2014

Kriscia Portillo
Universidad Capitn General
Gerardo Barrios
14/06/2014
Final Essay of My Teaching
Practice

1
Self-Reflection of my Teaching Practice and Course.
To start with, I would like to say that during my teaching practice I learnt a
lot, why is that? Well because my students have showed me how to become a
much better teacher. I know that you might wonder; how is it possible that some
grown up can learn from teenagers? But to tell you the truth, they have showed
me how to be a little bit more comprehensive and how to support them much
more, as students and also as human beings. In this respect reflection is an active
and aware process that can occur anytime and anywhere. It functions to help us, or
our students, to re-capture, re-live, make sense of, think about, contextualize, and
evaluate an experience in order to make decisions and choices about what we have
experienced, how we have experienced, and what we will or wont do next.
(Boud, 2001) As this author says, teaching is a process, in which both, students and
teachers learn from each other, how can that be? Well because we as teachers do
not know everything, sometimes we learn from our students, and obviously we try
hard for our students to learn of ourselves. Reflection is one important tool for us
as teachers, because that will show us what kind of things we might be doing
wrong at some point during our teaching, and also it will show that things that we
need to improve. Nobody is perfect, so based on that, we always have to have
room to improve.
Conventional analogue language learning labs as they are or rather were
used in school as well as university tend to rely on the audio-lingual method of
language learning. One of the key principles of this method is that the language
teacher should provide students with a native-speaker-like model in the tape-
based lab. By listening to a dialogue, students are expected to be able to mimic the
model. Based upon contrastive analyses, students are drilled in pronunciation of
words that are most dissimilar between the target language and the first
language. (Eva Grstenberger, E-learning without e-content? , 2005) I also learnt
through reading this specific part of this e-book that there are so many ways to

2
learn a second language because I was always focused on teaching English as a
second language as a foreign language, how is that? Well I used to believe that
English had be taught in English, but this was a new approach that I actually learnt
by reading this portion of the e-book.
Now, I would like to make a brief talk about my teaching practice; well I did
my teaching practice at Instituto Nacional de Usulutan, (2014) during the months
of March and June (2014) I was involved in a project that the University held in
that institution, which was called Communicative Competences. I encouraged
my students to develop the ability to lose the fright that most of the times students
of a second language have in their beginning days; but I remember that the first
day I taught them, they were all quiet and I may dare to say that even some of
them were bored, and after we were done, I made a self-reflection of that particular
class, and since then I try to be much better. A had a group of 26 students
approximately, in which I knew for a fact that every one of them were going to be
different so I had to deal with the reality that I had to prepare good classes so my
students were able to learn. I know that at the beginning I tried so hard to be like
no other high school teacher is now a days in our country, I tried to establish
English as the only spoken language inside of the classroom, and that is something
I learnt from my upcoming classes. I did not only use Spanish as a complementary
language, but also I used it in order to teach English; it was kind of funny because I
did not know that people actually learned that way, but my students did learn,
and no one would ever imagine how proud I am because of that. "Good teachers
are always evaluating themselves" (Ramsden, 2002) that is actually a really good
quality to be able to recognize the mistakes that we usually do and in fact, try to
not make them again. Nobody is perfect, but unfortunately some people just deny
that fact that they are also humans, that they make mistakes, and they live in that
blind reality, but that is their problem, mine is to improve day by day, to make a

3
mistake once, not twice, that is the reason why I believe that what makes us better
is to commit mistakes.
Teaching Practice, as a course is actually a really useful tool for us in order
to become teachers. I know that it can be a little overwhelming sometimes, because
we had a lot to read, and to be honest, I was not that used to read, but in order to
keep updated with this course, I had to create an ability to read. Sometimes it just
felt so complex because we were not used to some of the technical words that some
pamphlets or books have but eventually we kind of get into them. I cannot
complain; I know some things are hard to deal with, but I know that if we try to do
them, we will. I made some mistakes during this course because I false assumed
that because I might know some English it was going to be a piece of cake, but I
was wrong, and that I learned through the process of this course. I made my own
mistakes but thank God I learned from them and hopefully I will not make them
again. What I learned during this Teaching Practice course served me a lot to
perform a much better Teaching Practice to my students. I know it is hard to be a
teacher, to be look at like someones role model; it is not easy to be seen sometimes
as a monster but it is something that we have to learn to deal with, because we
all know that not all people is going to love us, but at least, we have to worry to be
good teachers.
After all that I went through while doing my Teaching Practice, all there is
left to say is that thanks to this experience I know for sure now that this is what I
want to do, because I fell in love with teaching and that makes me so proud of
myself.




4
Systematization of My teaching Practice.

To do the systematization of my Teaching Practice, The first thing that I had
to do to begin with the systematization of my Teaching Practice was to know to
what kind of students I was going to be dealing with, then to know the dates that I
was going to be teaching them and also the time, location and the resources that I
was going to have access to once I start my teaching practice. After all of that were
clear the first thing I did was:
Planning in which I scheduled all the dates that our coordinator gave
us and also the topics that I was going to be developing during those specific dates,
I had to cover one topic per class of 100 minutes, and I was attending to the
institution 200 minutes per day, so basically I dealt with two topics in each section
that I went to.
Program is the one that I basically make to keep an order of all the
topics I will be using during my Teaching Practice. Even though it does not show
any date, just the topics name that I will be using through the development of my
class.
Syllabus this one will show all the topics that will be develop during my
Teaching Practice, including the Language Focus, Pronunciation, Reading,
Speaking, Listening and Writing. I will focus on all of these while focusing on each
individual topic that I developed.
Outline is the one that basically shows the specific activities that we are
going to be developing during our Teaching Practice; I know that we might end up

5
developing more activities during our teaching process but here, in this outline are
going to be only the ones that we give some credits for.
Artifacts: Lesson Plans; this important tool will help us to develop in a
more organized way our classes. In which I establish the different activities that I
will be developing within a class and this activity will depend on each specific
topic. Also it will contain the wrap-up activities and the timing of each one of
them.
Evaluation Sheets: these are part of the Artifacts, in which I will use
them to evaluate my students, due to some activities are going to be developed in a
written way and some other in a spoken way, I had to make the rubrics that I will
be using on each one of them.
Now, I am proud to say that this was the main difference that I had to deal
with while I did my social service, because back then, I did not quite know about
the fact that we have to elaborate a systematization of our teaching practice, and
that by this, our teaching was going to be easier and more organized. In contrast to
my teaching practice and my social hours, I did not actually enjoy doing my social
service, now, in the other hand, I loved teaching. And that is one of the main
differences between being organized, using a systematization of my teaching
practice and do things as they come to, just the way I did while performing my
teaching service.




6
How to apply E-Portfolio Approach including the new learning
environment with ELT

The issue of E-Learning and teaching in computer notebook classes has
long been dominated by discussions about E-Learning content and appropriate
platforms. Recently, however, questions about appropriate didactic scenarios have
become more relevant. The following approach is going to challenge this point of
view. It claims that together with a microphone and free audio recording software,
the notebook can be a meaningful tool in improving students oral skills. (Eva
Grstenberger, 2005) Basically what this author says is that we have to always be
aware to be using technological supplies into our classes, how? one might wonder,
Well there are a lot of ways to do so, for example, now a days almost 95% of the
students have a cellphone, of those almost 70% of them are the owners of a
Smartphone, we should take into advantage that and teach our students to use that
tool as a learning spoon.
Maybe some English teachers do not how to use technological devices in
order that those technical devices will become as an important learning tool
instead of just some nice objects that people has. Therefore we as teachers must
keep updated with the latest technology also know how to use that technology.
Social based E-Portfolios are integrated into EFL, or ESL curriculum, it
might create a learner-centered environment because posting in blogs, websites,
Facebook, wikis and making digital portfolios creates feeling of ownership and
responsibility for learners who try to collaborate as well as share ideas and learn in
a new E-Learning environment. It is argued that portfolios lead students to think
critically and become active, independent and self-regulated students. (Babaee,
2012) One of the main characteristics that a teacher now a days must have is to be
kind enough to share his/her knowledge with others, that is the main purpose of

7
the E-Portfolio, because once a person have lived a teaching experienced, now this
person can share on the web all the things he/she went through while doing it; this
experience may actually serve others that might read it and maybe comment on it,
give recommendations or maybe add things that can be improved during a
teaching process. By doing this also it creates a sensation of independence, in the
case of the students and it also has shown that students who create E-Portfolios
develop a more active environment for themselves. Because E-Portfolios is not only
for teachers use, but also students so by doing that they will develop a curriculum
online and people will see what they are working on, and they will keep it
updated.
People are always tempted to try to make an argument for technology
having an impact on the development of pedagogy and in many cases we can see
that the use of technology has enabled teachers to re-think what they are doing.
We also see people trying to populate this domain by talking about notions like the
flipped classroom, ostensibly a methodology that sees input as occurring at
home and physical classrooms being used as spaces to explore what has been
presented in the input. (Gary Motteram, 2013) As we can read this article, people
used to think that technology was actually not good to be used as a tool in teaching
because as everything else, technology has its flaws but we have to learn how to
use it properly. As we all know, if we use technology in a wise way, obviously our
students are going to be learning from it, so as teachers we have to adapt to the
different changes that teaching has been making in the latest years and if we adapt
and learn how to implement and develop our teaching style, we definitively are
going to be growing as teachers and also as human beings.

Use of Technology in a place where there is not technical devices


8
Now a days it is so hard to find a place where is not updated with the latest
technical devices, even though these places might not have the coolest
technological supplies, they have a TV at least. But imagine that I am sent to work
in a place where there is not any technological device, what will I do? Firstable I
know that in order to be able to develop a much better class, interactive and
practical, I have taken into account that I will have access to at least a computer,
but if the place where I am working on does not have a computer, I will be forced
to bring one myself. If there is not any electricity at that place, I will charge up my
computer to the fullest, and if it is necessary I will carry an extra battery to use it
after I discharged mine. Also some speakers that I would be carrying around in
case we need to listen to something on the computer. I know that is going to take
an extra work of our own but at the end it is going to be worthy. I guess that this
would be the best choice to solve the lack of technology at this place. Nevertheless
the use of Smartphones is also as good as using computers, and they are more
flexible to carry on, so that would be my second choice if I want to use technology
in my classes. In the case that internet can cause problems, maybe I can get some of
my students to bring me a modem, so we can have access to the internet and uses
the tools that we for sure know that internet has. But it has been said that we do
not always need technological devices to be good teachers, there are some other
strategies that we can use, like for example, the use of realia, pictures, drawings,
etc.






9





References
Babaee, M. (2012). The Internet Journal of Language. Recuperado el 13 de 06 de 2014, de
http://www.aaref.com.au/default.aspx?FID=11&ViewArticle=1&ID=113&Keyword=e-
portfolio
Boud, D. (2001). Sydney Edu Au. Recuperado el 13 de 06 de 2014, de
http://sydney.edu.au/education_social_work/groupwork/docs/Reflection.pdf
Eva Grstenberger, W. S. (2005). E-learning without e-content? . Recuperado el 12 de 06 de 2014,
de https://lms.at/lmsteam/download/file/e-learning-without
Eva Grstenberger, W. S. (2005). E-learning without e-content? . Recuperado el 12 de 06 de 2014,
de https://lms.at/lmsteam/download/file/e-learning-without
Gary Motteram. (2013). Innovations in learning technologies for the English language teaching.
Recuperado el 13 de 06 de 2014, de
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/C607%20Information%20and%20
Communication_WEB%20ONLY_FINAL.pdf
Ramsden. (2002). Sydney Education. Recuperado el 12 de 06 de 2014, de
http://sydney.edu.au/education_social_work/groupwork/docs/Reflection.pdf