NAME: Trần Thu Thảo

STUDENT’S CODE: 22045275

CLASS: QH2022D2 – Class 2
SUBJECT: ELT Methodology

FINAL ASSIGNMENT
Write a reflective essay on one useful idea that you have picked up in the course that
you can use it as an innovation in teaching. Your essay should be structured as
follows:
1. The context of your teaching/working.
2. The idea you wish to present:
- What did you know about it before the course?
- How did you acknowledge of that idea change after the course?
- Why do you find it useful (use selective references to illustrate your view – No
more than 5 references)?
- How have you used it or are you going to use it as an innovation in teaching?

Education has always been considered an important aspect of life development,

society upgrades, and economic enhancement. During this 21 st century, we have never
been able to see such an enlarging globalization throughout the world, which inspires
different races of people, cultures, and religions to connect and learn from each other.
Due to this desirable event, it seems that a certain language has been chosen to
become the bridge between the population of the world, which was none other than
the Germanic-based model, English. This has led to an occurrence of increasing
demands to learn English all around the world, Vietnam included. As a person who
has been acquiring English for more than 20 years, a student from the Faculty of
Linguistics and Culture of English-Speaking Countries, and an English Tutor for
elementary kids, it is certainly my responsibility to deliver the best English teaching
methods and lessons as requested by my students. How can I do this? As my English
Associate Professor, Dr. Le Van Canh used to say: “Everything changes!”, which
encourages me to work harder, and enhance my teaching methods day by day to adapt
with the globalization pace of the world. I have had an opportunity to attend the
subject of English Language Teaching Methodology during my Master Course and
collected a useful idea about teaching English Reading Skills for my students.

Each English teacher has a different teaching context. As for myself, my teaching
context usually evolves around three main circumstances: whom I am teaching; the
social demand of the language I am teaching; the students likely to be found in my
English class. Firstly, I would like to describe the type of students that I work with
during my teaching hours. My students are mostly from private elementary schools
with middle-class or upstream family backgrounds in Hanoi. Most of their parents
either have their own businesses or are extremely professional in a certain kind of
working field, which brings them a lot of money, creating high education conditions
not only in Language Learning but also in other variety of surgical activities for their
children. With that amount of investment in education, the students are already
contributing to private English classes with native teachers such as American,
Australian, British, Canadian, or even Irish, all of whom are College graduates and
have at least one Bachelor’s Degree in Education or Teaching. All the kids have had
the opportunity to attend classes from highly-recommended English Centers in Hanoi,
with excessive tutoring fees. Secondly, learning with native speakers can mostly
secure my students’ natural reaction to English Speaking and Listening Skills on how
fast they can reflect the language in normal conversation. However, it seems that there
are still some flaws in how my students use English in their grammar, vocabulary,
reading, or writing exercises. Due to my parents’ connections and my former English
teachers’ introduction, I was assigned to tutor and help those students with their
lacking use in formal English exercises. As a person who had experienced the same
English learning procedure as my students, from learning how to reflect in English
conversation with native teachers to establishing English grammar, vocabulary,
reading, and writing skills with Vietnamese teachers, it is unquestioned that I can
understand what my students are going through with their learning process. Thirdly, as
stated before, due to their undoubtful high investment in English learning from their
parents, their demonstration in English Speaking and Listening Skills are quite
incredible, they are able to hear, and comprehend the main ideas while communicating
in normal English conversation. Some of my students were positive that their English
was better than their mother-tough, Vietnamese.

In any Language Learning process, Reading is apparently one of the most principal
skills representing a student’s range of vocabulary and grammar capability or even
their background understanding of the divergent issues written in English. Reading
can somehow state a student’s tendency in what her/his Language Level is. It is
pointed out by most of my colleagues that teaching English reading skills can be quite
complicated, which causes them confusion in identifying the right teaching methods
for their students. Truthfully, there are no “right” reading teaching methods, just the
most suitable ones for your students. Throughout my ELT Methodology course for my
Master’s Degree in English teaching, I have been able to discover a fitting reading
teaching prescription that I intend to execute during my English Tutoring in the future.
In former times, my definition of reading skills was just to skim, analyze and confirm
the main ideas, and information for the questions asked. This definition depended
excessively on the student’s vocabulary and grammar range in identifying synonyms,
and keywords in reading texts. How did I acknowledge totally this matter? I only
started teaching reading skills a couple of months ago, due to a request from some
students’ parents. It was my job to review the lessons that the children took in native
teachers’ English classes after school. As expected from such expensive classes, the
reading level required was too extended for my students to complete their reading
exercises, which made it more challenging for me to tutor them and deliberate the
most suitable reading methods for these elementary kids. To my knowledge, reading
skills consist of six main steps: decoding, fluency, vocabulary, sentence construction
and cohesion, reasoning and background knowledge, working memory and attention.
According to Dr. Andrew [Link] and his article “Six essential skills for reading
comprehension” on the website: [Link], reading comprehension can be
difficult for certain reasons, no matter the reasons, knowing the right skills involved,
what are your students’ struggles, can help you get the correct support. However, after
the ELT Methodology course, I figured the picture could be much bigger, escorted by
what students have to do before and after reading a text. The professor showed me a
table named “The Procedure of Teaching Reading Comprehension”, with three big
main steps involving teaching reading skills, which were Pre-Reading, Reading and
Post-Reading. And each of them contained a wide range of undeniable ideas on how
to execute a proper Reading Skills Lesson.

The purpose of the pre-reading step is mostly to identify the main idea of the reading
text. The step consists of four ideas including brainstorming about the topic, genre,
author (activating prior knowledge), inferring from title, poster, other visuals, making
hypotheses about possible content, style, language, etc and having a quick first look at
the text: what this text could be about. Brainstorming has always been an inevitable
part of any learning process, it contributes directly to your background knowledge,
and your understanding of any new problems occurred. Whether in reading,
brainstorming is required to activate prior knowledge. As specified by Dr. Andrew
[Link] in his article “Six essential skills for reading comprehension” on the website:
[Link], the fifth skill for reading comprehension is about reasoning and
background knowledge. Most students can relate what they have read to what they
have known. So it is crucial for them to have prior knowledge about the world when
they read. It is also imperative for students to have the ability to “read between the
line” and figure out meaning when it is not literally spelled out. So how can I assist
my students with their brainstorming? I interact with them in class through
conversations about the experiences that I have acquired in life, not just in the
language learning process, which may trigger them to be curious and think more about
how they can acquire experiences for themselves. I want to explore them as much as
possible with open-ended questions that require thinking and explanations. Then I will
give them time to brainstorm their ideas, their understanding of the problems I ask,
which can prepare them for many reading texts in the future.

The plan for the reading step also consists of four small ideas, which contain using
various ways of reading from skimming to scanning, clarifying linguistic and semantic
meaning (guessing from context); using annotations and dictionaries, making further
predictions, and clarifying meaning with others, re-reading if it is necessary. As stated
in the article “Eleven examples of while-reading activities” by Manuel Campos on the
website: [Link], he confirmed that reading was a process of looking at a
series of written symbols and getting meaning from them, which required a proper
while-reading strategy. These activities are defined as tools that can help students
focus on aspects of the text and understand it better. According to Manuel Campos,
skimming and scanning were ways of reading a text speedily in order to identify
specific information. I find this matter describable to the students just by showing
them how to look for their friends’ numbers on their phones or their favorite shows on
television. The purpose of inferring the meaning of new words in the text is to clarify
linguistic and semantic meaning using annotations and dictionaries. My students will
be required to have at least one technological device in service of their information
finding for my classes. A dictionary link, which is Oxford Leaners’ Dictionaries, will
be sent to my students during reading class. They will be asked to identify new words
and search for their meanings in the dictionary. Since the interaction between students
is necessary, I will divide them into groups, the number of students in one group will
be based on the amount of new information found in the text. My students will always
have permission to re-read the text and discuss with others if certain information is
challenging for them to understand.

The final step of post-reading, which is made up of four small ideas: reflecting on how
what has been read fits into the schemata, reflecting on what the readers have learned,
how they can use this text, how appeals to them, underlining key passages, summing
up, responding to the text in various ways, reviewing and discussing a text in the
context. At this final step after completely constructing all reading skills, figuring out
students’ perceptions about the text can be quite stimulating. On account of this
situation, certain post-reading activities are created to trigger students’ curiosity about
the reading text for further use in the future. As reported by Neil Millington in his
article “10 Fun Post-Reading Activities” on the website: [Link],
summaries, making collages, and using vocabulary can enhance the student’s abilities
to sketch main information in fresh reading activities. By dividing them into groups,
they can discuss and exchange the information that they have reached in the text. I can
also set a time limit for such a post-reading activity like reviewing as many facts as
they can, the winning team will receive a small present, whether in my case, will be
sweet snacks since my students are still elementary kids. As mentioned above, due to
the requirement of having at least one technological device for my class, my students
will have a chance to perform the “making collages” activity, in which will they have
to gather as much relevant information as possible to the given text. Those pieces of
information can be pictures, videos, poems, or music, which my students find suitable
for the lesson.
Never have I been able to participate in a more inspiring course such as ELT
Methodology by Dr. Le Van Canh, there was a significant amount of ideas that I could
single out for my personal uses. In spite of that, I still find the idea of diving the
reading skill into three separate steps: Pre-Reading, Reading, and Post-Reading
intriguing, which I can undoubtedly use for my reading classes in the future. I am so
grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the course.