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.