Letter of summation

Xiao (Echo), Zhang

As Julius Erving said, Goals determine what you are going to
be. Thanks to this one- year experience in TESOL program, I walk
towards my goal of being an outstanding English teacher. The past
one year I spent in the TESOL certificate program is like a journey as
well as a dream, where I have gained an amount of knowledge, skills
and life experience. They are rewarding and fruitful for me. Although
I have learned language teaching methods and approaches in China,
I didn`t think teaching is a complex thing until I have studied TESOL
in the United States. The classes of methodologies and frameworks,
weekend workshop, student teaching and even the tutoring in this
program make me take everything seriously, and be well-designed
for each lesson. Moreover, I got used to summarize and reflect my
own performance regularly.
First and foremost, the component classes introduced basic
teaching structure and specific classroom management. Take the
idea of PPP as an example, it was introduced to me in my first
quarter here. PPP stands for Presentation, Practice and Production.
To be brief, the PPP model is made up of three part: teacher does,
teacher does along with the class and students do. This teaching
model repeated in both TESOL classes and IEP classes. It allowed
me to have a shaped idea of forming a lesson and use time in class
more

effectively.

Besides,

we

analyzed

several

classroom

management cases in component of TESOL B. I found that a good

teacher not only has professional knowledge, but also has great
ways to control the whole class, and make students focus on the
lesson. Linguistic class introduced various teaching and learning
theories. One of them is Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which

was introduced by Vygotsky. Through this concept, I learned that

there is an area between a person`s independent performance and
his assisted performance. Therefore, the teacher should help
students reach to their potential ability. In addition, all the
methodology courses I took provided us opportunities to teach minilessons. In my opinion, mini-lesson was a chance to present, as a
teacher, the techniques that I learned in class. Moreover, it brought
me a lot of excellent ideas on teaching vocabulary, listening,
reading or conversation through observing peers` work.
Second, I got benefit from the weekend workshops, through
which I learned to incorporate different interesting and fun ideas,
like games, in my teaching. Besides, it would be necessary to teach
culture of the language. For the reason that cultural references get
students to engage in the class, and help students get better known
of the language. In the cross culture class, I knew that learning other
cultures helps learners to reflect back to their own culture.
Additionally, I learned the other PPP (Product, Practice and
Perspectives) in the American culture class. This class helped me to
broaden my mind, even on a simple thing. There are plenty of
connections to one thing, and we should try to explore more. This is
helpful for not only learning ,but also teaching. Because of different
education backgrounds and growth environment, learners` strength
are many and various. Take account of these, the teacher need to
consider the idea of multiple intelligences in class.
Finally, thanks to the tutoring and student teaching, I had the
opportunity to transformed all the theories and skills I learned into
the real teaching practice. I did tutoring job for three quarters, and
started my student teaching in the last quarter. At first, I didn`t
know what a lesson plan was, but after the one-year learning, I can

create detailed and organized lesson plans. I also gain feedback and
suggestion from both my instructors and students through tutoring
and student teaching, so that I can make it better next time.
I still remembered my goals in this program, spread knowledge
to others; acquire effective teaching skills; complete my 28-unit
TESOL program and get the certificate successfully. As time went by,
what I acquired seems much more than the above three goals in the
past one year. I appreciate I had such wonderful experience in
TESOL certificate program. I hope to help more and more ESL
learners on their language learning with my confidence, passion and
skills.