Journal1

     REFLECTIVE       

         JOURNAL

   

As we grow up, as we learn, as we live, at some point of our existence we start wandering about ourselves, about “the future and past me”. This definitely has happened to me, I am constantly doing an introspection process of my life, which helps me to see the person that I am reflecting or projecting to others and comparing it towards the one that I want to be. Moreover, in my professional field, as an English teacher, I try to do this as much as I can before planning a lesson and after it, because by doing it I am more deeply connected with the learning and teaching process.

            Somehow, when you start thinking about being a teacher a lot of fears come across your mind; in my case one of the biggest fears was to be a stiff teacher or worst to become like one of my high school teachers, who was only concerned on giving a grammar lesson and grading. Fortunately, being in ANCLA has not only helped me to overcome those fears, but also has actually helped my mentees in several aspects and without doubt to experience a reciprocal learning process. For the time being, I have had two students: Andrés and Ingrid. I have noticed that they have different learning styles; therefore I used different language strategies. 

On the first hand, I want to mention the experience with my very first student: Andrés, he is a 30 years old theologian with basic level of English, at the beginning he was reluctant towards studying English and his strongest complain was that he was too old for learning it. The learning strategy that I tried to use was to connect him emotionally with the language. I tried to make him feel more comfortable by making examples related to his field of study and to his likes in order to knock down those walls that he had built around the whole idea of learning English. 

         This strategy is named "the affective strategy" and it is basically about “identifying one’s mood and anxiety level, talking about feelings, rewarding oneself for good performance, and using deep breathing or positive self-talk, have been shown to be significantly related to L2 proficiency”(Oxford,2003, pp15). Which is what I tried to do by encouraging him to trust in his abilities. In addition, something really unexpected happened at the beginning. We agreed that I will speak in Spanish, but we realize that when I switched to English he could understand what I was explaining, this little fact encouraged him to learn and practice, he started to make more questions and getting more involved in the activities. Besides this, one of the learning strategies that we had to work on the most was memory; we tried with repetition, making draws, singing and relating concepts with images; for example something funny happened when I was explaining him the pronouns and no matter how hard we tried, he kept mixing the pronouns he and she, so what I told him was to add a S to the pronoun HE because women are sexy; later throughout the lesson he did not forget this trick, besides he start creating a new ones which facilitate his learning process.

            On the other hand, my second student: Ingrid, she is 18 years old and is currently studying electric engineering. I have noticed that her personality is introverted and that she works better in individual activities. As I begin to know her better I can tell that she is visual and kinesthetic, therefore I tend to bring different types of materials and activities to enhance her learning process. For example I have made activities about making her describe series of pictures or comics, also to act a situation or draw it.  Furthermore, an interesting thing happened which is that she come to class with a classmate: Santiago. Hence,  my learning strategy in this situation is to tap the social strategy and affective strategy because she feels more comfortable and loves to cooperate with her classmate, also she is way much participative and involved with the topics and materials. For example, we play games that are usually aimed to improve their vocabulary; we also made a lot of oral activities such as role plays or discussions. Moreover, both of their personality types are labeled as Closure-oriented students according to Rebecca in Language Learning Styles and Strategies: An Overview because from what I have seen and noticed they like specific tasks, they are very serious with our class, they bring me questions every time, they love facts and write almost everything I say in their notebooks, also they feel more comfortable if at the beginning of the lesson I show them what we will do, like the trace of our class, so it tend to be more organized and calm.

      Finally, thanks to the opportunity for being part of ANCLA I have been able to actually experience what being a teacher or mentor is like, to apply what I am learning and compare it with the theory. This opportunity besides giving you experience it gives you perspective, it has changes somehow my vision of teaching and it is perfectly combined with this subject (methodology and didactics) since this subject aims to show us the colors and possible approaches and methodologies about teaching, here you realize that nothing is completely written that there is no right or wrong answers neither there is a perfect path to follow that will guide you to be a “good” teacher, due to you will be the own driver or builder of it.