Second Language Acquisition and Culture

Learning a foreign language is difficult but rewarding. I find this topic from my PIDO 3250 discussion forum.

To me , I have learned English for so many years, and I find there are several ways to learn a foreign language,.

First, you must be brave enough. Most of my ESL students are quite shy, and they don't dare to express themselves well. Sometimes they would like to show their own opinion after preparing a long time. Therefore, in my class, I will give them several minutes to prepare and then encourage them to speak their attitudes on topic.

Second, the environment is quite important. Many of my ESL students from China have large amount of vocabulary, and their writing and reading are well while listening and speaking are very poor. To learn the cause, I find that environment is really important for second language acquisition. Once they have immersed into an English-speaking community, it is natural for them to understand well and speak fluently.

Third, different people may use different approaches in language acquisition. Some students may use step-by-step approach, while others may improve their language by big leap. When I was about fifteen years old, I began to study oral English in evening school. At that time, I was in the low-level class with Chinese teacher.  However, when I noticed that there was a foreigner teacher in the medium-level class, I went to that class. For the next two month, I experienced a hard time and I felt headache each time after class since that foreigner teacher cannot speak any Chinese.
To my surprise, about three months later, I suddenly found that I could understand most of his class and even I could express myself. Maybe I am an example for some students that it is not necessary for him/her to study second language step by step.

Fourth, I think the most important one is to understand the culture of targeted language.
I have found that it is difficult for one to learn a foreign language without knowing anything about the culture. In order to study English, I have to learn American drama, Bible, etc. Of course, if someone wants to learn Chinese, he/she must learn some cultural background to understand the meaning of the words. Culture and language cannot be separated.

"'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.'"  -  Nelson Mandela 

Here is a good paper that illustrate how important is the culture to second language acquisition. 

 http://www.osugisakae.com/tesol/matesol-papers/spackman-culture-and-sla.pdf

Science World

Science world is a miracle place for kids. They can learn a lot from those fun activities, such as electricity, air, etc.

Cell Phone in Classroom

Modern technologies have brought us great convenience. We can use smart phones anywhere anytime.

On one hand, we enjoy those advantages. First, we can communicate with people all over the world. Second, smart phones are quite light, and it is easy to carry them anywhere. Third, in case of danger, we can use it to make emergent call.

On the other side, smart  phones do bring some disadvantage for us. Apart from its harm to our health, it also make our class uncontrollable. Most students like to bring smart phone to the class. and then, they cannot resist the temptation of communicating with friends, which distract them from focusing on class. 

As a teacher, we must find some effective way to deal with smartphone. It can help ESL students to look up the meaning of the word at handy, on the other hand, most of them may play games during the recess and communicate with friends frequently.

Here are some useful links for smartphone in class.

Flipped Classroom, cons and prons?

Flipped classroom is popular topic right now.
To be frank, I still doubt the feasibility of such methods in class.

First, I believe that both the teachers and the students are self-disciplined. They both should obey the rules of the "games"-- that is to say that teacher will have to do much work to prepare the relevant teaching material, videos or lectures, etc. and they also have to answer the questions from different students;therefore, the working load is becoming more   

On the other side, students have to learn critical thinking. Only when they get familiar with critical thinking can they learn the subject by themselves according to their own pace. Such Flipped Classroom has proposed high requirements for the students. they have the ability to control themselves, and learn something new by themselves. However, most students are reluctant to spend after school time leaning and studying more.  It is not difficult to think that if students don't work after school or before the class, teachers will have to spend more time explaining those materials.

I have found some links which illustrate some points against Flipped Classroom:

http://www.stratostar.net/blog/five-reasons-against-the-flipped-classroom#.VCo8Fufle3c

http://www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2012/12/12/the-flipped-classroom-what-are-the-pros-and-cons-

http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.ca/2011/10/five-reasons-im-not-flipping-over.html

Whole Brain Teaching, have you ever heard of that ?

By discussing in the PIDP 3250 forum, I got to know this unbelievable kind of teaching approach.

Have you ever heard high stress environment.
This one is really beyond my imagination.
I am really curious about whether this kind of method is useful for teaching process.
In this approach, all the people take actions to respond to their instructors. Sometimes the class is really noisy, but the whole class can become quiet instantly according to the teachers order.

In my opinion, I think that maybe this method is useful. But, self-discipline students are the prerequisite for this class. they can express themselves well and at the same time .
I will not use such means in my class before I could use it skillfully.