Article 8

July 26

This is the last chapter of the textbook, and it is about the experiences of Laura Hull in developing a curriculum framework for a corporate language program catering to business executives, and hence the name

"Chapter 8: A curriculum framework for corporate language programs." Hull was the director of these programs and while the other chapters' foci were mainly about the course, this chapter differs as her focus was more on the behind-the-scene planning and implementing of the individualized courses (198). Furthermore, another foci of Hull's experience are evaluation and finding a curriculum that would meet these four goals, which are also known as "the four C's": clarity, coherence, consistency, and continuity (178).

In problematizing the issue- or understanding and defining challenges in order to modify and make needed changes- she first did research, although she was challenged with limited time for preparation and few guidelines (198). Conducting research can be seen as the formative aspect of evaluation. She researched about her clients, making note of their individual needs so she can be able to address them. She also gathered insights from the students and teachers who were currently involved in the program on the areas of strengths and areas that needed to be improved. This evaluation the program was through the means of feedbacks and interviews (198).

Finding the solution in providing an effective training in the English language means addressing these three important aspects: 1) to assess learning needs, analyze learning styles, define specific, measurable, and time-achievable objectives, and participate in a planning program; 2) to implement a program plan through the practice of carefully selecting learning strategies to achieve those objectives; and 3) to design a self-study plan to continue their learning after their on-site work with the program (187).

And finally putting together the framework, which addressed the aspects above, was achieved in these steps: designing a learning plan,

implementing a learning plan, and setting up an ongoing learning plan even after the students left the program. This plan for the framework can be seen in outline form in "Appendix A: Curriculum framework" on page 194. In addressing needs which can be seen as learning goals are listed in "Appendix B: Sample needs assessment," page 196.

What I like most about this chapter is addressing individual needs as shown on page 196. It gives more concreteness to the learning goals as it is shown in this way. Having concreteness in learning goals helps teachers have specific objectives that they can manage and it is also beneficial to the students because their needs are addressed. In having these listed such as the ones shown in Appendix B gives a clear visual to the standards expected.

Image

Image of buildings. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.yankeesecurity.com/buildings7_e.jpg.

Image of smiling man talking. [Photograph]. Retrieve from http://www.handsoncare.com/assets/images/Smiling_man_talking_on_cell_phone_1.jpg.

Article 7

July 19

This next experience is again located in Japan, but for a college elective for advanced listening comprehension. The chapter accounts the experience of Barbara Fujiwara and is entitled "Planning an advanced listening comprehension elective for Japanese college students."

This chapter attempts to understand the unique responsibility of teachers/course developers in the selection of materials and why decision this is critical. Also, it gives insight on how teachers organize the course and the role of the students in the developmental system.

Fujiwara sets up the course as a new experience for her and therefore she begins by observing language lab (LL) courses. She notes that LLs impressed her with the use of technology. However, because she was pressed for time in the development of the course, she was not able to review enough audio and video materials to be used in class assignments. And hence, this is where the students' role came in. Through input and suggestions by an essay assignment which functioned like an entrance exam for the elective in order to thin the over-enrollment, Fujiwara took some of these suggestions for her class- assigning group projects to analyze and present video or audio materials to the class. So, eventually, Fujiwara ended up with a textbook that she had chosen entitled How to Listen and a few other materials she had also chosen, and the rest of the materials were chosen by the students to base their projects on.

Fujiwara found that the choosing of materials was very critical. She also found that the choice was dynamic, depending on the students' needs and capabilities at a particular time. What I liked about this article was the process that Fujiwara went through, in which it was realistic. She started out with planning and mind-mapping in order to better conceptualize the course. Then she took students' suggestions to make the course workable for the students and to help her decide on the materials to use. She had deep and thoughtful self-reflections, taking into account her concerns and emotions, how she combined theories, decisions, and practice, and most of all observed how the course was affecting her students. Lastly, we could see through her honest journaling that her decisions were not perfect which I find very realistic. And although perfection was not the case, she strived for the betterment of the course in attaining her goals. The course was at its earliest stages, but she learned a lot and therefore understood how to make the following semesters better. For example, she decided to drop one of the textbooks, although she found the contents useful but because of its difficulty to be comprehended and the ability of her students, she chose to do away with it (164).

By the end of the course, her students said that it had been very helpful for them. They also greatly appreciated that their inputs were thought to be important. And they gave more suggestions in improving the course. With the students' reports, the goal of Fujiwara for the course- which is to "increase and improve [student] listening strategies and skills" through a variety of audio and video materials focusing on contemporary lifestyles and issues in the United States and the United Kingdom, and students will also be expected to practice these skills outside of the class- was achieved, and the variety of feedback reflects the unique needs of each learner (153, 165).

I also agree that having the right materials is very important for the learning of students. When I used to tutor ELLs, I found that the decisions for the right materials were vital. For example, because the private school that my students went to did not have a more comprehensible material for ESL, the students and I had such a hard time in getting an understandable, workable, and learnable information for them.

Images

McNamee, Win. March 2010. Cherry blossoms begin to bloom throughout Washington. [Photograph]. Getty Images. Retrieved from http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/80389902.jpg.

Image of language lab. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://ninitalk.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/language_lab.jpg.

Image of textbooks. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.estudiainglesonline.com/textbooks.jpg.

Article 3

July 8

Chapter 3 is Johan Ulvin's experience regarding an ESOL course development for a Boston nursing home in which he focused on determining student needs. In "Designing workplace ESOL courses for Chinese health-care workers at a Boston nursing home," the author notes that although the course did what it was designed to do after observing and analyzing the needs of the students for three weeks, it had failed his students. Our further exploration will reveal why he had felt so. However, on the bright, as he became more involved in the classroom, he was able to accurately identify the students' needs and therefore, went on to improve the course.

After his ninety hour observation and came up with a course with already defined set of needs, he executed his course plan on his students. Eventually, he found this particular plan to be ineffective because it did not include the input of the students, neither did it include the other factors that are unique to this group of Chinese immigrants and other individually unique needs. Therefore, he revamped the program in which he considered the input of the students. In addition to that and discovering unique needs, Ulvin also made trusted relationships with his students and used student experiences in their learning.

We can see this improvement of course program in the tables on pages 46-47. In Table 1, we see that the needs and goals of the Chinese students were defined by the supervisors, nurses, department heads, and trainers. But there came a shift in the system as seen in Table 2: student experiences were included in decision making and other problems of the students that needed to be addressed were also included.

In the end, Ulvin found that course development does not exist "in a vacuum," but rather is indeed an ongoing process, that involves the active input and participation of the learners (58).

I believe that his progression between the two processes is a great improvement. Education, course development, and assessments are becoming increasingly focused on involvement of students. I learned that students being involved with various ways of assessments, in which not only written but also oral, affect, and production, makes assessment less threatening. I especially admire Ulvin's method in which he involved himself in his students' trust and used their experiences in making significant connections with the lessons. When I was learning English as a second language, I was very interested and learned best when I had the chance to make connections between English and my own primary culture and language. I was also very willing to share them.

Images

Image of Chinese flag. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://drjamesgalyon.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/china-flag.jpg.

Image of student and teacher. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://extend.schoolwires.com/clipartgallery/images/26256131.jpg.

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.

Article 4

June 27

Chapter 4 was entitled "Designing a seventh-grade social studies course for ESL students at an international school"- the experience of Pat Fisher, a chairperson of the English Department of an international school in Japan. This chapter fascinates me because I had similar experiences to what Fisher experienced in regards to the development of conversational, everyday English and academic English, and how vastly different the two are.

I came to the United States in second-grade, and although I had some difficulties in first understanding academic language, but because I was young, I transitioned quite smoothly from my first language to English. However, it was being an instructor that I realized how different- and difficult- it is to acquire conversational language from academic language.
Fisher had the same dilemma in which the students in the middle school where she was teaching were fluent in communicative language but were struggling in their classes. Being enrolled in the academic programs at the international school put higher demands on the students' use and understanding of the English language. Therefore, Fisher, who was a social studies teacher, had to teach both the English language and the social studies content in order for her students to learn and work independently with the schoolwork (64).
Fisher started with proposed goals, addressing the students' learning needs. Going back to the second chapter, "A framework of course development processes," Fisher addressed the first and second steps- assessing needs and determining goals and objectives, respectively. Although her proposal was accepted, she realized that she did not fully address the second step because the goals and objectives were written vaguely, not specifically stating what it is to be learned by students in both content and language.
Therefore, she re-develops her goals and objectives through research of methods done by other teachers and with the reflections of her own experiences, and she mapped them out until she came up with a specific and workable set of objectives in order to attain her goal which is to develop learners who are "competent autonomous functioning in the mainstream" (70). Also, in adherence to the fourth step in developing a course, Fisher also addressed the roles of her students on "Appendix A: Pilot-year proposal" on page 75. With the final pages of her experience, she includes tools that she incorporated in her teaching in the attempts to her class goal; these included a "student contract"- a list of assignments and tests, a "correction worksheet"- developing not only knowledge of the content but competency in the language, a "map-around group"- rubric type, a checklist for peer editing, and "information sharing"- a group activity.
I admire her development of lessons in which teachers and students can clearly see the objectives, and students would see what is expected of them through an organized and explicitly stated set of criteria. She addresses the needs of her students, which is to develop content knowledge and to develop academic language.
Going back to my experiences as an instructor- I was a part-time tutor to some middle-school and high-school ESL students who were attending private schools here on Guam. The schools did not have an ESL curriculum, and the students were given the exact same materials as their classmates and were expected to perform in just about the same level. The "elephant in the face" problem was that the students had just come from Korea and were not only lacking in using academic language, but were also struggling with English conversational language. Overtime, although they developed communicative skills with English, academic language was much more difficult to develop. So, did they enjoy school? I would guess not because their learning needs were not met.

Images
Chu, Andrea. Teenage female student (12-14) reading book on floor in library. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/200489563-002/Taxi-Japan.
J-Bridges. Image of Shibuya, Japan. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://j-bridges.jp/images/pictures/tokyo/shibuya01.jpg.

Article 2

June 21

Chapter 2, "A framework of course development processes," brings us to the steps of course development along with questions of concern for each step, important key words that the author clarifies, and issues that she addresses. This is the longest chapter of the book as it addresses seven important steps with much details.

The first step is Needs assessment- this is to answer the questions, "What are the students' needs and how can the teacher assess and address them?" First of all the term needs assessment refers to obtaining data in order for the teacher to learn what the students already know and what they need to know, and to bridge the gap between the two. In finding out the needs, the teacher should take into account the students' current proficiencies and difficulties and also, their

backgrounds, which have effects on how they learn.

These factors help determine the differences of needs varying from student to student. It is not only highly beneficial for teachers to conduct needs assessment (by a variety of methods such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, and samples of previous work), but involving students with their own needs assessment is also greatly beneficial because it helps students "become more aware and more purposeful in their learning" (14).

The second step is Determining goals and objectives, to answer questions, "What are the purposes and intended outcomes of the course? What will my students need to do or learn to achieve these goals?" The author differentiates the terms goals and objectives, in which goals is defined as the "overall, long-term purposes of the course" (seeing the big picture) and objectives as "express[ing] the specific ways in which the goals will be achieved" (seeing details and chunking them in order to achieve the goal) (17).

The importance of setting goals and objectives is to give direction and coherence for the instructor in planning the course he/she will teach. Furthermore, in choosing goals and objectives, there are several things to be considered, such as the student's needs, district standards and curriculums, school policies, among many other factors. The goals can involve proficiency goals, cognitive goals, affective goals, and transfer goals. Details of these are found on page 17 of the textbook.

The third step is Conceptualizing content- "What will be the backbone of what I teach? What will I include in my syllabus?" In accordance to language teaching, the contents that the teacher will include, emphasize, and integrate are different aspects of language and language learning. In the recent years, language teaching has moved away from a "one-size-fits-all" program to being more context-dependent and specific needs, interests, goals, and so forth of the students are taken to consider. The traditional way of conceptualizing content includes grammar structures, patterns, and vocabulary, and are very much systematic and governed by rules (20). There are several ways of teaching the contents above through pronunciation, communicative situations, and other contextual and practical applications. There is also the exploration of culture.

The fourth step, Selecting and developing materials and activities, describes and attempts to answer the questions "How and with what will I teach the course? What is my role as the teacher? What are my students' role?" For many instructions, teachers consider activities and materials as the backbone because they are something concrete that students will use and have focus on for the class (26). In gathering materials and activities, it is important to note their feasibility and availability (26). Last week, I had related questions to this topic, and Dr. Rivera said that a network is very important such as joining professional organizations, like the IRA, in helping me obtain materials, and another option is exploring online, which has a great collection of activities used and tested my many teachers.

The fifth step, Organization of content and activities- "How will I organize the content and activities? What systems will I develop?" The author explains that there is a system in organizing content and activities, and the two general principle to follow is building and recycling. This is developed through simple to open-ended ideas, or concrete to abstract. This is the principle of building. Recycling means "encountering new materials in new ways: in a new skill area, in a different type of activity, or with a new focus" (28). This makes new encounters challenging and thus keep interest and motivation. The great upside of recycling is that prior knowledge is used and further developed through connections of new and different channels.

Evaluation is the sixth step and addresses the questions "How will I asses what students have learned? How will I assess the effectiveness of the course?" Teachers can use both formal and informal, formative and summative methods of assessment in order to find what students have learned and how effective was the teacher in teaching the course. This describes that teachers are not only to assess the cognitive and proficiency content within the course but also the effectiveness of the course- "Was the course effective? In what ways? Where did I fall short?" (30). Students can provide feedback through assessments. The purpose of evaluation is for promoting and improving effectiveness, with the teacher and students as the principal evaluators of the course.

Lastly, the seventh step is Consideration of resources and constraints, and answers the question, "What are the givens of my situation?" Different teachers will look at different circumstances as either resources or constraints. In either case, the teacher will still plan, develop a course, and teach in fulfilling such constraints or making use of such resources. The given situation are factors in the decisions made- a principle of problematizing.

I learned a great deal of things in course development just with this chapter alone. I have already learned much of the information given here, especially on the topic of assessment and evaluation, in previous classes. And I hope that this would deem invaluable to my coming years of teaching- the application of my knowledge gained from my classes.

Images

Bobbyperux. February 2010. [Photograph]. DevianArt. Retrieved from http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs20/i/2007/254/2/2/Free_Film_Frame_by_Bobbyperux.jpg.

Book image. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.lifehack.org/wp-content/files/2008/01/books.png.

Gutter. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://alvalentine.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/thinking-pic.jpg.

Article 1

June 16, 2010

A couple of days ago, I talked about my philosophy on teaching with the emphasis of theory and experience going hand-in-hand in order to develop a course, curriculum, syllabus, and lesson plan that work. The same ideas and principles are established in the first chapter, "Teachers as course developers," in Kathleen Grave's textbook of the same namesake. Theory, both theories in the general and the personal sense, and experience provide coherence and direction for the teacher (2). I like her description that teachers in the field are learners too, in which they incorporate their own experiences and prior understandings into new contexts, and continue to modify them into their teaching craft in order to develop a course that benefits the teachers and their students (2). Although curriculum development comes with guidelines, models, and principles that can greatly help a teacher, experience is highly important too because the teacher is the one who knows her situations in relation to her students. I like how the author words this idea: "experience... enables teachers to make sense of the theories and expertise of others because it gives them opportunities to clarify their understanding of theory and make it concrete" (6).

Another valuable insight that I learned from the reading is the stages of course development. Stage 1 is the planning of the course (in which goals and priorities are identified); Stage 2 is the actual teaching of the course; Stage 3 is modifying/replanning the course; and lastly, Stage 4 is the reteaching of the course.
The process does not end with the last stage however, as modifications and reteaching can occur several times in order to improve on the lesson or meet the needs of the learners (4). Throughout this entire process is the cyclical, ongoing assessment and decision making process. Part of the decision making is problematizing- the teacher defines the problem in a concrete situation and find a workable solution for it (5, 6). This active process' purpose, according to one of my professors, is for the improvement and maximizing of learning of the students. This is the purpose of teaching and the duty of teachers.


Images
Rodrigues, Andres. Image of planning. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.masternewmedia.org/images/planning-choice-among-multiple-roads_id267012_size350.jpg.
JIU. Image of a teacher. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.womansday.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/wd2/content/crafts/teacher-s-photo-contest-easter-crafts/526483-1-eng-US/Teacher-s-Photo-Contest-Easter-Crafts_featured_article_628x371.jpg.