Class on Nov. 16th

It has been one month since last class. I was impressed about how much Latin I remembered. The words such as dusae, mox, and et left very deep impressions in my mind. I would say that this is the benefit of acquiring a language instead of learning about words and a language. If I never experienced TPRS classes in the past four months and someone told me that teaching a new language without practicing after classes, I would never believe. It seems impossible for me, who had experiences of learning a new language and knew how hard the process was. I want to apply this method into real classes. I assume that there are going to a lot of problems and I really want to looking for solutions through teaching in TPRS. I feel that  teaching different languages should not be exactly same. Every language has its own natural ways to acquire it. For example, Chinese characters are not able to read directly, so learning Chinese is different from learning other phonological languages. We have to seek helps from magic tool, pinyin. It takes more works. I am willing to teach in TPRS in the future and seek more data from real classes.

Post for Oct. 26th

We did not have the class today, but I have few questions after reading the article. Waltz mentioned CCR approach of teaching reading. At the beginning, I assumed that the method has been used for our Latino course, which Dr. Patrick taught some key words he would use for readings such as "Ursa" and we, students would be able to recognize the words later in the reading. However, Waltz later stated, " with the cold character reading (CCR) method, students do not see Chinese characters util the moment they are reading them in a long, connected, repetitive text" (97). Does it mean that students will not see any new characters before reading? I was quite confused while I was reading this part. In the last journal, I mentioned that I was able to read most part of the reading before Dr. patrick translated it, and it seemed that I was able to read easily without any efforts. I am wondering if the method we used for the last class is CCR.

Waltz proposed to teach both simplified and traditional characters, at least, she proposed to show students both of them. However, the problem is, while writing, students will not tell the differences between them and it might turn out that they write both simplified and traditional characters in one sentence. How could we deal with it? Or should we tell students which one is simplified or traditional during teaching? Will that be too much for students?

One interesting point Waltz stated was footnotes. I remembered that when I learned Chinese, I tended to read Pinyin instead of Chinese characters as well. However, she stated that the difference is that western people tend to read alphabets forever, so students need to build habits to write footnotes at the very beginning. I think that there could be another way to do it. For example, at my first grade, our readings always have Pinyin with characters. At the second and third grades, pinyin only shows up while some new characters appears in the article. If we have trouble on reading, we need to use dictionary. Do you think it is a good idea to teach our students to use dictionary? We do not have to let them read the explanation, instead, just finding out the sound.  

LLED 7504 Oct. 12th

On Wednesday class, I feel the context is more comprehensive than the context from the previous classes. Even though we learned two pars this week, I feel that I am able to read most of the contexts before Dr. Patrick translated the meaning. I have learned German for one year and half. I realized that when I read the Latino, I prefer to translate them either in English or German in my mind, instead of Chinese. I guess that it is because Chinese is a complete different language system comparing these three languages, and it is hard to find the similarities. I believe that more languages people learn, faster they would learn. Students from diverse background with other native languages, they might learn in different pace because the relations between their native languages and the target language.

Another interesting point Dr. Patrick mentioned in the class is the grammar in TPRS. I feel that most of us have misunderstandings about learning grammars in TPRS. I did not think that TPRS learn any specific grammars after I read the textbook. However, Dr. Patrick mentioned that for higher level courses, teachers will be able to have one grammar class once one or two months. I am looking forward to listening more about different teaching paces for different levels of students in TPRS.

LLED 7504 on Sept. 28th

According to what we learned in the past couple weeks, TPRs emphasizes not giving our students too much pressure and teaching through comprehensible input. We talked about the importance of reducing students' anxiety to improve the learning efficiency. In my view, to reduce their anxiety, we need to build a relax learning environment and trusting relationships between teachers and students, so that our students are willing to have eye contacts with us and ask questions. The classroom culture is powerful. I remembered when I studied in China, I barely made eye contacts with teachers because I know eye contacts mean nothing good will happen, usually students will be asked questions or in trouble. I thought this is culture thing until I start studying here. I always make eye contacts with professors because I know I have nothing to be afraid of.
Being flexible is the way I learned from the class on this Wednesday to build a trust environment and relationship in class. I believe that every teacher have struggled about the pace of teaching was not as fast as expected. There are so many unpredictable situations came up every day and they might result in delay of schedule. Should we change the context of the class for dealing with unpredictable situations? The teachers need always assess the problem and balance the context of the course. Like Dr. Patrick's example of using the class time to talk about racism, I believe that he earned the trust from that class. The race talk is always important for students from diverse background. Talking about the problem helps students open their minds to others.

LLED 7504 on Sep. 14th

In today's class, we talked about how to build comprehensive input while teaching a new language for our students. One thing we repeatedly emphasized during the class was involving English or students' first language and establishing meaning for students. After learning Latin through past 2 classes, I could tell how significant of understanding the contents. I have taught mandarin for 1 year and half, the school required me only speaking mandarin in the class, which was really hard for me to let my students understand everything I taught. Every time I saw their confused faces, I felt I needed to explain to them in English. However, when I was doing that, I always thought if I was doing right things. Learning TPRs helps me eliminate these confusing.

Speaking of teaching mandarin, I feel one of the biggest challenges for me is to teach my students how to write. Usually I do not want them to read or write Chinese at the very beginning, because that is overwhelming for them. Even for native speakers like me, we learned how to write Chinese characters from kindergarten all the way to high schools. Nowadays, since I did not write Chinese very often, I have to always check how to write them. So I am wondering if we start from teaching pinyin instead of Chinese characters, when should we involve Chinese characters into the curriculum and when should we let them learn how to write? Furthermore, I feel this also depends on what purposes for our students to learn mandarin. If they only want to be able to talk in mandarin, I think we do not have to take writing part very seriously. 

LLED 7504 on Aug. 31

Learning Latin by TPRS during the class was a really fun experience. I have learned some Italian two years old and I feel Latin and Italian are closely connected. But the most interested thing I found out was the ways I learned these two languages were so different. I attended a study aboard program in Italy for almost three months. Most of time we were learning about immigrants education in English there. However, due to the basic life demand, we were asked to learn some basic Italian such as ordering food and asking the road. During the first week, we were asked to remember a bunch of words and sentences for life demand and practiced by creating dialogues in class again and again in the following weeks. I would say that it was a sort of helpful for living there. However, I truly did not like the way I learned and I barely remembered much right now. It was also possibly because I was learning German around that time and I was kind of refusing remembering and mixing up with other languages. Turns out that I felt I was not interested with Italian at all. But I would say the class on Wednesday was fun. I could not tell how much I could still remember two years later, but at least I enjoyed the class.
When I read the first chapter, I misunderstood the meaning of narrowing vocabulary and learning grammars in a small range of words. After the class, I felt that I had a much more clear thoughts about what the author talked about. One thing I am still concerned was that TPRS emphasized that teaching our kids from their questions. However, I am wondering what if our students are super shy and barely asked questions or not interested in learning Latin and did not want to ask questions.

First LLED7504 class on Aug. 17th

Speaking of learning a new language, most people would ask me the similar questions like "what is the best way of learning a language?" or "What would be the fastest way to learn a new language?" The answer would never be simple. I feel people learn a language in different ways. For example, there are many bloggers suggest learning a new language through watching movies and listening musics would be effective. However, these approaches did not work well on me instead reading and learning from books becomes the best way for me. During the class discussion, my groupmates mentioned that learning a new language too fast might not be good because it may not turn to the real learning. Without practicing and experiencing, it would be hard to turn to be long-term memory. I strongly agree with that. Most Chinese start learning English by memorizing thousands of words, however, after years, if they did not use those words, they could not even have a piece of memory in their minds about the words they used to remember. I would say learning a language is never a short term stuff, it will take time and please do enjoy it. One day, when you look back, you would be surprised about how much progresses you made.

In the class, the discussion about leadership might be affected by leaders' culture raised my attention. After spending many years studying in America, I realized that at school, we were taught how to be successful on academic, however, we, as international students, do not have families taught us how to be successful on social world in an English speaking country. The words we are using and the way we are talking might not fall into the mainstream. That might result in misunderstands during conversations. In addition, I believe that not only international students are suffering about excluding from social life with native English speakers in society, but also any people who are ESOL might face the similar situation due to non-mainstream family cultures. One common phenomenon could prove my idea. When a group of people met each other for the very first time, it might be easy to see white people prefer to first start talking with white, asian faces are willing to stay together to know each other and black might already start joking with other blacks. It is nature to stay with people from the same or similar background.