Learner Autobiography

Transcription

1 Qizhen Learner Autobiography Since I was a child, a teacher s position has been divine to me. I had wished one of my relatives was a teacher all the way through elementary school. In that way I could ask questions where I did not understand in class and I could learn more things that were not able to be gained from classes, for example, drawing and singing. It was the not so reasonable a strong motive that I wished to be a teacher when I grew up, though as time went by, I finally decided to be a teacher after college graduation. In middle school, I begin to learn English in school as a second language. I missed the first two weeks class, so after that it was very hard for me catch up with others. I could not read those short greeting sentences such as How do you do, I m fine, thank you when all the others are so proficient and comfortable within the class. I was down and had never felt as desperate as I was always the top student in other classes. However, I was not defeated and believed in myself in learning ability, especially in English learning. Because my teacher always indoctrinated us with the idea that all students were equally intelligent, if we work harder, we can succeed. Then we learned the phonetic alphabet and then the words. Students would communicate about learning strategies. I learned some common but weird ways of learning and reciting English. For example, we would assimilate the pronunciation of thank you with the pronunciation of Chinese characters san ke ye, which means three pieces of pills. We would try to learn English words by counting the alphabets sequentially, just like how we recite the phone numbers in order. It was not surprising to hear some students pronouncing c-o-m-e, come, c-o-m-e, come to recite the word in morning reading time. Teachers thought these methods would raise

2 children s or beginners interest in learning, but ignored that many of them became dependent on this. It is detrimental to second language learning because it hindered subsequent advanced language learning, such as longer words and grammars. Then, we learned phonetic alphabet and I found it so much easier to remember words when relating it to every word, though at that time I did not know anything about the theory of phonemic awareness. I tried to tell other students about this. I had wished I would be a good English teacher in the future, especially when I became the English representative and was responsible for help and encourage others. All the way to high school, I did almost the same thing as a representative, to communicate with other classmates, organize English corner and try to give them my own learning strategies and methods. Students were generally highly motivated. Since parents normally have high expectation on their kids academic success. Kids are always told to study hard and a good student in school. In school, kids were generally highly motivated either intrinsically or extrinsically or both, even though some of them were having a hard time. However, it happens that teachers would communicate more with those top students, ignoring hopeless students who had bad grades, without considering their academic level, family background and their own personalities. I always think that if we have better educational surroundings, if educators have tried to understand each student s social situation, the situation and educational outcome would be at least different. After secondary school, I was admitted to a university majoring in English, which provided me opportunity to teaching students English. As a freshman, I realized the importance of environment for language learning. If someone is learning a new language, it is important to get involved in an environment where the only used language is the new language. When I gained a chance to accompany a group of foreign middle school teachers visiting around the city Chengdu,

3 I spoke English all the way for three days because the visitors could not speak Chinese. After that, I found myself willing to speak naturally just as I spoke my first language. But after a week or two, I could not speak in that way anymore as all I spoke Chinese to my classmates and my teachers. I think it was during my second year in university that I begun to consider pursuing a teacher s position after graduation. I just found teaching made me feel so comfortable and natural. I had the chance to tutor a group of students for a month to improve their spoken English. From this experience I found myself love guiding them, though there were question marks about teaching strategies everywhere, such as how to improve their learning motivation and self-confidence in speaking and practice. At first everybody was quiet and I could sense the anxiety, the lack of confidence, the feeling of confusion when they tried to speak to a large group of people. But they were more comfortable and willing to show their opinion when they were in a group of three or four students. I would try my best to grab their conversations and gave them some suggestions or just discussed with them about which way was better. For example, we would discuss which was more important, grammatical learning or mutual communication. I would also talk to each one of them in order to know their academic situation, which helps me a lot to adopt teaching strategies. If a student was already competent in grammar but speak not fluently, I d give him some listening practice rather than to do a list of grammatical questions. This student-centered way of learning gave them space to think and communicate in a relatively free atmosphere, and improve their own whole language ability in listening, reading, writing and speaking. But always I was not sure which method was better for the whole class or a single student; I was not sure whether they were obliged to learn English, goal-oriented, or they were intrinsically motivated.

4 After that I joined the foreign language association in our school and I was a group leader teaching the phonetic alphabet. All of them, after understanding and relating each word with phonetic alphabets, can recite word much better. One of my students even told me that he had never thought that phonetic alphabet is closely related with words even though he tried so hard to remember words. At that time I was keen to give all I know about language to my students, but still I always did not know which way would be the best for each one of them. Whether should I taught all the words and phrases at one time and then repeated them or should I taught each word, repeated and went on to the next word or phrase? Should I just presented them a list of grammatical theory and asked them to recite it, then to take exam, since all of them were so determined to learn English well and decided to devote the majority of their time? Some of them joined in the reading aloud every morning and kept appearing at the college English corner at six o clock, every day. My point is that they are highly motivated in learning which has been a key element in learning a new language well. There must be some other reasons, such as examoriented curriculum instruction, which cause their failure in communicating with other students or a native speaker. Or probably well-selected teaching materials were not available and the access to learning materials was too limited. Recently one of my colleagues asked me if I could find the essay by E. B. White s, since he considered it a proper teaching material for a group of students English. He could not find it in China, and I found it available in the library and online. I decided to learn French in my third year in college, though all my friends and teachers told me that French was hard to learn for Chinese students. But what I found was totally different. We have an experienced and respected French teacher, whose pronunciation was considered to be as good as a radio reporter. In each class he would first review what we d learned last class. Then he introduced some background information about that class, providing us some interesting

5 stories about French people or some of his experiences in France. This in fact had drawn our attention and motivation in French learning. Following this introduction he would guide us or push us to read and learn the new words and grammar, listen to the article several times, which was a lot of hard work. But it was not boring, because after that we were divided into small groups to practice. Out of class we have lots of assignment on listening, reading, and writing and we were encouraged to ask questions. Through challenging students to do their best in learning new knowledge, students learned French intensively and quickly. After class we had lots of homework which kept us repeating French learning. Everyone agreed it was not an easy class but we loved that class. We learned a lot and it was relatively interesting. Our attention was paid to the class because it was interesting. Apart from that, there were so many grammar, words and phrases similar to English. I was the one who bought an English-French and French-English dictionary in my class. I tried to tell my classmates about the benefit of French-English dictionary and they finally felt in love with it, since it was not only easier to learn French but also a way to learn English. It was so much better to read French compared with English especially when some of the words are spelled the same and some of the phrases have the same structures. It is hard to learn French, because most of the time when French and English are translated into Chinese, free translation is focused. In a result the meaning of English is presented but we do not know how the English pattern comes into being and do not know what is more native and natural. Once students begin to write something, all those simple SVO sentences appear in writing without well-organized reasoning and exampling, and with a few formal expressions. I heard a lot of stories that students can do well in reading comprehension in test but know little about writing, grammar or speaking.

6 My favorite way of learning a new language was to listen to audio books while reading the books. Because it not only provides me almost all kinds of sensory perceptions, acoustic, visual, even sense of smell, but also gives real language settings and stories. I could never drop the audio book once I was drawn into Jane Austin s world, lost in Gone with the Wind. All those vivid expressions and description are just like the newly spring of cluster of words and thoughts. They are easy to remember drawing my attention. But before that I could never finish a book just through reading though I tried time after time, because there are always new words in each pages and I would stop reading and looked up the dictionary all the time. My first reading of the first page of Jane Eyre took twenty minutes, how could I finish reading a book in that way? Many of my students have told me their experience of stumbling over each new word though reading a chapter where their motivation and confidence were finally extinguished. After I came to US to study, the first thing that struck me was the fact that I cannot communicate freely or I cannot speak English anymore. I did not know how to pay the bill in a restaurant. I did not know I should say thank you to the driver when I got off the bus. My former knowledge and experience of all these practice are not useful now and my habitus and disposition are considered to be out of practice. It does not mean that I m not polite, but I need to learn a new cultural and social practice. I came to the conclusion that the English I learned in China is far less enough. To learn a language well one should truly travel or live in the country to feel and experience the language since language is not pure science or clusters of alphabets or symbols but a cultural component part of an ever-changing society. So in teaching a second language, it is important to provide student an environment, a cultural background, such as a cultural class, reading vividly pictured book or interesting stories or giving each student a name of the target language. Once I joined the game Pictionary, the words or expressions that I drew were new to

7 me. But with the help of their explanation, I learned all those expression by heart, relating each word with a specific picture, so vividly. I jogged down the game and think that it will help my students to remember words. Apart from that, all the classes are in English, different from where I came. Even as English majors we had lots of classes in our own language. Here, even if I paid full attention to the class, it is still not easy to grab the meaning. I plowed through all kind of research papers for the first time. But after a semester when I went back to those reading, everything comes so much easier and natural. This is because I have repeated those interesting language patterns, ways of thought, academic terms again and again. I have shaped thousand of chunks of short-term memory and long-term memory in my head. The more I read; the more eager I am to read more. I think it is necessary for motivated students properly to encounter with a language repeatedly for the purpose of language proficiency. It is also important to arouse their positive emotion in learning. Just focusing on instructional modals and repetition are not enough, as we find that no matter how considerable a teacher is in class, students learn differently in degree and width. It is important for teachers to know their students background both in familial background and academic level. Students from lower social classes probably are different in academic level and learning motivation compared those who are from higher social classes or richer families. A student may have to consider work to earn money for his family who do not speak English while he is attending school. In a word, it is very important to give all levels of students a feeling of safety, like a home. Sometimes, I would just imagine what I will do if I am a teacher or retrospect what I had done in the past was proper or not.

8 Ineffective way of teaching such as drilling into students mind by repeating boringly would entrench students interest, motivation and creativity. I had experienced an American literature class, in which the teacher listed all the personal information of those literary celebrities on power point file, reading through the list with a few explanations. Students would skip the class and consider it to be boring, or worse, get a boring impression on American literature. If it is a good teacher, he might inspire students motivation to read more literature, attract students attention in class and make student to think critically. A comparison between literature celebrities may lead them to compare and come to their own preference. Finally, I think there are several factors to keep in mind in order to be a good teacher. Educators should not only gain professional quality but also responsible for each student. A passionate and devoted teacher generally does better in his career. It is important to keep a comfortable instructional environment, whether it is safe or quiet. It is important to draw students attention to study even though it is never possible to make the whole class pay maximum attention. Motivation has been a key factor in leading students to learn efficiently in and out of school. Highly motivated students often do better in academic achievement or other social activities.