Yunjoung's blog

We, Koreans study English from Kindergarten but oracy skills are not good considering the duration of studying.
As Yunjoung mentioned, oracy skills are essential if English learners are to participate fully in a democratic society. Speaking involves in number of complex skills and strategies–not only the stringing together of words in proper grammatical sequence but also the organizing the words into coherent, powerful messages that help the speaker attain personal goals. Listening and speaking are integral to communicative competence. This ability begins with oracy training in English-language development.
Even We can write and read, if we can not speak what we want, there can be communicational problems. I agree with Younjoung that it is therefore vital for teachers to help students overcome their oral language quietude.

Ji Young Moon's Blog

I visited Ji Young Moon's blog and her summary regarding the learner autonomy attrated my attention. She mentioned that learner autonomy is the learners’ feeling that studying is taking place due to their own decision. The learner autonomy must be supported in a systematic way by the teacher and curriculum for the learner to benefit. When I was young, there was no Hakwon which is personal institute for helping students who would like to improve their weak subject. However, most of Korean students and parents depend on Hakwon too much and they seem to be unable to study without the help of Hakwon. Also I heard from many teachers in Hakwon that students just follow teacher's instruction lack of self-displine. As Ji Young mentioned, students should develop learner strategies which are systematic plans, designs, procedures, or maneuvers used during learning. I also would like to apply direct strategies such as cognitive, metacognitive, social-affective method to my class.

Chapter 7 Literacy Instruction for English-Language Development

In this chapter, writer is talking about the reading and writing process. Writing is still difficult task for me. As a EFL(English as a Foreign Language) learner, many other people will have same difficulties as me.
When we need to write, it is hard to find out materials what should we write. Therefore, the author says students need a real reason for writing, such as a letter exchange with a pen pal( Diaz-Rico, 2008, p. 193).
The first step of writing process is prewriting. Diaz-Rico (2008) has stated that prewriting helps students not only to build a representation of the topic about which they are writing, but the challenges, prompts, and questions from collaborators also help to fashion a working representation of the assignment or task. The second step of writing is “Drafting” (p. 196). In this step, writers do the best they can in spelling, vocabulary, and syntax, without a concern for accuracy. The drafted writing can be revised by self-correction and revision (p.197). Also students can give one another feedback through formal “sharing” meetings organized by the teacher (p. 197). To make use of distance learning for young adult learners, Janet Raskin developed a noncredit writing course for the commercial website Englishtown.com. I visited this website and found that it is very useful source for speaking as well as writing. I would like to attend seven days free tutorial course.

Chapter Blog for Chapter 6 Oracy Instruction That Builds on the First Language

The title, “ Oracy Instruction that Builds on the First Language” attracted my attention as I am going to take two kids to California this summer (am I too brave? ). This chapter discusses about the oracy processes-how people learn to listen and speak in a second language. It is interesting to know that children learn to engage in higher level thinking by learning first how to communicate (Diaz-Rico, 2008, p. 146). Oracy skills are developed by oracy training.
Listening activities are categorized listening to repeat, listening to understand, and listening for communication. Listening to repeat is learned by audio-lingual teaching, students repeat exactly what they hear. Listening can be taught by the task approach such as assigning students to create listening journal entries, audio taping selections culled from a variety of sources, and listening to the real world. Listening can be combined with other language modes as part of an integrated approach to English-language acquisition. Prelistening tasks are including preview of vocabulary and previewing the rhetorical structure of casual explanation. While listening, students can follow an outline as they listen, take notes cued by a set of questions. Or it will be a helpful strategy for English learners to videotape a lesson while students simply listen to the lecture (Adamson, 1993).
After listening, students can join many kinds of activities such as writing, discussing, reading, drawing or acting out their interpretation of the content(Diaz-Rico, 2008, p. 151).

Chapter Blog for Chapter 5 Learner Strategies and Learner-Focused Teaching

When I read about “metacognitive” teaching method in the book, I felf it is very high level teaching method. Diaz-Rico (2004) says it helps students plan what and how they want to learn; monitor, manage, and motivate while they are learning; and evaluate what they have learned and how they did so. Also she mentioned that metacognition is “the ability to think about your thinking-to make your thinking visible (STEL, 2004, p. 126). Metacognitive strategies are divided into three areas; Planning, monitoring, and evaluating.
Planning strategies help students learn how to organize themselves for a learning task.
For example, if students have group working task due in one week, they decide indivisual role for the first three days, draft and gather their works over the next two days, andn finally proofread their works. Throughout this, students learn how to plan the main comcepts, key ideas, and specific information that must be included (STEL, 2004, P. 127)
Monitoring strategies help students to check their comprehension in listening and reading, and their production while speaking and writing. Students can self-evaluate outcomes to judge how much they have learned, and this self-evaluation can be compared to the teacher’s assessment.
Performance evaluation strategies teach students how to assess their own performance on a task, using learning logs or other reflective tools to keep trck of their progress (STEL, 2004, P. 127).
Another part which attracts my attention mostly is about study skills and time management. Diaz-Rico (2004) says we do not need to “read everything carefully.” The important skill is to know what and what not to read carefully, and to allocate reading time accordingly. This is very important point to know as a English learners.

Chapter Blog for Chapter 4 Performance-Based Learning

Most of teachers who are working for the private institute should focus on students' school grade so it would be hard to apply the knowledge what we learned through MA program.
Two years ago, right after finishing TESOL certificate course, I got a job in elemetary school as a English teacher. There was no designated textbook or curriculum. School asked me to do story related activities. It was good chance to apply what I learned and it was very exciting.
According to my experience, each step of task chain is to be very simple and easy to understand. After detailed explanation about each task, it is important to show demo so that all of the students have clear pictures about each step. For large class, I felt group activities are better than the individual work. Also, competition makes a tremendous difference in child`s ability to concentrate and learn during school hours.
Chapter 4 is very helpful as it explains about the instructional plan, assessment, standards which are essential parts for real class circumstance.

Chapter Blog for Chapter 3 Views of Teaching and Learning

Chapter 3 is including variety of teaching and learning skills such as cognitivism, behaviorism, humanism, constructivism, philosophy, mastery learning and direct teaching.
All of these skills are useful and especially, I would like to talk about TPR (Total Physical Response). When I worked at the English Kindergarten, I read story books to children for four to seven age groups. Every time, I taught key sentences with TPR and after finishing one story book, children could speak out about 30 key sentences just looking at the TPR. It was amazing!
I like these methods for young children. They usually have very short span time so teacher needs to attract their attention often. In case of TPR, there are lots of interaction between teacher and whole group of students or individual student. Teacher speaks and students respond nonverbally, then students use more verbal and teacher responds nonverbally.
Grammar translation method sounds like the teaching style most of my English teachers used. When I was a student, my teachers did not speak in English. They used Korean for explanation and the class was totally teacher to students interaction.