTURE”, for example: when teaching Will and Going To ,I plan to have slides with futuristic photos of how the world Will or Is Going To Be in 2050, based the visual aids students personalize. These slides must be planned prior to the lesson, appropriate, non complex, big enough for all students to see and engaging. Communicative English language planning also involves making the language more attractive to learn for speakers of other languages A good way of planning for example is by asking the question “what do I want my students to know by the end of this lesson, and by the end of the course?”

 Now I can also have many students benefit from while reading activities which is a way in which the teacher guarantees that the students are really paying attention and not just going through the motions in a typical out loud-take turns Reading in class. While reading activities will depend on the type of Reading it is: Intensive or Extensive Reading but some of the activities suggested for the phase of the reading are skimming(reading quickly to a gist),scanning (reading for specific information) ,finding certain words, to find out who wrote the article, deduce word meanings from text from the text itself, comprehension questions as the students read after each paragraph, match pictures to paragraphs, put titles on paragraphs, putt he paragraphs in order,

I would like to improve my teaching writing abilities, I am not currently teaching a writing course in my job, but I have done it in the past and in the regular language arts classes there are also writing activities. I would like to be assigned Reading and Writing courses which I`m not given anymore because I didn`t have appropriate training in this area. I have learned to distinguish “Writing for Writing” from “Writing for Learning”. But I reckon that the process of planning, drafting, reviewing and editing is something I know in theory but getting the students to understand and do it is different. I don`t seem to be able to get this message across well. I tend to give the students a model to follow but I find that students more copy it with changes in certain parts but that they don`t have independence to do it themselves and I think that this is that I myself am not very sure about this area either so I recommend myself to explain and carry out the different prewriting activities such as brainstorming, genre as a type of writing for my students as  members of a discourse community and  genre analysis which will help students to see how typical texts within a genre are constructed.

I would also like to improve getting young learners engaged and activated to reading and writing. I find that adults tend to be more responsible and receptive to these skills but I have not been successful with getting young learners properly engaged in this. I currently give vocabulary with visual aids so students know meanings without having to translate and making it a little more enjoyable as children like looking at images on screen but it`s not enough. I feel that I need to engage them better. I suggest for myself according to what I have learned from the TEFL Reading and Writing course it that there are other ways to engage, such as: watching a short video, reading a headline and asking what they think it will be about, activating prior knowledge about the subject by asking questions or opinions about the related topic, looking and discussing photos related to the topic, playing a game, bring in realia to activate in trig. Children learn the language subconsciously according to linguist Stephen Krashen acquiring the language rather than learning and that kind of language exposure, namely comprehensible input where the children are in an anxiety-free atmosphere and when they need it they will be able to retrieve the language they need from their acquired language store. This is something that I need to work on so I will be looking to the other alternatives such as watching a short video, reading a headline and asking what they think it will be about, activating prior knowledge watching a short video, reading a headline and asking what they think it will be about, activating prior knowledge about the subject by asking questions or opinions about the related topic, looking and discussing photos related to the topic, playing a game, bring in realia.

Overall the main parts of reading is to take into account the pre-reading with various useful techniques with should involve activating prior knowledge and an acquisition of vocabulary prior to the reading of the article itself. There needs to be a while reading study and activation so students have a purpose to continue being engaged by having a task to do followed by a after reading activity that should involve a type of a discussion after the reading enabling students to personalize and remember the topic well. Writing needs to be the process of planning, drafting, reviewing and editing, it`s very important for students to be prepared to do these skill. I, myself will have to reinforce what I have learned about engaging children into reading and writing by trying out various pre knowledge techniques on the students which I have learned in this course.

By Carlo Veliz Aguirre