Lightbown & Spada Chapter 7
I want to start off by saying that this chapter was interesting but simple. It basically summed up the book and discussed how each theory and idea plays out in the real world but here is how I stand on this particular chapter: Isn't this what we've been doing all semester? We have been discussing all of these theories and ideas in our own view and now we are given the views of Lightbown & Spada. This may be relevant to our studies but in my opinion what they are telling us we have already discussed in length in the classroom and in our blogs.
That being said... I have to agree with most of what they talked about. They seem to understand, just as we do, that most theories have some kind of validity to the individual learner depending on how the learner learns (that sounds funny). Though there are some that are less valid than others, it is hard to say that any specific theory wouldn't work because each individual learns so very differently and with that we have to accept that a learning theory that may not work for us may work perfectly for them.
Canagarajah
As far as this article is concerned (watch as I knock down another one) I felt pretty much the same way as I did about Lightbown & Spada Chapter 7 and the end of the article, after all the discussion of certain issues and current topics, as of 2006, was "inconclusive"...
What out article writer seems to be discussing is the evolution of any issue/pedagogy/idea, in this case being TESOL, and he is basically giving us the 411 on how the issues have grown, which we have also been discussing in class (sort of).
On that note, it's not like he doesn't make some good points about the growth of TESOL and how we are continuing along certain trends and laying aside others for new information in the field of teaching speakers of other languages, it just seems to be telling me that "hey, we've progressed". Well, I suppose that is what would be expected.
Maybe I'm being too harsh or not getting what is supposed to be gained but in my mind our reading just summed our course work from two different sources.
Yes, I feel that the article was pointing towards the development of TESOL, and to be honest, I hadn't even heard about TESOL, nor did I know what it was, before I came to the US. I really didn't even know a thing about languages, SLA and the role of English at that time either. Now that I have taken this class, I feel that I have missed so much, that I should've been taught this at my college back home. This class has opened the world a little bit more for me, and TESOL is like, "WOW, I didn't know we had issues in teaching English!", and now at the end of the semester, it just feels like we should teach everyone what we just learned in our class because people will need this knowledge.
ReplyDelete