TESOL 01:Second Language Acquisition               Assignment

Teacher: David McGill

Date : 14th/April

Name : Jinny(28th WD)

(Woo, Ji Yeon)

Ⅰ. Instruction

- I have a successful experience about learning English.

Ⅱ. Body

- Not successful in the traditional classrooms.

- Teaching style of Enabler.

- Communicative Language Teaching.

Ⅲ. Conclusion

- Enhanced four skills

I have an experience which made me to move steps forwards for  the balanced improvement of the basic language four skills. I am going to tell the successful story with one of my teachers of enabler type under communicative Language Teaching.

I have learned English since I was a middle school student and majored in English Literature and Language at the university. But before I met Jessica who was my English conversation class teacher when I was a senior at the university, I have never been satisfied with my command of English on speaking and writing even in the my classes at the university. I was totally taught by traditional classroom circumstance. Almost all teachers made themselves centered during classes by reading, translating and explaining texts and we, students just listened to them and took notes for examinations. This teaching method can only made my reading and listening skill improved and the other two seemed to come to a standstill.

By the way, Jessica's class was very different. Looking back into the past, she was a ' enabler' type of teacher. She motivated her students to take part in her class actively and gave many chances to speak English in the classroom by lots of group work, such as discussion and debate. She knew well about subjects and fully understood characteristics of her adult learners but she didn't take the role of the direct explainer of subjects and just cast 'situations' and a 'resource of information' when needed so as to make her students guess her classes' goals. This kind of teaching type made my lack of other two skill-speaking and writing, improved.

Next, her teaching methods which was most likely Communicative Language Teaching was very helpful to me. She used many fun activities in her classes such as picture story, role play, language games and discussion and these activities made me feel not boring at all during her classes. Besides, She tried to let her students proceed the activities without hindrance by no instant correction of errors and that made me feel easy and not embarrassed when I spoke out and wrote down my thoughts during classes. I could freely exchange my opinions with other students without sticking to grammar and lexis. It brought me a big improvement of fluency and improvement of accuracy could be followed by after class studying orasking problems to her after classes.

In conclusion, I think that the 'enabler' type of teacher with Communicative Language Teaching enabled me to have much more enhanced and balanced four basic language skills. Of course, I am still not perfect in all the four skills of English but I am not afraid of using them at all now. I could be stuck in much lower English level of speaking and writing and I could be diffident of these productive skills. The most important and thankful thing is that she let me have self-confidence on English. Many learners are still put in the  aditional and inactive classrooms. These kinds of classrooms can be much more convenient and easy to teachers but not heplful to learners. In order for them to get all four basic language skills, classroom circumstance needs to be changed into more active and teachers should try to  draw learners' attention with various fun acivities.