Classroom Talk

In my placement, mostly I see initiate-respond-evaluate (I-R-E) interactions going on. My CT usually introduces a topic and start asking to students. For example, if today they learned about different nationality then my CT would ask a student “where are you from?” in Chinese then a student would answer in Chinese. My CT uses I-R-E a lot in the classroom to see if students have understood the questions and be able to answer correctly or not in Chinese. I do not see much of classroom talk in the classroom. Mostly students are repeating sentences and vocabularies over and over to remember how to say things in Chinese. Especially in Chinese immersion kindergarten classroom, it would be hard to do discussion or recitation since focus is on learning Chinese. Students do not have enough words or knowledge to share their idea in Chinese. In Almasi’s article, she mentioned that encouraging students to provide a rationale for their response is a good way to scaffold students. And I think it is important to students that in discussion, there is no right or wrong answer. It is time for students to express their thoughts and share their ideas in the class. For those students who do not participate actively in classroom talk, I think give them more time to think about the discussion topic before actually discussing it. That way student would feel more confident about their answer and feel more comfortable talking in the class.

Exploring, defining and creating meaningful approaches to literacy learning

In my classroom literature is included in a few ways. Every week students get new spelling words to practice over the week. When they get them on Monday they sit and write each work 5 times at their desks. They take the words home and practice them for the spelling test on Friday. On the spelling test they have to spell the words correctly and use the correct upper and lower case letters. The spelling words correlate with their readings for the week. Their readings are from a text book and are themed (ex: outer space). Students always have a reading book in their desk. They are instructed to pull it out and read it almost every time they are done with an assignment. There is also something called AR reading books. Students read these books and then take a quiz on the computers to check for comprehension. Lastly, my CT reads them a story from around the world every week. They look at their large globe and find where the story is from in relation to where we live and then read the story and reflect on it after (text to text, text to self and text to world).
In addition to having things such as what is listed above, I would like to incorporate technology into my classroom. Just like the video we watched in class, technology is a large and growing part of literature. Getting children involved in literacy using technology I think will be a key way for success. Students can read and write online and do many other things to expand their knowledge (blogging, book reviews, etc.). I would also like to incorporate multiple genres of literature including everyday items such as food labels, receipts, signs, etc. I would also like to incorporate class book readings into my classroom. We would read as a class together so students could follow along, I could read and students could read out loud.

Goals for Learning - TE Language Arts

I am excited to be taking TE 402 Language Arts and look forward to reaching new learning goals as well. Based on my experiences as a pre-service teacher, I feel that literacy is my one of my favoirte subjects to teach kids. In TE 301, I feel I learned the basics of literacy including terms and their definitions, different forms of assessment, meaning of literacy and it's importance for students. However, for this class, I am looking forward to going beyond the basics. I am ready to learn how to actually teach literacy and help students become more successful academically. Throughout this semester, I hope to be exposed to different teaching and assessment strategies for language arts. From these experiences, it is my hope to develop my own teaching pedagogy and become more experienced and comfortable as a language arts teacher. I also look forward to becoming understanding of students' needs as literacy learners and use that information to develop the best ways to teach them.
Additionally, I hope to make learning more effective by using strategies such as technology. I am very curious to see the different ways it can be integrated with language arts. Personally, I think technology can be a great way to capture curiosity as many students already have a love for technology. It could also allow them to learn things such as reading and writing much easier as various new software can be effective teachers. Lastly, it is my goal to reflect upon my own personal language arts experiences from this semester. This is something that I have not done much of in the past but I think it could be very beneficial. By reflecting on the best things and the worst things I experience over the semester, I will be able to reflect, learn and apply them to my future teaching career.