Tuesday, July 5, 2011

My Reflections of ESL Course #3 – Teaching ESL Grammar & Vocabulary

This course introduced Csikszentmihalyi’s elements of flow and how they can be applied to lesson planning and teaching in order to keep students engaged in learning. Teachers can increase the likelihood of students being “in the flow” by informing them of the lesson’s goals; designing meaningful, fun and relevant learning experiences within students’ zone of proximal development; creating a comfortable learning environment where students are encouraged to take risks with new language; viewing mistakes as part of the learning process in order to decrease the fear of failure; and providing formative feedback.

Planning lessons was an important part of this course. Lesson objectives focused on developing grammar points and vocabulary while integrating the four language skills; receptive and productive practice; different learning styles and grouping strategies; inductive and deductive learning; ideas to consolidate learning; and multi-levelled student practice within the context of the communicative approach. Developing lesson plans provided opportunities to incorporate a variety of planning and teaching aspects into ESL learning activities.

Error correction techniques and guidelines were interesting and informative. I currently teach elementary school aged children and often reflect upon and discuss with colleagues when and how we should correct students’ reading, speaking, and writing errors; and how many errors and which ones should be corrected. I like to limit the number of errors corrected, and focus on errors related to the lesson objectives. Providing feedback on one or two errors is not overwhelming and the students are more likely to remember those corrections, thus eliminating the errors in the future.

The most challenging part of this course for me was selecting and sequencing grammar points for a particular group of students and then matching those points with themes and topics. Information from the Canadian Language Benchmarks: ESL for Adults document and the scope and sequence of grammar points from textbooks was used as a guide; however, the large number of grammar points made this task difficult.
In the later part of this course I had the opportunity to review materials from two ESL textbook series (Side by Side and Interchange) and two ESL dictionaries (Collins COBUILD Student’s Dictionary Plus Grammar and Oxford ESL Dictionary). I was surprised to learn that these well-developed materials existed. I like the idea of using a textbook and its supplementary materials in an ESL course, especially if they are similar to the Side by Side or Interchange series. Some units may need to be supplemented with vocabulary, grammar points or communicative activities in order to meet the needs of a particular group of students. One or both of the dictionaries stated above would be helpful resources in an ESL classroom. Besides the regular dictionary features, they also have “usage” or “note” charts which state how to use the entry words and when not to use them; and a section of labelled pictures organized by themes. The Collins COBUILD dictionary has an extensive, but concise grammar reference section.

For the final assignment, I reviewed a unit from Grammar Dimension 2 (4th ed.). Many learning activities in this textbook could be used as described while some may require changes and/or supplements. I especially like the organization and contents of the focus charts, the variety of learning tasks and the inclusion of communicative activities. In my opinion, the lack of explicit vocabulary instruction is the greatest weakness. Overall, this is a text that could be well-used in an intermediate ESL classroom.