Highlight anything that you have learned through this course and discuss why this is meaningful for your learning and instruction?
6.10
I am sincerely sorry for the late post. I thought I have done posted this journal on time, but I only saved the post as a draft. And it obviously was not shown on my blog. I will try to double-check my blog posts in the next time. Sorry again, professor Kim.
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I am very glad that I get to take this course in the 2014 spring semester. Obviously, I am still in a junior year of college and this course is supposed to be open for senior students. When I tried to come up with the schedule for this semester, 'Teaching Second Language Reading' was not even in my option. However, I got a text from the department office that juniors are allowed to take the course if desired. The course perfectly fitted into my schedule and I decided to take it because I, as a future English teacher and a current English private tutor, teaching reading was the hardest of all four major language skills.
It is hard to list all of the things i learned through this course, because there are too many of them. The one that I want to highlight the most is metacognitive skills. Before I take this course, I didn't have any idea how one's metacognition could enhance second language reading experiences. But through several literature reviews on metacognition and reading, I, as a language learner, figured out why I struggle in reading English. This insight gave me some confidence that I can teach students in a way that they can avoid such struggles. Even in L1 reading, metacognition and vocabulary knowledge are highly related to reading comprehension more and more. Considering the fact that every L2 learner already has their L1 skills inherited, learners' metacogntion can be surely transferred to this L2 reading comprehension with some monitoring.
Also, I now have a clear vision about what reading skills are. Before then, I just thought simply there is easy reading and difficult reading. That is all I thought. I didn't think about why the text are easy and difficult for certain learners. The discourse on reading skills was much bigger than I thought and it seems like more researches are still ongoing. However after understanding separability and hierarchy of skills, it became more clear to me that why interactive approach is important in teaching L2 reading. I think skills should be taught with more consideration on current issues.
Last but not least, I think the best part of this course was that there are only 8 students in total. It seems like we are having a small seminar every week and I could learn a lot from the countless discussions and interactions with peers and the professor. This was one of the most unique experiences I could ever have in the college. Because I could feel it that good learning not just comes only from textbooks, but interaction. I don't think what I learned will be as good as it is now if we had a big class.
I would like to thank all my peers and of course, professor Kim for the hard work.
