Learners and Learning

Opening Statement

As a rookie in the teaching field, I have more experience of learning from being a learner rather than a teacher. I believe that my “beginner’s mind” as a teacher allows me to be more accepting of learning for both my students and myself: my students learn the language I am teaching while I learn the art of teaching itself, and we all learn about culture and life together at the same time. From personal learning experiences, I believe that learning is much more effective and productive when the learner likes the contents of the lesson and is engaged in the mode and style they feel most comfortable with. Learning also means retaining the knowledge and applying it appropriately. Retention can be effectively achieved through intricate analysis of learner mistakes followed by authentic and personal use of the corrected language. Learning is completed only when we reach what Caleb Gattegno stated: “What we have learned becomes automatic.” (Young, 1995)


Awareness: the relationship between learning and teaching

When I was attending High School in California, my world history teacher Mr. Burdette made the disclaimer in the first class that his worst subject in high school was history itself! He then explained that because history was the subject that he disliked the most, he was able to learn much from teaching it. Oddly enough, I enjoyed his class more than any other classes throughout High School, and his words motivated me to challenge and learn more about my worst subject, English, by teaching. I grabbed my chance and started teaching in Japan, believing that through teaching I would magically learn much about English myself. I had no strategies, no skills, and my English is full of grammatical and spelling mistakes, but I went to Japan with confidence thinking that the one-eye is the king among the blinds. In a community conversation class with 12 Japanese Adults, I was surprised to find myself learning millions of things from them: Japanese politics, health, cooking, history, chemistry, many others, and most importantly the languages both Japanese and English. I still remember how Mr. Katagiri, who was my neighbor, my Japanese father, and also my English student, joked with me all the time saying “Hey James I think your English is getting better”! The little English that I shared with these modest and humble students in exchange for what I learned was, I thought, an unfair trade that others might see my teaching practice of robbing knowledge off students to be a crime. I was able to get away from my guilt trip only because I taught as a volunteer and did not received money from them.

My experience in Japan made me ask myself, who was the real teacher in that adult conversation class? At SIT I stumbled across an answer that teachers are “not the one who knows”, but rather “the one who knows how to teach.” (Young, 1995) This statement helped me to reflect on the different approaches I studied about in the approaches class and wrote in my beliefs and principles worksheet L&L Aw D1 that “learning comes from scaffolding with peers”, and “it is the teacher’s responsibility to create a non-hostile and friendly environment” to provide scaffolding and promote learning. Furthermore, I analyzed the beliefs and principles I wrote down for language, culture, learners, and teachers and concluded that my mission as a teacher is to be a guide for students, not the know-all talking encyclopedia. More importantly, I need to be “a facilitator, a consular, a good listener” for the learners as well; only then, I believe, is when I deserved to be coined with the title “teacher” and perform the art of teaching.

Nevertheless, while being called a “teacher” by students, I still believe I am learning from my students as I teach. Like how Mr. Burdette was learning more about history as he was teaching, my English was improving as I consulted grammar books and dictionaries repeatedly in and out of classrooms while helping students understanding English. The relationship between learning and teaching can be confusing depending on which perspective one sees it with. The I-Thou-It triangle that many SIT professors mentioned was a helpful tool to see the relationship more clearly. As Caleb Gattegno pointed out in his Silent Way principles, in the classroom “the teachers work on students and the students work on the language.” (Anderson, 2005) This explains the triangle going in the clockwise direction. Outside the classroom, on the other hand, the triangle would work in a counter-clockwise direction, where the teacher works on the materials, and the materials manifests students’ learning. While on the surface this triangle relationship may seem like its focus is on the students’ learning, in reality the triangle can go two ways and show teacher learning in the process of teaching. One effective way to learn about our teaching and ourselves is to collect student feedback without being present in the classroom. During my internship at Costa Rica, my institution supervisor, Christian Moriera Segura, introduced this method of gathering student feedback and volunteered to be the liaison to translate results for me. My reflection on his summarized and translated feedback shows that in the process of teaching my class I was learning about culture, language, teaching methodologies, and even my bad habit of looking at the clock all the time from the “thou” and “it” of the I-Thou-It triangle. (L&L Aw D2) Currently, I can see endless possibilities for myself to teach and learn in my classroom as a teacher. While it may be possible that after twenty or thirty years of teaching English I may be able to recite every grammatical rule from “The Grammar Book” by Diane Larsen-Freeman, I do not think my desire to learn and passion to teach will be any less then.


Attitude: willingness to allow learners’ learning to guide your teaching

Learning does not happen when the learners do not have the intention and desire to learn. I was forced to learn piano at the age of three and hated every song I was assigned to practice. On the contrary, I loved the very few pieces that I was allowed to choose and performed well in competitions playing them. My personal experience led me to believe that I need to teach contents that the students can relate to and enjoy using. Prior to attending SIT, I spent two years playing the role of an assistant teacher in Japanese schools with a great amount of time to observe teacher-student interactions, student behaviors, and the contents students were drawn to. As a result I developed the strong ability to observe students’ reactions and was disappointed at how little learning was taking place in the classrooms with Japan’s rigid and closed education system.

In fall of 2005, Shakti Gattegno visited SIT and gave a demonstrative workshop on the silent way approaches to us MAT 37s. There were many original and interesting principles introduced to us that made looking at the Silent Way approaches like looking at an image in a kaleidoscope at first. In my Silent Way response paper for the approaches class, L&L At D1, I expressed how uncomfortable I was about not praising the students after a mini peer teaching experiment with my peers using the silent way approach. Furthermore, I failed to see how a teacher in silence could manage the classroom when in traditional classrooms teachers need to use their loud teachers’ voice. On the other hand, I resonated well with the principle where the learners should be given the opportunity to truly enjoy the process of discovering their learning by deciding how they want to learn. It reminded me of the joyful moments of learning piano when playing the pieces I liked, and encouraged me to try and incorporate this enjoyable factor in my teaching.

Shortly after Shakti’s visit, we were introduced to another teaching approach, the Communicative Language Learning (CLL) approach. CLL principles were derived from Dr. Curran, a psychologist and also a counselor, when he wanted to provide his patients a safe and holistic environment. Some key principles of the CLL approach I learned, as described in my CLL approaches response paper, were to give students as much space as they need to learn, to have control over their learning and develop inner criteria, and to work on both accuracy and fluency of the language. (L&L At D2) Overall, I was most drawn to the procedure of collecting student-generated ideas and utilizing them as the core of lessons through a tape recorder. It is no doubt a wonderful and non-hostile way to ask the learners to select their favorite topics, which from that point on I can apply principles of other approaches if I so desire.

Creating a secure atmosphere and observing the learners silently gives them the freedom to explore and discover their learning according to their inner criteria; at the same time, theses principles will grant me, the teacher, a firm grasp on how I would refine my teaching to best meet the students’ needs and wants. The combination of silent way and CLL principles have allowed me to witness several times learning moments created by my students. In a recently taught class at the San Mateo Adult School, I conducted one of my best lessons taught by not having written a lesson plan and taught to what the students needed. Documented on my online reflective teaching journal, I successfully combined both the silent way and CLL approaches by observing the class quietly and working on my students’ habits and learning strategies while they worked on the materials they generated. (L&L At D3) I described the red pen as a “divinely powerful” tool to create the opportunity for the students to discover learning, and my modified “hybrid human computer” provided the openness of learning space and freedom for the entire class in an economical way. I was thrilled with this particular lesson and teaching ideas just kept flowing out of my head non-stop as I followed what my students needed and wanted me to do for them.

The more I practice my art of teaching, the more I am convinced that I am responsible to create and provide opportunities for learning moments to occur among my students. In order to fulfill my responsibility I need to continue to reflect and revise my teaching and continue to allow learners’ learning to guide my teaching. I can only dream that my piano teachers knew the importance of learner’s learning; then, perhaps in a parallel world I would be a pianist instead of a teacher now.


Knowledge: learning differences: styles, disabilities, strategies, and processes

One of the reasons we have so many different teaching approaches and techniques is because there are many different learning styles. Unfortunately, before educators were able to understand and categorize some of the more extreme learning styles many students suffered the consequences of being labeled as something they were not. When I was teaching in Japan, I had my first experiences teaching what they called “special needs” students. In my personal essay for SIT admission I described my eye-opening experience with my first special-need student Akemi, “even the slow learners can perform well with the right motivation”. (L&L K D1, part 1) I started to think about my own learning styles and strategies after I came back from Japan; I never liked to take notes in classes and I talked a lot with other students, was I a bad student? Interestingly enough, one of the very first things I experienced while studying at SIT was the requirement to take the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Test[1]. After finding out that I am an INFP person and reading the descriptions on the general descriptions of this personality type I was able to understand how personality types can influence learning.

During my internship at Costa Rica I attended and presented at their national TESOL conference. My internship supervisor Mary Scholl gave a workshop on learning modalities and demonstrated various teaching applications to serve students with strength in different modalities, especially the non-visual ones. On a worksheet to assess workshop attendees’ current knowledge on modalities (L&L K D2 p1), it was clear that upon attempting to write down as much knowledge I knew of the different learning modalities, I was only able to come up with very few things to write down. Shortly after she gave out another handout (p2) where she added an extra modality “tactile” to the existing ones: audio, visual, and kinesthetic and listed popular classroom activities and procedures classified in their perspective modality group. The list is helpful as it allows teachers to determine the types of activities to include more frequently for better learning results on the learners. I attended another workshop after Mary’s on multiple intelligences by Luis Vargas. The presenter gave us detailed information and a useful inventories list for the different multiple intelligences. Furthermore, we were given the chance to practice analyzing a typical classroom activity to determine which steps of it involved different learning intelligences (p5-6). It was an important experience to see that when designed well, one activity can include many learning intelligences. I was excited by the fact that I can now engage all my students of various learning intelligences with just a little more effort and consideration during lesson preparation.

With an understanding of different learning modalities and intelligences, I was in a better position to determine if a student was just different or really has disabilities. Having personally taught a few lessons to disabled students in Japan, I was attracted to a presentation on “reaching a variety of learners” by an MAT alumni, Christie Herbert, when her husband Bill Conley invited her to give the presentation at SIT. In a quick self-assessment before the main presentation, I wrote down what I thought was the most important principle when working with students who learn differently, “be patient and observe more before making a conclusion”. (L&L K D3 p2) While there were overlaps on using different learning modalities, Christie pointed out the importance to build a repertoire of strategies for students to reflect on what worked for them. Students know themselves the best, and by empowering students, even the disabled, to reflect can improve the strength of their motivation to learn.

SIT really prepared me well to deal with differences. After learning about approaching learners with learning disabilities, Elizabeth Tannenbaum, a MAT faculty, gave a workshop on working with illiterate students where I learned different learning strategies for dealing with illiterate learners. The wide array of activities she setup in stations (listed on L&L K D3 p3) gave me first hand experience on using extremely simple but practical tasks to learn specific steps on performing basic life skills. It was not until I tried out writing on sand and making characters out of play dough that I remembered how I learned my first language, and how long it took me to learn things the first time. Illiterate students need these basic life skills in order to start learning anything in the school environment. Nevertheless, I am still not very confident on teaching learners with learning differences as I am not able to put myself in the world of disabilities and relate to feelings and hardships these learners go through daily. From my short reflective journal, L&L K D4, I expressed the frustration I had teaching a group of illiterate students at the San Mateo Adult School and the need for me explore this area further.


Skills: assessing linguistic and cultural needs and performance of students

Additional language acquisition often takes years to reach fluency level, and is complicated and confusing when our first language already occupies most of our cognitive load. (Sweller, van Maerrienboer, Pass, 1998) Learners do not always understand the reasons they make errors while using a new language. It is important for teachers to be skillful in analyzing the mechanics of a language, its grammar, in order to provide concrete learning shortcuts and strategic learning options for the learners.

In my English Applied Linguistics course at SIT, I learned and practiced the skill to analyze student-produced errors through a method called “Interlanguage Analysis”. Prior to our internships, our course instructor Francis Bailey gave us a task to collect student errors to bring back. It was important to note background information to these errors with details as for the purpose of this activity we wanted to preserve the original meaning that the students’ wanted to express; wrong interpretations, cultural or behavioral, of students’ intentions would lead to completely different and useless results. To analyze, we had to create a grammar tree and describe possible structures of the learner’s interlanguage (IL) system. We then identified in class the learning strategies that learners used in their systems and discussed possible pedagogical steps in order to guide learners with similar problems in the future. L&L S1 D1 shows the procedures (p.2) we took to practice this skill over three weeks of classes, as well as the progression of my skill (p.3,5-6) from the first assignment to the last assignment.

Towards the end of the course, as commented by Francis, I demonstrated “a strong understanding of IL” and “awesome grammar analysis” in my report for interlanguage analysis. (L&L S1 D2) The process to analyze grammatical transformation of both the learner’s incorrect sentence and the corrected sentence showed obvious areas that the learner yet needed to learn. This information also helped me identify what the students already knew and did not know at the time the incorrect sentence was formed. In the report I concluded, “With a good analysis of the students’ incorrect output, there is a good chance that we can identify patterns to their interlanguages. Once the problem is identified, we can tackle the specific problems that the students are having and help them sort out their rules.” Of course, one drawback I saw in this technique was the time involved in analyzing just one error. In reality, especially in the lower level classes, students produce mostly incorrect sentences, making IL analysis not feasible.

There was no doubt that I was uncertain and hesitant on the practicality of IL analysis when I first started teaching after my studies at SIT. However, I had recently found out two things about IL analysis that changed it into a powerful tool I use in my teaching:
One can modify the procedures so that it is less time consuming.
Through analyzing an error sentence, students can also raise cultural awareness.
At the San Mateo Adult School, I started my new teaching journey as the low-advance conversation class instructor. As I explained in a reflective journal I wrote for that class, I conducted a lesson where students learned through both peer assessment and my facilitated assessment. Without the intention to apply IL analysis skills, my analysis in the reflective journal shows that I later realized what I did to assess my students was more or less a variation of the IL analysis. I was able to, without drawing out the entire grammar tree, faintly visualize a simple tree in my head to analyze and assess my students. (L&L S1 D3) It was clear that the hard work I have done on the numerous IL analyses in the EAL course really paid off. The reward from successfully assessing students’ interlanguage for that lesson was the result of student learning; they became aware of what they lacked and needed to improve on, both grammatically and culturally. In the journal I documented the linguistic needs of my students’ English:
For Chi and Nga, they have the tendency to drop “be” verbs while speaking in English.

Also in the same document, another pair of students needed to learn the formal language that American waitresses use in this culture:
For Yoko and Kyun-sung, they became aware of the different ways to express themselves in English. For example, a waiter/waitress needs to speak with formal speeches using the proper modals in their sentences. (L&L S1 D3)

While my main goal is to further integrate IL analysis in my teaching to assess students’ performances, as a never-ending learner myself, I get to improve my understanding of the languages that I am studying by analyzing through the lenses of linguistics and culture. It is my hope that the more grammar and culture I learn from analyzing my students’ interlanguages, the better I can help them reach their desired level of fluency and accuracy.


Skills: designing and conducting teacher research projects

I chose this extra sub-competency because I have recently carried out a research project with another teacher at the San Mateo Adult School. It may be true that with the internet and newest technology there are abundant amounts of information floating around within our reach. Once in a while, however, we may encounter a question or problem where other people’s answer cannot give us the answer we are looking for. It is then up to us to find the answer to our questions by conducting research.

My first experience of research projects in the TESOL field is an assignment for my Second Language Acquisition (SLA) course at SIT. The class was divided into three groups to conduct our researches on three major components of SLA: lexicon, grammar, and pragmatic. The course instructor, Elka Todeva, designed this assignment and pointed out a general direction to us by providing several related literature from the field. We the students conducted our research over a month and gave a presentation to the rest of the class. In a compilation of work related to the research project (L&L S2 D1), page 1 shows the timeline of our group meetings and page 2 shows my small group’s plan to take our findings and present them. Each member of my group was assigned a part to cover different areas of the research, and I was assigned to present the contrast between a deductive and inductive grammar lesson. L&L S2 D2 is the PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate a deductive lesson on the passive voice grammar based on the results of my part of the research. Page 3 and 4 of L&L S2 D1 is a summary, also the feedback, from Elka on our presentation who commented that my group did a great job summarizing existing studies and personalized the materials into a “fun, content rich, and engaging presentation”.

My part in the SLA group research project was small and brief, and more importantly it was designed by Elka not me. I honestly never thought I would design a research project on my own, but with the strong urge to promote persistency among my students and improve the collaborative atmosphere of the staffs I involved myself in designing and conducting a research at the San Mateo Adult School unintentionally. Originally I just wanted to alleviate the anxiety my students get when they sit in a new classroom at the beginning of a new semester; students at my school have the tendency to drop out of school when they get a new teacher and I wanted to prevent that from happening. I started with just one other teacher on this project, Bruce Smith, who’s teaching a class just one level higher than mine. I brought my students to his class, and after a short introduction we paired our students up so his students could become a tutor for my students while we float around to facilitate the groups. Neither Bruce nor I gave much thought in what more to expect from the activity other than a simple peer teaching experience for his students and one or two on one instruction for my students.

The project started after I e-mailed Bruce my teaching reflection on the experiment with his class. Bruce and I learned much from our experience, and got together to share our ideas and philosophies. The more we talked about teaching theories and principles studied in our MA programs, the more we were drawn doing more with the original idea. Bruce advocated that we team up to expand the project and write a research paper together. I began asking other teachers at the school during break time to participate and wrote up a brief explanation on several benefits for both student groups as shown on L&L S2 D3 page 2. A few teachers agreed to help and gave us the opportunity to continue and expand our project. As I wrote reflective journals and shared them with Bruce, he integrated my reflections in the draft of our research paper. (L&L S2 D4) We constantly met up to update and exchange more ideas to include in the paper, as well as sharing our sources of literature.

This joint teacher research project still needs more data before we can further analyze its effects on our students. We plan to gather data for one more semester before moving on to analyze the pedagogical implication of this project. From this project, I discovered the genuine and joyful reason to why researchers are motivated to design projects. With the desire to find a solution to satisfy my students’ needs, I am willing to devote time and effort to conduct and complete this research project. It is my hope to learn from and with Bruce to improve my researching skills as we continue to find some answers together.

Conclusion

There are three aspects of teaching that I aim to improve on in the near future in regard to the learner and learning competency. First, I want to increase my knowledge on effective ways to motivate and promote learning among learners of different learning abilities. I will begin by reading existing articles in the field of researches done at other schools. My second goal is to constantly review the grammar book and learn to make less grammatical mistakes when I speak because as the teacher I am the model for my students and I do not want them to imitate my mistakes. My last goal is to complete my research project on the cross-class, student-to-student peer teaching with Bruce Smith. I hope that by reaching these three goals I will be more confident and enjoy learning together with my students.


[1] The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Test is a psychometric questionnaire created in 1942 and used to determine and match peoples’ personality with one of the sixteen types of pre-defined personalities