ĐẠI HỌC QUỐC GIA HÀ NỘI
TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ
KHOA SAU ĐẠI HỌC
BÀI TIỂU LUẬN HỌC PHẦN GIỮA KỲ
LÝ LUẬN & PHƯƠNG PHÁP DẠY HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ
Giảng viên phụ trách: [Link] Lê Văn Canh
Học viên: Trần Thu Thảo
Ngày sinh: 26/11/1998
Mã học viên: 22045275
Khóa học: QH2022
Lớp học: QH2022D2 Tiếng Anh - Lớp 2
Hà Nội – 03/2023
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Reflective Assignment 1................... Page 3
2. Reflective Assignment 2..................... Page 5
3. Reflective Assignment 3..................... Page 6
Task 1......................................... Page 6
Task 2 ........................................ Page 8
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REFLECTIVE ASSIGNMENT 1
Reflect on one lesson you taught this week and write a lesson account by an-
swering 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 stu-
dents 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 pro-
nunciation 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
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made two of them sobe. I would definitely remember to give the defeated stu-
dents 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 han-
dling 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 vocabu-
lary 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 cre-
ated in 1958 for American children, using a simple amount of familiar English
words that most elementary kids loved. I created my own English subtitles, un-
derlined 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 tech-
nology, I could use that as an advantage for myself while showing their favorite
entertaining equipment, which would help them to study faster with their excite-
ment.
REFLECTIVE ASSIGNMENT 3
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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 Learn-
ing Language process, which helps English learners communicate, and captivate
new information daily. I know from my own personal experience the tremen-
dous 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 in-
cluded: Activation of prior knowledge for improved listening comprehension;
Systematic presentation of listening for main ideas, listening for details, and lis-
tening and making inferences; Stimulating integration of real-world cultural in-
formation 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 di-
gested and analyzed some listening materials, my students will be divided into
groups, encouraged to discuss among the group, and take notes on as much in-
formation as possible about their understanding. These activities aim to moti-
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vate my students to think and relate to themselves due to the constant intelli-
gence of their age. And my final step will be the presentation of extensive lis-
tening tasks leading to personalized speaking, which was also [Link]’s orig-
inal final step in the book. Upon learning any skills, there will be exercises
given to my students to recognize their learning process. While teaching listen-
ing, some listening records along with questions will be delivered to my stu-
dents after every lesson. It is a basic method for me to identify a student’s learn-
ing 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 dur-
ing 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 in-
tensive 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.
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.
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Languages have always been an inseparable part of mankind’s life, every cul-
ture, religion, country, and social system. According to the Cambridge Dictio-
nary 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 some-
one 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 globaliza-
tion, 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 understand-
ing 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 contrib-
uted from aspects of conversation, teaching long turns, issues of teaching spo-
ken grammar, and the increasing pedagogical implementation of previous un-
derstandings 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 ba-
sic 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
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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 per-
form our second language speaking skills.
Secondly, [Link] implicated that teaching English writing had three ap-
proaches: 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 learn-
ing 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 per-
sonal ways to execute any writing tasks they want.
Thirdly, I truly believe that reading skills are the fundamental step in the Eng-
lish learning procedure. [Link] pointed out that the challenge of understand-
ing 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 read-
ing 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 Method-
ology class during my Master Course, I was able to inspect more into the teach-
ing reading matter. I have been encouraging my students to use the literature, as
[Link] said, to activate their further thinking and understanding of the read-
ing texts for more information that they could use in the future.
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Finally, alongside speaking skills, listening skills are considered to be a critical
area in showing learners’ natural reactions toward the language in any conversa-
tion. [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, un-
like 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 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 establish-
ing 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 full-
ness of time.
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