This section is about helping you to focus on how your learners are experiencing the language learning environment and only indirectly on what you are doing as a teacher, a teacher's assistant, or a tutor. TESOL is continually influenced by research in applied linguistics. Evidence is mounting that language-learning success requires students to think about the way they learn best and to work towards positive change themselves. It is not just the teacher's responsibility to teach, it is also the students' responsibility to learn. Discuss this concept with your students. Ask them how they learn best. Encourage them to think about their own objectives and the things they can do independent of you to reach their goals.

Try to teach with activities and materials that encourage students to be active rather than passive learners, and encourage them to articulate how and what they are learning (much in the same way this website encourages you to think about how you are teaching). As they do so, they will begin to discover their own learning styles and to make informed and strategic decisions about how to learn more effectively.

Complete the exercise of your choice and email it to Dr. Strong-Krause at diane_strong-krause@byu.edu.

REFLECTION

• This exercise is to help you recognize the types of learning activities that are being employed in your classroom. Tape record or videotape (or have a friend or another teacher observe) your class for two days. If you are an aid, you can do this without outside help. Keep track of the total time (in minutes) spent on each of the following:
  
  • Teacher talking
  • Students listening to/speaking with each other
  • Students reading
  • Students writing
  • Students engaging in some sort of physical activity where they are moving their bodies or manipulating something with their hands

  What is your reaction to this? What, if anything, would/do you plan to modify in the future?

DISCOVERY

• Ask your students how they learn best. Plan a lesson that incorporates the activities that your students said help them to learn. Teach the lesson. When you teach the lesson, before you start, explain to your students what the objectives are, and that you will be using the activities they believe to be most effective. At the end of the lesson use some form of assessment to gage their learning, and ask them to assess and reflect on their own learning. What did you learn from this experience?

• This exercise focuses on you as a learner. How has completing the exploratory exercises on this Website helped you to become a more active learner? How could the Website better facilitate this?

VISION

• Your students spend relatively little time inside your classroom. What kinds of activities can you do in class to encourage your students to also do out of class that will help them practice what they are learning and incorporate it into their daily lives? (If you are stumped, ask your students). Describe at least three.

• Describe two or three learning activities that you think will help your students the most in their real lives. Why are these activities important to do in the classroom?
  

diane_strong-krause@byu.edu