“Ability to analyze various domains of language (e.g., phonological, lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic) in relation to adult learner language development and to apply these understandings to adult English language teaching”
Sample Documents
- Handout on phonetics I created for training volunteer ESL instructors
- Handout on minimal pairs for volunteer ESL instructors
- Analysis of tutee’s use of grammar and my reflective blog entry
- Phonetic analysis of tutee’s pronunciation
- Conversation Analysis of an instructor’s use of language: annotated transcript of a student-teacher conference
Reflection
The Penn State TESOL Certificate program introduced me to many linguistic concepts that I had not studied previously during my time as an English literature major. This certificate program has thus filled a gap in my education and enhanced my ability to reach adult students and also mentor novice instructors of ESL.
I applied some of these linguistic concepts when I trained fellow volunteer ESL instructors at a local English course for adult immigrants in the community. I prepared a brief manual on what I judged to be essential concepts, and on one page I simplified the various domains of language so that the volunteers could visualize and apply these rather abstract terms. I also provided a handout on minimal pairs in order to help them think about planning future pronunciation activities. At one of the training meetings that I led, upon request by a veteran teacher, I simulated a 4-minute mock lesson in basic Swedish, in order to help the volunteer teachers step into the shoes of our incoming students. After the mock lesson, which I purposely made to be inappropriately difficult, my friends reflected on how intimidating it was to be instructed in Swedish, which they had no knowledge of. As a result, they became more aware of how English language learners might feel in the classroom, and they also learned about how teachers should be highly conscious of the vocabulary level they use when talking to students.
During my time in the certificate program, I learned a lot about phonological concepts and had plenty of opportunities to reflect on them in relationship to adult learners. I was particularly captivated by the phonological concept of linking, which is the way fluent language speakers automatically connect words within an utterance. When examining the sound system of a language like English, it is important to distinguish between segmentals, which are individual speech sounds, and suprasegmental aspects, which are a features related to how entire words, phrases, and sentences sound. Linking, pausing, using word stress, and varying intonation are all suprasegmental aspects, and before I took this course I did not know the specific terminology that linguists use to describe these aspects of English that I use all the time. I have some especially strong memories from tutoring in fall 2014 regarding suprasegmental aspects of language, such as linking.
When I took Applied Linguistics 802: Focus on Language, I conducted a semester-long tutoring project, in which I created a learning profile for an international Penn State law student whom I tutored once a week for a couple of months. One pronunciation activity required by my course was using English nursery rhymes to assess the pronunciation patterns of my tutee. I presented out several of my favorite nursery rhymes to my tutee, some of them iambic, some of them trochaic, and this ended up being a very fun activity for the both of us. I wrote an in depth phonetic analysis as a blog entry afterwards, and my main takeaway was that he needed to work on linking words more smoothly, since he made many unneeded micropauses that I thought might be distracting to a listener. I noticed that in the rhyme, “Old King Cole,” it is quite difficult to link the “d” in “Old” and the “k” in “King,” mainly because “d” is a voiced alveolar consonant produced at the front of the mouth, while “k” is an unvoiced velar consonant produced at the back of the mouth.
This nursery rhyme activity overall helped me as a native speaker to structure my unconscious knowledge of English, to evaluate whether a person’s pronunciation is comprehensible, and to understand better how to help someone adjust his/her pronunciation. I even used the same activity the following year when I was tutoring a Korean graduate student, in order to help him practice linking the words smoothly as he recited the rhymes.
More recently, I applied some of my awareness when I was observing an American Oral English course at Penn State in Spring 2016, when I noticed that one graduate student in the class many times pronounced the word “prime number” as something that sounded like “brown number,” revealing the student’s difficulties with both vowel and consonant production. After this lesson, I talked privately to the instructor and recommended that she forward to the students a link to the University of Iowa’s phonetics animation program for learning the sounds of English. I shared that I learned about this resource in my TESOL courses, and as she had heard of it before, she decided to create an entire journal activity in which students used this phonetic animation program to target phonemes that she had identified as difficult for them individually, based on class performance. I would do the same if I were teaching this kind of course in the future.
