Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 4th (21 July 2014)

On 21 July 2014, I have learned about teaching writing. Most people agree that writing skills are increasingly important and often not adequately taught. When writing is taught in schools, writing instruction often takes a backseat to phonics, handwriting skills, and reading comprehension. This group talk about teaching writing involves being accurate, encouraging writing and producing a finished product.

Writing skills are an important part of communication. Good writing conveys a meaningful message and uses English well, but the message is more important than correct presentation. Writing is a creative process. What makes an effective piece of writing? Good writers plan and revise, rearrange and delete text, re-reading and producing multiple drafts before they produce their finished document. This is what a process writing approach is about. When students read the essay in its final, polished form, it becomes clear that following the complete writing process produces the best essay.

In conclusion, the key to successful writing classes is that they are pragmatic in nature targeting the skills required or desired by students.

Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 4th (21 July 2014)

On 21 July 2014, I have learned about teaching reading. The third group had presentation about teaching reading. Reading is an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension. The reader uses knowledge, skills, and strategies to determine what that meaning is.

There are two general approaches to teaching of reading skill is extensive reading and intensive reading. Extensive reading is reading as much as possible for your own pleasure at a difficultly level at which you can read smoothly and quickly without looking up words or translating to English as you go. Intensive reading occurs when the learner is focused on the language rather than the text. Reading activities that are meant to increase communicative competence should be success oriented and build up students' confidence in their reading ability.

In conclusion, teachers use more comprehension for practice reading skill of students and use language question after students read a text for ensure that they have really understood what the read.

Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 4th (21 July 2014)

On 21July 2014, I have learned about teaching listening. This group had presentation about teaching listening. They talk about strategies of listening and step to teaching listening skill that interesting for learning.

Listening is key to all effective communication, without the ability to listen effectively messages are easily misunderstood. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication. Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input. Top-down strategies are listener based. Top-down strategies include listening for the main idea, predicting, drawing inferences, summarizing. Bottom-up strategies are text based. Bottom-up strategies include listening for specific details, recognizing cognates, recognizing word-order patterns. However teaching principles of listening is an important part such as make it explicit, model, and practice. Teacher given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching to help their students become effective listeners and students can fend for themselves in communication situations.

To sum up, teaching good listening skills is difficult as it is so difficult to define and exemplify, and few of us, even native speakers of English, really do it well. But by making explicit the qualities of good listening and then practicing it, students can become good listeners in English.

Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 4th (21 July 2014)

Reflection what I have learned from my friends had presentation about assessment and testing on 21July 2014. Assessment and testing is among an instructor’s most essential educational tools. Teachers who develop useful assessments, designing corrective testing, and give students second chances to demonstrate success can improve their instruction and help students learn.

They talk about assessing and testing. Assessment has 8 types such as formative, summative, informal, diagnostic, placement, progress, achievement and proficiency. Although as teacher we sometimes feel that we don’t have a lot of influence on the design of public exams, we often find ourselves writing process and achievement test. Basis of designing and making test, First, decide on our assessment criteria. Second, test need to have validity. Third, list exactly what it is we want to measure. Forth, decide on the balance of items in a test. Fifth, have to be extremely carful to write Rubric. Last one, give theme to colleague or student to try out. Direct and indirect are 2 types of test item. Direct test items based on 4 macro skill as speaking, listening, reading and writing. An indirect test items have 8 kinds as gap fills, cloze, multiple choice, true/false, jumbled sentence, sentence transformation, proofreading and matching. And another thing that's important is rubric. Rubric is a multi-purpose scoring guide for assessing student products and performances. A rubric involves 4 components; task description, scale, dimensions and description of dimensions.

In conclusion, assessments and testing as tools for accountability and measure the knowledge and ability of students. Moreover, the assessments and testing can be a vital component in our efforts to improve education.

Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 3rd (15 July 2014)

In our class on Tuesday 15 July, 2014. My group is second group has presentation about teaching with technology. Instructional technology (IT) has become an important part of teaching and learning within the classroom as well as working with fully online environments.

In the classroom, technology can encompass all kinds of tools from low-tech pencil, paper, and chalkboard, to the use of presentation software, or high-tech tablets, online collaboration and conferencing tools, and more. To point out, the teaching with technology has varieties and many benefits for teacher because it can deepen student learning by supporting instructional objectives. Example of interesting technologies such as IWB or smart board, computer, projector, presenting online,other devices and so on, of course, if you want to use those technologies effectively, you need to learn and understand about those tools before. In addition, the most popular technology is the teacher used "SOCIAL NETWORKING" (Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Blogs) to contact information, to talk, to share video and image files, including the assigned tasks via these applications with their students. 

As shown above, the newest technologies allow us to try things in physical and virtual classrooms that were not possible before, which can help students and teacher has facility and easy for learning and teaching. However, it can be challenging to select the “best” tech tools of your goals for student learning.

Learning is seen as essentially a social process, requiring communication among learner, teacher and others. This social process cannot effectively be replaced by technology, although technology may facilitate it. Bates, A.W., & Poole, G (2003)

Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 3nd (15 July 2014)

          Reflection what I have learned from my friends has presentation about teaching speaking on 17 Tuesday July 2014. In our daily lives most of us speak more than we write, yet many English teachers still spend the majority of class time on reading and writing practice almost ignoring speaking and listening skills. Speaking is one of important skill in the four skills. The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second-language or foreign-language learners.

They talk about speaking. First, speaking happens in real time. Second, when you speak, you cannot edit and revise what you wish to say, as you can if you writing. The best of teaching speaking should be based on real-life situations that require communication. By using this method in ESL classes, students will have the opportunity of communicating with each other in the target language.  In brief, ESL teachers should create a classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language. This can occur when students collaborate in groups to achieve a goal or to complete a task. On the other hand, if the right activities are taught in the right way, speaking in class can be a lot of fun, raising general learner motivation and making the English language classroom a fun.

To create classroom speaking activities that will develop communicative competence, instructors need to incorporate a purpose and activities and allow for multiple forms of expression. The interesting activities to promote speaking such as information gaps are also commonly used for speaking practice, as are surveys, discussions, and role-plays, Storytelling fosters creative thinking. It also helps students express ideas in the format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and setting a story has to have. Students also can tell riddles or jokes, Picture Describing is another way to make use of pictures in a speaking activity is to give students just one picture and having them describe what it is in the picture. For this activity students can form groups and each group is given a different picture. Students discuss the picture with their groups, and then a spokesperson for each group describes the picture to the whole class. This activity fosters the creativity and imagination of the learners as well as their public speaking skills, and so on.

          Conclusion, teaching speaking is a very important part of second language learning. The ability to communicate in a second language clearly and efficiently contributes to the success of the learner in school and success later in every phase of life. Therefore, it is essential that language teachers pay great attention to teaching speaking. Rather than leading students to pure memorization, providing a rich environment where meaningful communication takes place is desired. With this aim, various speaking activities such as those listed above can contribute a great deal to students in developing basic interactive skills necessary for life. These activities make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their learning more meaningful and fun for them.

Learning Log: Inside the classroom, 2nd (7 July 2014)

In class today, I have learnt about varieties of teaching methods and there are interesting such Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is a method of teaching language that focuses on collaboration as both the means and the ultimate goal of education. Communicative competences are four kinds of competence: Linguistics or grammatical competence is teaching pronounce, vocabulary, and structure of grammar, Sociolinguistics competence is language with other culture, Discourse competence is reading for interpret and Strategic competence is how to solve the problem in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Content -Based and Task-based language learning as part of CTL, a more recent refinement of CLT, has gained considerably in popularity. Content -Based are the uses of content and developed from and around the selected content, so the language topics to be covered in the lesson (e.g. grammar, skills, function, etc.) are designed based on the selected content. and Task -Based Language Teaching is an approach based on the use of task as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching. This method focus on interactive between teacher to student, student to teacher and student to student. Interactive between teacher to students is teacher should ask the question then student can answer the question. Interactive between students to teacher is the student can express their opinion. Interactive between student to student is they are interactive by group work or pair work.

In conclusion, there are important methods to English language teacher. After that I should know more about Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in order to actually be used in the lesson plan.