Reflections on the Class and Ideas About the Language We Learn
First part of today’s writing is about some reflections on this language learning class of these few weeks. There are three learning methods particularly mentioned and practiced in the class, which are impressive to me.
- First methods we learned is Jigsaw. This method requires dividing students into groups of equal number and each of the member learn only a part of content of the class lesson. Then students of same pieces of knowledge gather into a specific professional group and exchange and organize what they have learned. After that, every member go back to their original team and teach the other members their contents. Eventually, every students learn complete contents of the lesson and then take a test to confirm their learning effectiveness.
◆ Applicable Situation: In the class, we have tried this learning method. In my opinion, it is suitable for a class medium number of students, and the situation to learn topics with great amounts of details or contents.
◇ Advantage:
(1) When there are a lot of contents for students to learn, this method helps distributing the heavy works.
(2) By discussing with other students and learning from other students, it is more easy for individual to concentrate and memorize compared to learning merely from teacher’s lecturing.
(3) Except the contents of the lesson to learn, this method also is a great opportunity to practice teamwork, self-discipline and ability of organizing information.
◆ Disadvantage:
(1) This method is much time-consuming comparing to teacher’s teaching and students’ self learning.
(2) Students self-discipline and cooperation is necessary unless the learning might be totally or partly invalid; the individual’s behavior may influence others’ right or experience of learning.
(3) It is possible that students learn the contents incorrectly and mislead their classmates, which although can be discovered in the final test, still need time to fix.
◆ Personal Reflection of Real Practice: Even in our class that contributed by mostly students of English-majored, it is not easy and did not go so smoothly in a hasty try. Therefore, I believed, to use this method effectively, it is more suitable for the class of higher quality of students since it has a high requirement on both students’ personal ability and self-discipline.
2. The second method we learned in the class teaching the learning of speaking part of language is fluency circle. Fluency circle is a process by repeating same dialogue to gradually internalize it instead of memorize or just read it.
◇ Applicable Situation: For student who has basic speaking ability but still cannot speak fluently or freely on any kinds of topic.
◆ Advantage: By the process of merely reading it out, trying not to look at the script all the time to internalizing the dialogue even on one’s own words, it is a effective and smooth way to learn to speaking freely.
◇ Disadvantage: The theme of dialogue is fixed, which means the learner might, after the practice, only internalize this particular conversation.
◆ Personal Reflection of Real Practice: The method might be quite effective, but, personally, I think the method, to improve learner’s ability, has too many restrictions. The language ability of the learners have to be just right of the level that suitable, unless this method would be rather too easy or too difficult. Also, to internalize the speaking ability instead of just the dialogue that practiced, this method must be repeated amounts of times.
These are the two method that we practiced in person during the class, and my personal opinion on it. Due to my limited background knowledge and experience, this is not a thorough reflection, but still something I would like to share:)