Blog Post 6: Maximizing Learning Opportunities

Blog Post 6

September 24, 2012

Brown Chapters 4 & 16  

Kumar Chapter 3

            Brown’s chapter four in Teaching By Principles, will be a great resource in the future.  I found each section was answering either questions that I had and answering questions I didn’t even know I had.  These sections or elements, are referred to as foundational principles that form building blocks for theoretical rationales.

            “I have see many a novice language teacher gobble up teaching techniques without carefully considering the criteria that underlie their successful application in the classroom…..I just want to know what to do when I get into the classroom” (Brown 63).  I believe that this statement is relevant to all preservice teachers, including myself.  This semester in particular I have been focusing on building a database of methods, approaches, and activities because, frankly, I am terrified by the idea that next semester I will be teaching ELL’s in a high school.

            As important as methods, approaches, and activities are to teaching language, Brown states that we need to carefully consider the criteria that underline their successful application in the classroom (Brown 63). The principles that form the core approach to language teaching are as follows: Cognitive Principles: automaticity, meaningful learning, the anticipation of reward, intrinsic motivation, strategic motivation, and autonomy.  Socioaffective principles: Language ego, willingness to communicate, and the language-culture connection. Linguistic Principles: the native language effect, interlanguage, and communicative competence

            Automaticity is an interesting concept.  Teachers need to realize how children, adolescents and adults learn languages differently.  Children do not focus on the grammatical aspects thus allowing them to absorb the language and promote fluency.  Adults can benefit from certain focal processing of rules, definitions, and other formal aspects of language.  However, adults, stated by Brown, “can take a lesson from children by speedily overcoming our propensity to pay too much focal attention to the bits and pieces of language and to move language forms quickly to the periphery by using language in authentic contexts for meaningful purposes” (Brown 65).  I think the hardest part for me when I was learning an L2 was moving the rules, definitions, and other formal aspects of the L2 to the periphery of my focus.  I guess I, as being as linguistically inclined as I am, focused strongly on grammar-translation and assumed I was past the ability of using automaticity to gain fluency and comprehension.

            As Brown discussed in his chapter four, students need to learn autonomy without too many outside rewards.  In Kumar’s chapter three in Beyond Methods, he also states that, “learning is primarily a personal construct controlled by the individual learner” (Kumar 44).  With this in mind, we can help our students by maximizing learning opportunities for our learners.  Kumar discusses that we need to realize that our lessons cannot be bound by teachers’ agenda, teaching materials, or by syllabus specifications.  We can sort all of these out before we even get our class list of students, but as we begin to learn about our students, our agendas, materials and syllabi need to reflect the information we obtain.