Etienne and ESL

TESL 0100 Unit 10 Reflection: Look How Far We’ve Come! (Source: Etienne Robin) It’s incredible how quickly time has flown by! Within the blink of an eye, we are already heading into the last week of this course. Seeing as this is the last blogpost I’ll be writing for TESL 0100, I would like to take the time to stop and reflect on my learning over these past ten units. We’ve covered quite a bit of content and so I would like to share three things that really resonated with me. The first thing that particularly stood out to me were the different roles a teacher must assume in the classroom. Brown and Lee (2015) outlined these roles on pages 259 – 261: 1.)     Teacher as Controller 2.)     Teacher as Director 3.)     Teacher as Manager 4.)     Teacher as Facilitator 5.)     Teacher as Resource Until reading this chapter, I hadn’t given much though to the various roles a teacher needs to take on in order effectively interact with their students. By stating th

TESL 0100 Unit 9 Reflection: Social Media and Language Learners  (Source: https://pixabay.com/en/social-media-3d-render-bubble-2636256/ ) At the turn of the 21 st century, the internet revolutionized the way we interact with each other, namely with the birth of social media. Thanks to this innovation, the world no longer feels like such a big place; we can now connect with people from every corner of the Earth instantaneously. By its very communicative nature, social media can also be a powerful tool for language learners. Through social media, they can now extend their language learning outside of the classroom in new and exciting ways. Below I have taken four headings from Brown and Lee (2015) to outline some ways in which social media can enrich language learning: 1.)     Opportunities for Interaction: Social media offers language learners an abundance of opportunities for them to interact with others in their L2. They can “…express themselves, build profiles, for

TESL 0100 Unit 8 Reflection: Test Anxiety                                     (Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/albertogp123/5843577306 ) Imagine that you are a student about to take a test. The teacher hands out the papers and you are instructed to complete this test within an hour. You look down at the test paper and your mind immediately goes blank. Your palms are clammy, and your heart is racing. You try to focus on the questions in front of you but the fatigue from staying up all night studying clouds your memory. You try to make sense out of the questions, but they don’t resemble anything you covered in class. You focus on trying to solve the first question, but you struggle to come up with an answer. Before you know it, the teacher announces that there are only five minutes left until you must hand in the test and you’ve made very little progress.  Does this sound familiar? Have you ever been in a situation where test anxiety has gotten the better of you?