ENTRY 4: REFLECTION WRITING
During the semester and the time spent on this course, I have learned so many different things that would greatly help me in my future years of teaching. Teaching English language learners is something I am so excited to do. From this course I have learned things from universal influences that helps with learning a second language, the speed at which second language learners learn, individual differences, the relationship between languages, and many more. A topic form this class I felt that needed more time or we could have focused a little more on was motivation for English language learners. I feel that motivation is something one must have when learning something new. Teachers must find ways to help motivate students so that they are engaged and excited to learn. There are times when students have many extrinsic motivation but teachers should help students find a intrinsic motivation so that students can progress more in the long run. While extrinsic motivation is very effective in the moment, extrinsic motivation is more effective for a longer length of time. I believe motivational techniques and what teachers can do to help would have been a topic to focus more on because of how important and impactful it is to a students learning journey.
Having this blog during this semester has been so helpful in the learning process but also an exciting way to interact with other students. Learning about others and their ideas and opinions has been very interesting. What I really enjoyed was learning about my classmates friends, colleagues, and interviewees and their experiences. Since we were able to interview two people during this semester, this blog provided a way to learn about so many more people around us. I believed the interviews that we had to conduct was the most exciting part of this blog. Having to go out and find someone to interview and learn about their lives and experiences was so interesting and fun. I was able to put myself in a position where I just sat and learned information about people in my life that I did not know before. I also learned more about real life situations, solutions, philosophies, and different teaching techniques through my classmates interviews. I was able to use others real life experiences to better my knowledges on how to treat and teach English language learners now and in my future classroom. What I also enjoyed was the comments we had to make on other classmates blogs. We were able to learn so much about others opinions and their thoughts on different topics. It was a great way to also communicate my opinions respectfully and also get others opinion on my own thoughts. I thought this was a very important part of this blog since we all had to keep an open mind and respect others opinions. Overall I believe this whole blog experience was very effective on being an engaging classroom where we learned a lot from each other and each other’s experiences.
Hi Julie. Your blog caught my attention when you discussed motivation. I see extrinsic motivation factors in my student teaching everyday and they are short lived. I agree that we need to find a way to intrinsically motivate students. I feel that this may be hard to do. From personal experience, I feel a desire to be successful simply because I do not want to like I do not know what I am doing. How do we intrinsically motivate our future students? Reviewing over Ortega, I discovered that we should teach our future students to "engage in a behavior that is self-initiated by choice and sustained by enjoyment in the activity, for the sheer sake of learning" (Ortega, 2009, p. 176).
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have discovered, I think this is done by teaching students to value the art of learning and take pride in ownership. I tell them to say their answer with confidence and take pride in everything that you do. Thank you for sharing your comments, they are extremely insightful.
Hi Anna,
DeleteI am glad that you agree with my thoughts on motivation. I do feel too that getting students to intrinsically motivate themselves is difficult but can be done. I have met students who had no desire to learn but after a motivational talk and conversation with them, they began working because they have told me they wanted to do better. This conversation though can be difficult to have with all students and sometimes won't be effective with all students, but we must try. I do se as well that with enjoyment, students do become motivated as well. Thank you for your feedback!
Hello Julie, thank you for sharing your interviews this semester with us and allowing us to grow and learn alongside with you. I agree with you, we have learned several things in this class that will aid in helping us as a teacher teaching English language learners. For example, we know teaching children a second language during their sensitive period will be the best time to teach it and it our job to lay a strong foundation (Ortega, 2013, p.12) However, I do disagree with you in that I do believe we have covered motivation efficiently. I found this topic to be extremely interesting and decided to write my research paper on it. Thank you for your reflection with us!
ReplyDeleteHi Hao,
DeleteThank you too for sharing your videos as well, I found them very fun to watch and have learned a lot from them. I think motivational is very interesting as well and decided to write my research paper on it too. I believe motivation is such an important part of a students learning journey and wish to learn more about it. I believe this opportunity to learn about motivation for our research paper will be very useful for our future classroom. I am so glad we both were able to learn so much from this class to contribute to us teaching English language learners in the future. Thank you for your reply.
Hello Julie. I enjoyed reading your reflection. The motivation section of this course was the one that I enjoyed most. I agree with you that more time could have been spent on discussing this topic. As you mentioned motivation is something one must have in order to learn. While this course focused on motivation in terms of second language acquisition, in my opinion, motivation is the foundation to almost everything we accomplish in life. According to Ortega, “the highly motivated individual will be also instrumentally or more extrinsically motivated by anticipated pragmatic rewards and utility that we see in learning an L2. They want to appear personally agreeable (associated with positive attitudes towards the L2 community and culture) and also professionally successful (Ortega, 2011, pg. 187).
ReplyDeleteHi Isabel,
DeleteIt is great to hear you enjoyed the motivation section the most. I completely agree the motivation is the foundation to almost everything we accomplish in life. I believe without motivation we would not have a reason to try to become better or more. Motivation is something students must have in order to learn another language. Students will simply not do well is there is nothing making them want to learn. While extrinsic motivation can help with students learning, teachers must find strategies so that student want to learn for themselves and not for incentives. Thank you for your reply.
Hello Julie! It has been such a pleasure reading your blogs and reading your insights! This reflection is very insightful, and I agree with several of your points. Your idea of wanting to focus on motivation more is one of the things I agree with the most!! Ortega (2011) mentioned that many researchers have emphasized the importance of motivational factors in L2 learning (pg. 24). I think it’s an important and interesting thing to learn about! It would have been interesting to learn more about the different types of motivation as well as learned some ways we can motivate our ELL students so that they themselves are excited and motivated to learn the language!
ReplyDeleteHi Alyssa! It is so great to hear you had the pleasure in reading my blogs and insights. I am also happy you agree with my point on motivation. Having motivation in learning a new language is extremely important. Motivation is what keeps a person going, with out it the person and simply slow down or even stop their learning experience. I also agree with you on how it would have been great learning more about the different ways to help motivate our EEL students. For my research paper I decided to write about motivation so hopefully I will be learning about more methods and their effectiveness. Thank you for your comment!
DeleteI have also decided to write about motivation! It really is a fascinating topic to research about. It is interesting to learn how much goes into motivation and how many different types of motivation there are! I was particularly interested in learning about instrumental and integrative motivation, because I had not heard those terms before.
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