Practicum Reflection
Practicum Reflection
Prior to my practicum experience, my perspective on student’s learning capabilities in language is quite different from what I have observed. Before, I thought that it would be an easy task for an educator to teach English to already English speaking children. However, it all changed as I embark on a very rewarding and challenging experience of handling a class of English Language Learners (ELL). I was able to meet the entire class on the onset of my visit, the students gave me a warm welcome and everyone was seem so enthusiastic and eager to share the time with me as their teacher. They were not a difficult crowd to handle; in fact the students gave their full cooperation and participation during my turn to handle their language lesson. Not a single child is problematic in terms of behavior.
During my practicum I had the chance to implement lesson planning with SIOP because I learned that students taking ELL class should be encouraged to communicate their thoughts by means of asking simple questions pertaining to the details of the recent story they have previously read. At first, the students showed knowledge about the alphabet, but not accurately identifying individual letters because the problem is that they do not know how to sound them correctly. Not all students appear to be on the same level when it comes to sounding and identifying individual letters. They can sing the alphabet, but some of them could not identify the letters randomly. It came easy for the students to identify letters in the alphabet by showing a sample picture and how the letters was used in the name of the object in the picture. Sounding the letters individually helped the students to distinguish the difference between “B” and “V”. In order to ensure that all children will learn from the exercises, students who are at different language acquisition stage was paired with those that are doing good with the lesson. These way students were able to learn to interact with their peers and learn from each other.
During my practicum I had this profound realization that educators should possess unlimited patience particularly on those that are obviously in a lot of trouble keeping up with the lesson. Students have different learning patterns and habits. Not everyone have the same level of learning skills, some learn fast while the others are still a work in progress. However, the positive side of it is that students at the preparatory age group respond very well in different teaching technique. For instance, the SIOP lesson plan requires that the student should be able to identify letters through its corresponding sound. Using visual aids and picture sample, the students were able to tell me whether the word “vase” starts with a “V” or “B” and what will happen to the word if letter “V” replaced “B”. It was a challenging task for some of the children, but as we go on with the exercises and other activities all that pressure on them turned to a fun learning experience. This is the reason that educators should demonstrate a lot of patience because capturing the children’s attention and focus is quite difficult particularly in the preschool age group. The challenge with all educators is for them to make learning fun and exciting, which can be achieved by showing a lot of patience.
Surprises came as I learned that ELL students that are none native speakers could actually learn at the same rate as those of native English speaking students. My old assumption is that it would be a much difficult challenge for me as teacher to introduce the lesson to the non-English speaking students because the language being taught is not their native tongue. However, the learning experience proved to me that language acquisition is not innate at all; that language is like a skill that can be taught regardless of the learner is not culturally immersed in the language subject. It is a misconception that non-English speakers cannot learn English because primarily the fundamentals of Language Arts such as the knowledge of the alphabet are universal in all languages. My practicum is such as fruitful experience that taught me valuable insights.
