Task 6: Did I learned something about myself?

After I did all the tests and questionnaires I found some things that caught my attention and others that I was expecting. In the case of the multiple intelligences, I scored 5 in my top 3 and that was a surprise. In the first place, I have musical which in other tests I have it in a minor position, in the second place I have intrapersonal and it is true because after a long time in therapy I could finally truly love myself, therefore, I could understand everything that happens in my mind and body, that means that I can communicate my feelings to a different person too. And finally, in the third-place I have verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical and interpersonal, the only here that catches my attention was logical/mathematical because I have never been a fan of maths and abstract things, but it is true that I like to talk about a lot of things like philosophers.

In the case of my learning style survey, my results were the one I was expecting because I know me and that survey got right. I am multimodal because I scored almost the same points in visual, auditory and kinesthetic. I am an introverted person but I had a lot of an extroverted person, and I had only 4 points difference. I am concrete-sequential and closure-oriented. The parts that caught my attention was part 5 and 6 in which I had a tie in both categories and I never thought that could happen in this test, that means that I am equally global and particular, and synthesizing and analytic. I discovered that I like to notice the big idea and then I pay attention to the details and I have always thought that was backward, and I have learned to be an impulsive learner because in order to improve your English skills you have to take risks and just do it, in the past I rarely took risks but nowadays I can speak in English without the fear to make any mistakes.

Finally, in the Vark Questionnaire, I obtained a learning preference “multimodal” and I agree with that, it depends on the subject the way that is more comfortable for me to study it. In the case of English class I do colorful notes, I talk with my classmates or alone and I like to study while I am in movement. The way in which I enjoy the most studying is to make colorful notes and teaching myself aloud, it really helps me to understand something in a better way.

Task 1: The reasons that motivated me to study English and Pedagogy

I have always had in my heart the idea of becoming a teacher. When I started at school I realized that teaching was something that I really wanted to do. I spent all of my childhood playings in my free time like I was a teacher, I even made lists of imaginary students and of course, I made classes to my cousin too. Despite all of that English Pedagogy wasn't my first option to enter at University due to one of my aunts who said that teaching wasn't the best idea since she thought I would die of hungry because here in Chile teaching is not well-paid, I was 7 or 8 years old and that destroyed my dream. Now, I know that I shouldn't have listened to her, but anyway I continued looking for a course of studies that can feel my family proud of me, because the opinion of them was, at that time, very important for me. I discovered Occupational Therapy and I studied that for over a year and a half until I decided that I wanted to be truly happy. That was the first empowering moment in my life because I didn't listen to anyone and I started studying English Pedagogy and it has been one of the best decisions in my life.

At school my best subject always was English, I remember that thanks to one of my aunts, who is an English-Spanish translator, I watched a lot of movies and series in English because she loves to be in touch with her second language and I have always loved listening to music in English too, so it was really easy for me to be good at the subject. That encouraged me to decide that I wanted to be an English teacher. Besides that, English is an incredible tool in the case of I want to travel overseas, my aunt had traveled many times to different parts in the world and I really want a life like the life she has.

 Nowadays I'm every day more in love with my course of studies and it is not a secret that I want to teach all my life because, for me, teaching is the most rewarding job ever.

Task 6: An English demo class

Task 5: Opening a classroom door

I remember when I was in high school, the role of the teacher was to be in front of the class giving us all this grammar knowledge and vocabulary, meanwhile we as the students were sitting listening to her carefully. Our teaching/learning process was a really poor one because it was only focused on grammar so the teacher was our instructor and if we paid enough attention we can learn, but in the case of my classmates who didn’t pay enough attention, they couldn’t reach any goal that our teacher wanted at the beginning of the school year. As I said before, our teacher was an instructor and we were waiting for the instructions to work for every class, we poorly have interaction between classmates only once in a while and for some evaluation, but in the daily classes, it was only self-learning. Every year at the end of the second semester we were asked to do a dialogue with a partner and that was all the oral interaction in a second language we have with our classmates.

Even the teacher was very close to us, I had some classmates who were very shy and suffered when the teacher asked something and they had to respond in English or when they had to read something aloud. I remember that she always corrected our errors in the best way possible, she never makes any of us feel bad to make a mistake or something like that, she always taught us in a respectfully way. 

I remember that during classes our teacher used a few different techniques, such as inductive exercises, memorization, transformation drill and sometimes roleplaying. For me, I think that all these techniques weren’t enough for us to achieve successfully an L2, because it was always the same idea during classes, she barely focused in reading, writing or speaking activities, and we did listening because we had to listen to her and sometimes she came with a radio and played us some activity.

She did different kinds of evaluation like; grammar test that included a little text to read it and answer some questions and true or false, as I said before she liked that we did dialogues and when we were in the last two years of school we had to do a play at the end of the second semester. I really enjoyed her evaluations because I have always loved English, but the grammar test was hated by the majority of my classmate and the quizzes of the list of regular and irregular verbs that she did every week during all our high school was hated to, but I’m very thankful because I learned every verb of the list and now I don’t need a list of verbs to work.

Task 4: Classroom metaphors

My ideal classroom

My ideal classroom should be a greenhouse and a mountain. In the first case, I consider students as plants and the teacher as sunlight and water to them and their needs, in other words, the teacher provides students with information and whatever they need in order to accomplish their goals. In the second case, a mountain is referring to the idea of going up to fulfill your goals, as a teacher I want to motive my students to obtain whatever they want, but of course, they have to learn about the ups and downs that life has, it's important to teach them about failure and success, this will help them to grow in a safe place and they will know how to react in the future.
In my ideal classroom, I will be a teacher who is concerned about my students' needs and I will be helping them to achieve their aims all the time.

On padlet, I commented on the classroom metaphors of my classmates Yissel Pereira and Yesenia Godoy. In the link below you can have access to it.

Classroom metaphors

Task 3: Teaching philosophy

Personally, for me, to be an effective second language teacher means to do a good job inside the classroom and outside of it. I refer to be a teacher who is concern about their students’ needs and the potentials to learn a second language. A teacher who can make his or her students fall in love with the new language and they want to learn more and more, on their own in their free time. Nevertheless, I am not talking of a teacher who can make their students dominate perfectly the second language, on the contrary, I prefer a teacher who can make their students enjoy this new language and use their hobbies to teach them. All this can make a difference because this would give the students significant learning instead of only use memorization.

I have learned during this course of studies that a second language is acquired through input, this means that is acquired thanks to a certain closeness to the new language, the more they spend exposed to the language, the better. In addition to that, I would say that is important to provide a lot of input in an English class due to children would learn more. Of course, we, as teachers, have to captivate the attention of our students in order to have the opportunity to want to learn on their own at home. Therefore, with enough input during classes and what they do on their own either their hobbies are, the students will be successfully taught and they will have a little effort to study it because they will enjoy learning a second language.

As I said before, the input is very important when we want to teach a new language. So for me, a second language should be taught with a lot of it. This means that is important to provide the students with a lot of listening, reading and speaking activities, instead of using the only memorization of the rules of the new language and just vocabulary. What people need to learn a second language is practice so teachers should give a lot of material, and of course that the focus must be in the different ways in which the students learn, that is the only way in which every student could have access to significant learning.

I think that the most important factors in learning another language are self-confidence, motivation, a good teacher and practice. We, as learners, need enough self-confidence to avoid the embarrassment of speaking a new language aloud, this is directly connected with the practice I mentioned before because we need a lot of practice to acquire the second language in a successful way and self-confidence with help us to talk and practice with other people in a confident way, without any fear of make mistakes. Another important factor is to have a good teacher who can captivate your attention in every class and make you feel motivated to learn another language. It is known that motivation is the guide we follow to reach any goal or purpose we have in life.

The teacher should be someone who provides enough motivation for his or her students so they want to learn a second language. He or she should be someone close to his or her students since, in that way, students will feel free to ask any doubt that they could have without feeling stupid or something. It is really common in students to feel afraid to ask for doubts because of the kind of teacher they have, I truly believe that with a good teacher you, as a student, will feel comfortable and that will help your learning.

I believe that a teacher should provide as much learning experiences as she or he can owing to that everything could be necessary, and every student learns differently.

Task 2: Your beliefs and assumptions about language learning and teaching

Children learn a second/foreing language easier than adults.

I agree with this statement according to my experiences and books that I have read. There are a lot of studies in which experts have proved that children are faster learners in every subject, but more especially in subjects that include a second or foreign language.

When kids are very little, they repeat everything the other people say, that is why a second language can be acquired so easily. As they are learning their first language, they can learn a second language at the same time.

As I read an article by Harvard University, the basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. In the first years of life start the proliferation of neural connections in the brain, after this, the connections are reduced so that the brain's circuits become more efficient. This leads us to know that vision and hearing are the first to develop, followed by early language skills and higher cognitive functions. Consequently, learning a second/foreign language is easier in children than adults. Not only for what already said but also, in the same article by Harvard University it is said that the brain is most flexible early in life to accommodate a wide range of environments and interactions, but as the maturing brain becomes more specialized to assume more complex functions, it is less capable of reorganizing and adapting to new challenges. According to that, for example, by the first year, the parts of the brain that differentiate sounds are becoming specialized to the language the baby has been exposed to; at the same time, the brain is already starting to lose the ability to recognize different sounds found in other languages. Although the “windows” for language learning and other skills remain open, these brain circuits become increasingly difficult to alter over time. 

It is said that babies and young learners are like a sponge, who can acquire whatever you want to teach them, this is because the capacity that they have in their brains, but I watched an interesting TED talk by Patricia Khul and she explains how babies listen to the sounds around them and “take statistics” on the sounds they need to know. Before the age of 10 – 12 months, babies can differentiate between all sounds across all languages. Then, according to their exposure to languages, they start to only differentiate between the language sounds which are necessary to create meaning. I believe that all these ideas can support the theory of young children learning a second language fastly than adults, because when we are adults our brain already settles down and it is not prepared for new challenges or changes. Of course, even when we are older we can learn a new language, but it takes us more time and effort than a child.

References:

Center on the Developing Child (2007). The Science of Early Childhood Development (InBrief). Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.

Khul, P. (2011). YouTube. Retrieved 15 January 2020, from https://youtu.be/G2XBIkHW954

Task 1: Learner Autobiography

Autobiography

Loreto Estefanía Pinochet López

I was born and raised in Viña del Mar (Chile) where I lived until 2013 when my family moved to Quilpue (Chile). During my scholarship, I attended two semi-private schools: Liceo Nuestra Señora de la Paz and Colegio Ana Maria Janer. While I was growing, I discovered that I wanted to teach when I was older, but I was not sure about what I wanted to teach.

In both schools in which I studied, the English class was not the best. The influence of English in my life came from Disney movies, series and my aunt, who is an English-Spanish translator. I was helped by her to improve my English skills since I was a little girl and with her, I could watch series or movies in English all the time. This helped me to be always the best in my English class.

I graduated from the school in the year 2013 with special recognition as one of the best students of my generation. In the year 2014, I started at the University of Playa Ancha in a different course of studies, I attended Occupational Therapy for 2 years until I realized I wanted to teach English. I did not enter to pedagogy as a first option due to the pressure that my family put on me since they wanted me to have a better salary when I started to work. It is known that here in Chile, teaching is not a well-paid career.

In the year 2017, I started English pedagogy at the University of Playa Ancha and it was the best decision I could ever make. Last year (2019), I started to attend my practicum and I did it in two different schools. One of them has a lot of access to do a good class of English owing to every classroom has a computer, WIFI connection, data and free access to the school's library. On the other hand, the second school has only one data for the entire school and I did not see a library for the children in it. I could be part of two realities and I grew as a future teacher thanks to that, due to I have to think about how to make interesting classes with few resources, and I know that experience will help me in the future if I work in a similar school someday. 

In all this journey I have learned a lot of English and I have improved my English skills, but more importantly, I have learned about children and how to teach them successfully.
I am excited about this final year learning how to be an excellent teacher and I am even more excited about the end of this stage and the start of my new life as an English teacher.