Article 5 & 6

July 7

For the past several articles, I have always written extensively about the authors' point of view and experiences. However, I was thinking what would I have left to write for my reflection paper, especially if I would be writing so much in detail for every chapter then I everything would become too long? So tonight, I am modifying my reflections into something more concise in order to cover all chapters substantially.

Chapter 5, entitled "Designing an EAP course for postgraduate students in Ecuador," the experiences of Maria del Carmen Blyth who was a curriculum developer, foreign language teacher, and teacher trainer in several nations- Armenia, Egypt, Tanzania, Singapore, and Ecuador. I really liked her unique take on journal writing and mind-mapping. Through these two methods, she was able to ponder, reflect, and analyze data, thoughts, and experiences in order to accomplish her goal which was to answer the question, "What is the purpose of the course?" To go further into depths of her purpose, it is to provide language training that would be useful even after the 100 4-hour course. In my university education courses, I was taught the significance of meaningful self-reflections through journaling. With Blyth's experience I can more see why this is so- to understand my own experiences,

understand the needs of the students, choose activities and materials, and be able to map these out into thoughtful connections.

A couple of the methods that she used that I think would be very helpful are in Appendix B: School evaluation form (105) and Appendix D: Course evaluations. Appendix B evaluates the student's proficiency in English, which is highly invaluable because it not only acts like a progress report card, but the instructor can see the strengths of the students to build confidence upon and the weaknesses to work on and strengthen. Appendix D is the student's evaluation of the class on whether it has been useful to them and whether they have learned (and what did they learn).

Chapter 6- "Designing a writing component for teen courses at a Brazilian language institute"- on the experiences of Maria Estela Pinheiro Franco. Her problem and the problem of the Alumni in which she is supervising for the teenage program is that young students start out with a great proficiency in writing in English but by the time they become teenagers, their skills in writing greatly retard, although their speaking skills become high. Therefore, Pinheiro's goal is to develop a course in which writing will be practiced and improved. In achieving this, her objectives were to improve on vocabulary, grammatical skills, sequencing literature, sequencing in writing, and learning to write drafts and essays. Although, the task was daunting with the various student levels and needs to be catered to, she developed activities that interest and challenged her students. Furthermore, she arranged the activities into progressive levels of complexity, amount of writing required, concreteness to abstract concepts, and being able to put these skills together (148).

Another thing that I think was such a benefit for Pinheiro's course is that she had formal, as well as informal, input about teachers from their students. This prompted modifications and made the course more workable for the students' learning. Lastly, Pinheiro had the institution's support on what she was doing for her students.

Images

Writing man image. Retrieved from http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dramanan/teaching/ics139w_fall09/writing_man.jpg.

Steven Boyley. " Mindpapping." 1998. Retrieved from http://www.nlpmind.com/images/mind_mapping.gif.