MID-TERM ASSIGNMENT

NAME: Trần Thu Thảo

STUDENT’S CODE: 22045275
CLASS: QH2022D2 – Class 2
SUBJECT: ELT Methodology
INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Le Van Canh

Hanoi, March 7th, 2023

REFLECTIVE ASSIGNMENT 1
Reflect on one lesson you taught this week and write a lesson account by answering
the following questions:
1. Was the lesson successful? Why/ Why not?
2. What were the main strengths and weaknesses of the lesson?
3. What did the students get out of this lesson?
4. How were students engaged in the lesson?
5. What change will you make if you re-teach the lesson in the future?
6. What do you learn for your future from your reflection on this lesson?
Recently on Wednesday this week had I such a wonderful group of four students from
Doan Thi Diem Private Elementary School to teach. We discussed and studied
furthermore on how to pronounce a correct form of a particular English word. The
theme that I chose was about the students’ favorite food, along with ten keywords:
candy, bubble tea, chocolate, cake, coke, lollipop, mints, gummy bears, fried chicken,
and chips. I prepared word cards to go with the words that I chose to give the students
and showed their matched pictures on the projector. I read out loud all the words with
their correct pronunciation and asked the students to repeat them at least five times. I
then showed the correct form of pronouncing those words from a short American
commercial clip. I asked them to choose a particular word that they like the most out
of the ten keywords that I had prepared. To the best of my knowledge, the four of
them unquestionably picked out words representing sweet food such as coke, lollipop,
cake, and chocolate. A challenge was passed to the students, I promised to give a
certain student his/her/their favorite rewards containing the food that they had chosen
as a gift if they could pronounce all ten keywords with the correct pronunciation just
one single time. In the end, only two of the students completed the challenge and
received their rewards, the other two were very sad so they sobbed, and whined. Due
to such an unexpected situation, I had to calm them down and ease their frustration by
not giving the class homework that day. I could say that the lesson was quite
successful due to the fact that I was able to encourage the excitement for studying new
words and the eagerness to practice those new words in their journey of learning
English. Despite of this fact, there were still two weaknesses in my lesson. Firstly, I
narrowed too much of the theme and only focused on snacks while favorite food was a
diverse topic, I should have picked more words from different meals a day. Secondly,
since it was my first time lecturing elementary Vietnamese children, I did not have the
knowledge of how much they could be whining to satisfy their frustration and made
two of them sobe. I would definitely remember to give the defeated students
encouraging awards to ease the tension in the class. Besides all of that, most of the
students left the classroom with considerable smiles on their faces, some even hugged
me to show affection and enthusiasm for the next lesson. Hopefully, after another
lesson, I could have gained more experience in handling kids while teaching them.
New lessons and methods are learned every day, with different people, with certain
circumstances.
REFLECTIVE ASSIGNMENT 2

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 1. What is one most useful idea about vocabulary teaching you have learned in
today’s lesson?
2. After finishing your lesson, think back on all the activities you used to teach
and get students to practice vocabulary in the lesson. What vocabulary activity
do you find most effective/least activity to your students? Why? How do you
know it is effective? In case of the least effective work, what activity are you
thinking of using instead in the next lesson?

In today’s lesson, I find the most useful idea of teaching vocabulary to students is for
the teachers to have prerequisites for successful reflective practice, which is a
procedure occurring to three main requirements: Be whole-hearted, be open-minded,
and have responsibility. I have always known that teachers needed to have passion and
sympathy while delivering such an abstract intellect to students like vocabulary, but to
learn about the qualities they are required by heart was quite surprising. I used to teach
vocabulary to a group of elementary Korean students two years ago, the theme of the
lesson was fairy tales, with 10 main keywords: princess, king, queen, fairies, dragon,
prince, horse, sword, shield, and birthday. A week before the lesson, I sent them a
small feature from a Disney classical animated movie named “Sleeping Beauty”,
which was created in 1958 for American children, using a simple amount of familiar
English words that most elementary kids loved. I created my own English subtitles,
underlined those 10 main keywords, and asked the students to watch the clip at least
twice while finding all those words and taking notes to be certain that they did not
only watch the clip for entertainment purposes. At the lesson, I prepared small
presents for students who found all the correct words, which were only two in the
group of six students. I showed them the feature again on a bigger screen such as a
projector, they still enjoyed watching. After that, I give word cards with pictures on
them to the students for them to understand the meaning of these words better. I read
them out loud with precise pronunciation and asked each of the students to repeat
them correctly. I then collected all the word cards back and show only the pictures on
the projector while asking the students what were the meaning of them. They could
surprisingly remember all of the words and pronounce them accurately. In the next
lesson, I reflected those words on the projector with pictures to remind them again
until they could use them in their speaking lesson. The thing that I concluded to
myself after the vocabulary lesson was the privilege that my students had with
education while having technology, I could use that as an advantage for myself while
showing their favorite entertaining equipment, which would help them to study faster
with their excitement.

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REFLECTIVE ASSIGNMENT 3
Task 1. Read “Teaching Listening” by Brown and:
1. Write a text of your own on teaching listening skills using Brown’s ideas
2. Which of Brown’s ideas may work/may not work in your teaching? Give
reasons
Listening is undoubtedly one of the most important skills in the English Learning
Language process, which helps English learners communicate, and captivate new
information daily. I know from my own personal experience the tremendous amount
of time that one person is required to develop her/his listening skills. According to
Steve Brown in his book “Teaching Listening”, published by the Cambridge
University Press in 2006, we as teachers must capitalize on the interests and
knowledge that our students already had. Then our students will be guided to apply
their understanding and interests in real-life situations in order for them to become
effective listeners.
[Link] displayed four main ideas of teaching listening in his book, which
included: Activation of prior knowledge for improved listening comprehension;
Systematic presentation of listening for main ideas, listening for details, and listening
and making inferences; Stimulating integration of real-world cultural information for
students to know and share; Presentation of extensive listening tasks leading to
personalized speaking. Having been responsible for teaching English listening skills to
elementary students, I find [Link]’s book to be quite beneficial for my teaching
process. However, in my practical listening teaching process, I had re-arranged
[Link]’s listening teaching steps to my interests in teaching. My first teaching step
will be the original second step, a systematic presentation of listening for the main
ideas. Since my students are mostly elementary children, they tend to think that
listening is a natural habit without particular purposes in life, meaning they listen
because they are able to do it as a matter of course. I want to show them different
purposes of their own listening by presenting them with the second step, stimulating
the integration of real-world cultural information for students to know and share,
which was [Link]’s unedited third step. My students will be appeared to some of
their own cultural situations in real-life that they might or have encountered. There
will be a diversity of topics and their material situations in videos, records, or group
sessions for every lesson. My continuous step will be the authentic first step, the
activation of prior knowledge for improved listening comprehension, which is the
most important step in my personal experience. After having digested and analyzed
some listening materials, my students will be divided into groups, encouraged to
discuss among the group, and take notes on as much information as possible about
their understanding. These activities aim to motivate my students to think and relate to
themselves due to the constant intelligence of their age. And my final step will be the
presentation of extensive listening tasks leading to personalized speaking, which was
also [Link]’s original final step in the book. Upon learning any skills, there will be
exercises given to my students to recognize their learning process. While teaching
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listening, some listening records along with questions will be delivered to my students
after every lesson. It is a basic method for me to identify a student’s learning ability
and for him/her to practice for their listening test in the future.
All of [Link]’s ideas of teaching listening are suitable for me to use in my
listening teaching process, I have no disagreement with him. However, in my point of
view, I have added an extra step, which was “Practical Situations during After-class
Field Trips”, to my teaching procedure. The reason why I added this step was that I
thought my students would enjoy some relaxation after intensive lessons, especially
for their junior age. As a teacher, I would like them to recognize some situations and
have the opportunity to interact with them in real life. Some of my preferred field trip
destinations will be the “Walking Street” with tourists from other countries near the
Hoan Kiem Lake on the weekend and some Western restaurants with foreign owners
in Quang An Street, Hanoi.
The book “Teaching Listening” by Steve Brown has made me become more aware of
my knowledge of how to structurally teach English listening skills. I have the desire to
explore more applicable materials like this for my teaching career over the course of
time.

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Task 2. Read “Language Skills” and write a reflective essay on the differences
between your beliefs about teaching language skills and what is discussed in the text.

Languages have always been an inseparable part of mankind’s life, every culture,
religion, country, and social system. According to the Cambridge Dictionary website,
language can be a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and
grammar, used by people living in a particular country or a system of symbols and
rules for writing instructions for computers, the way that someone speaks or writes,
the kind of words and phrases used by people who do a particular type of work. Upon
stepping into the significant growth of globalization, human beings have chosen
English as the most communicative language. Due to this matter, a remarkable amount
of requests to learn English heightens every single day. Teachers have struggled to
deliver some of the best teaching methods to their students. While researching the
finest teaching materials, I was given a piece of special evidence by my instructor, Dr.
Le Van Canh, called “Language Skills”, by Amos Paran.

In “Language Skills”, [Link] implied and described the noteworthy change in

teaching four major English skills, which included: Listening, Writing, Reading, and
Speaking. He also confirmed the separation contrasts with our understanding of
language, a relationship between at least two language skills or more, current views of
literacy and oracy along with some arguments. I would like to discuss those matters
involving [Link]’s summary of the crucial change in teaching four major English
skills.

Firstly, I would like to discuss the process of teaching English speaking skills.
[Link] suggested our point of view on teaching listening skills had contributed
from aspects of conversation, teaching long turns, issues of teaching spoken grammar,
and the increasing pedagogical implementation of previous understandings of
conversation and pragmatics to a focus on naturalistic language data, an enhanced
understanding of the phenomenon of spoken language. He pointed out that with the
help of advanced technologies, we should not have had many difficulties to construct
large corpora of spoken language. In my opinion, I highly undertake his point of view
in teaching speaking skills. I do believe people have started to focus on their natural
reaction to a new language as a basic area expressing that they could understand the
language. A natural reaction to a language has become so dominant that many English
communicative classes have been operated in Hanoi, Vietnam to satisfy the need of
learning how to communicate in English naturally by senior learners. However, a
natural reaction has never been sufficient enough to truly master speaking skills. We
are still required to learn more, step-by-step until we are accurately able to perform
our second language speaking skills.

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Secondly, [Link] implicated that teaching English writing had three approaches:
product; process and gerne approaches with a complex relationship. The teaching
procedure was quite structured with models which were little in explanation.
Alongside this matter, the suitable amount of feedback on learners’ written production
was still argued between teachers. Having been a student learning English, I struggled
to understand what my teachers truly wanted with my writing production due to their
enormous amount of feedback. True to what [Link] said, I was instructed to write
my English papers in arranged models, without new inspection to the writing in the
past. Sincerely, I have been learning to professionally write in English by reading
famous American or British newspapers, research, and formal letters over the past few
years. Nowadays, my job as a teacher is to encourage students to investigate more by
themselves, other than learning some boring writing models in classes, to identify
their personal ways to execute any writing tasks they want.

Thirdly, I truly believe that reading skills are the fundamental step in the English
learning procedure. [Link] pointed out that the challenge of understanding reading
from a communicative angle was in fact picked up very quickly by reading specialists
in the 1980s. Many views of reading, reading strategies, and teaching them were
developed. He ensured that they were still valid in the present and reduced from
intensive reading to extensive reading. Teaching reading has always been a
demanding matter for me during my English classes. I used to primarily focus on
teaching my students how to skim and analyze the reading texts, which resulted in
them narrowly knowing how to find the suitable information for the questions given
without having the sentiment to explore more about the background figures of the
texts. Gratefully for my ELT Methodology class during my Master Course, I was able
to inspect more into the teaching reading matter. I have been encouraging my students
to use the literature, as [Link] said, to activate their further thinking and
understanding of the reading texts for more information that they could use in the
future.

Finally, alongside speaking skills, listening skills are considered to be a critical area in
showing learners’ natural reactions toward the language in any conversation. [Link]
insinuated that teachers were always fond of testing these skills rather than teaching
them. There were two main roles to be recognized in the process of teaching listening,
which were the role of decoding and the role of metacognition. The first one, the role
of decoding focused on the fact that, unlike written words, spoken words had many
forms, which caused the learners some difficulties in recognizing them. While the
second one, the role of metacognition assured that learners could identify suitable
methods for learning listening skills. I assume that with the right method of practicing
listening, learners can discover their own ways of understanding any form of the
spoken word. My students are able to practice their listening in actual communicative
classes with English native speakers twice a week, which enhanced their ability to
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listen and distinguish different forms of words. Some of my senior learners are
encouraged to practice listening to Hollywood movies or English news on television.
In short, Amos Paran guaranteed that there would more challenges in establishing new
teaching techniques for future researchers, material writers, and teacher trainers. I find
myself to have the responsibility for this matter as an English teacher. Gradually in
my future teaching process, I will be able to structure a satisfactory teaching method
for each of the students that I encounter in the fullness of time.