Equation with Four Unknowns, or Let’s Get it Started

My first blog entry related to the course Developing the Language Skills: Teaching Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening, that is supposed to be a “bridging” entry between the previous courses and this last one, is going to be quite a challenge for me. Due to some circumstances, the course, logically the last one in the program, will be my first one along with the course Understanding the Language Classroom: Procedures for Effective Teaching.I haven’t studied first 3 courses yet, although I had an opportunity to read modules summaries, available in Content from Previous Courses folder.

Course #1 touches upon theoretical aspects of the EAL instruction: it reveals main principles of adult learning; takes us to a retrospective journey into the history of language teaching; dwells upon the diversity of teaching methods and approaches; analyzes peculiarities of learners and teachers and their interaction within classroom environment; this course introduces a concept of communicative competence and reviews core principles of applying the communicative approach in an EAL classroom.

Course #2 has a more practically oriented focus and it lets us penetrate into the essence of the EAL instruction process. It familiarizes us with an idea of the Canadian Language Benchmark system; leads us through the basic stages of the teaching process, from learners’ needs assessment to learners’ progress analysis. The course also covers the basic principals of teaching 4 language modalities (reading, writing, listening and speaking). And the last but not least, it states the key stages of designing a teacher’s professional development plan.

Course #3 is devoted to teaching grammar and vocabulary. It introduces effective ways of teaching grammatical concepts, and answers the question ‘How to make learners accept the importance of grammar learning’. The course reveals effective strategies of presenting new vocabulary and touches upon the problem of appropriate error correction.

These 3 paragraphs contain a lot of new ideas and new information. Despite the difficulties I might face solving my equation with four unknowns, I am very excited to start my journey through the U of W ESL Teacher Certificate Program.