HUDA ALHARBI
a. LING 705: Phonetics I
with Dr. Allard Jongman
This course provided a basic introduction to the study of phonetics. I learned about the physiology of the vocal tract, phonetic transcription, and sounds not encountered in English. In the final project of this class, I recorded and analyzed speakers’ speech, using a specific software program called Multi-Speech. One was a native speaker of American English, and the other was a native speaker of Arabic. I measured short and long vowels, and stop consonants in both languages English and Arabic.
This experience allowed me to look closer at these sounds, and helped me to delve deeper into and understand the most common difficulties that Arabic speakers who learn English may face in pronouncing sounds that do not exist in Arabic such as /p/, /v/, and /q/. It increased my skills in knowing sounds’ articulators and how to use them to create speech sounds, all of which will help me in teaching English for beginning learners.
The evidence of what I have learned from this course and that I can now apply is seen in the case study in the following ways. Several letters in the English language do not exist in the Arabic language, which require learning a new set of pronunciation rules in order to properly use these sounds.
Therefore, knowing the places and manners of articulation and their corresponding IPA symbols could help me as a teacher of Arabic speakers in teaching how to pronounce letters that do not exist. For example, in this class, I learned that letter /p/, which Ahmed pronounced as /b/, is considered a voiceless bilabial plosive, while the letter /b/ is considered a voiced bilabial plosive. The only difference between these two letters is that the vocal cords do not vibrate upon articulation with letter /p/, but it does with /b/.
Knowing that can easily let me come up with a method in teaching these sounds, so that my students can differentiate between them. For example, I would place a piece of paper in front of their mouth and let them try saying the letters out loud. If the position of the paper changed, then the letter is /p/; if not, then the letter is /b/.
b. C&T 820: Methods of TESOL
with Dr. Hyesun Cho
In this course, I learned several things, such as how to apply knowledge of how students learn a second or foreign language by designing learning objectives and activities. Another thing is how to design, implement, and evaluate content-based lesson plans.
There were weekly reflections on course readings and responses to two of the classmates’ posts on Blackboard. That helped me in understanding the reading, and allowed me to learn from my classmates' experiences. Additionally, in this course, I had an opportunity to experience and implement a variety of approaches to TESOL as cooperative learning with the ESL teacher at a school in Lawrence.
Also in this course, there were two final projects. The first one is a curriculum project that includes two lesson plans demonstrating the content of two sessions, which equals 40 to 60 minutes. I used the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) plan to design my lessons that had content objectives, language objectives, vocabulary, and cultural information. Designing and creating these two lessons not only expanded my thought of teaching English, but also helped me deepen my understanding of applying appropriate standards and strategies for a specific student or class.
The other project was a mini-interview with the students I worked with. This project developed my communication skills with English language learners, helped me learn from their journey of learning a language, and allowed me to apply approaches and techniques that I learned from this courses, which developed my experience and skills in teaching.
The evidence of what I have learned from this course and that I can now apply is seen in the case study in the following ways. First, there are many standards, approaches, techniques, activities, and assessment methods that can be used in teaching the four English skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening, which depend on the proficiency level of the learners and their needs.
As an example reading approach, I can use bottom up, top-down, reader as a code breaker and text participants approaches with my student in this case study. Second, there are four stages of development: preproduction, early production, speed emergence, and intermediate fluency participants (Diaz-Rico, 2013 p.43). Having knowledge of these stages plays a significant role in determining learning progress and measuring student’s performance and needs that help the educator to plan lessons, and choose appropriate activities.
C&T 821: Diagnosis and Remediation in Second Language Education with Associate Professor, Dr. Paul Markham.
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Having this course had a huge impact on increasing my ability in assessment. This course’s main purpose was helping future teachers in understanding and using formal and informal assessment techniques and instruments to evaluate the progress of learners and identify learning difficulties in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In this course, I had a chance to practice formatting four formative assessment instruments, addressing the English four skills and learning from my mistakes. I also learned how to make my own rubric to easily assess students' performances.
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For the final project, I developed, evaluated, and wrote my reflection on the positive and negative aspects of all major components of the test that addresses all the skills, and was given to the ESL learner to answer. This experience helped me to learn from my mistakes, understand and apply various strategies, and encouraged me to develop my assessments methods.
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The evidence of what I have learned from this course and that I can now apply is seen in the case study. That is to assess the four language skills; reading, writing, speaking, and listening, there are different standards to meet, and approaches and activities to use depending on the learner’s proficiency level. For instance, to assess reading, I can use many activities such as matching uppercase letters to lowercase letters, same-different, and odd item.
C&T 822: Second Language Acquisition
with Dr. Paul Markham
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This course provides theories and researchers base of second language acquisition. Moreover, it permits my learning to understand the similarities and differences of the first and the second language acquisition, which help me to improve my teaching and learning for students.
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I have learned not only that strategies and techniques can influence learner’s outcome, but also there are different effects that can impact the learners’ outcome. L1 transfer, motivations, and feedbacks are examples of learning impacts. Knowing that would help me in preparing a lesson plan for my learners
refrence
Dίaz-Rico, L.T. (2012). (3rd Ed). Teaching English learners: Strategies and methods. New York: Pearson.