Looking Back on The Whole Experience

 Reflection on Constructivism and Review of  Language Learning Project

Getting to know the theory of constructivism, I think many statements came up with by constructivists are reasonable and worthwhile to apply into Second Language Acquisition. An important argument stated in constructivism is that learners are the ones who construct their own understanding. Although learners take the same class and are taught by the same teacher, every learner may comprehend what the teacher has taught differently. The argument actually implies the importance of learner’s autonomy. If more efforts are put into one’s learning, he/she probably can gain more from the learning experience.

Teachers then play an important role in cultivating student’s autonomy. Teachers don’t simply input knowledge but provide students skills to solve problem. Students may find it fun to solve a problem. They may gain a sense of achievement from problem solving as well. In the series of problem solving, students can learn how to define a problem, determine the cause of the problem, identify alternatives for a solution, and implement the solution. Students start absorbing knowledge rather than gaining knowledge. Following the skills mentioned above, teachers should also cultivate students’ autonomy in learning the second language.

Apart from the reflection on constructivism, I also reflect on how to improve my group’s English teaching activity executed in class. First of all, we prepare the teaching materials way too hard for the beginners. In my opinion, the generating of inappropriate teaching materials is owing to our awareness that our learners are students majored in English. We unconsciously forget the assumption that we are teaching the beginners in English. The existence of the awareness is actually good, because we know that we have to conduct a learner analysis first. Fortunately, we later make some adjustment to suit our learners. For example, we decide to teach our learners to share their hobbies in an easier way. Assigning a specific hobby to each learner, we can skip the steps to translate hobbies with difficult English words to our learners and focus on letting the learners familiarize the sentence structure. With practice, I realize we don’t have to be a rocket scientist to learn how to teach others languages.

As for my language learning project, I find it isn’t that difficult to pick up a language that I used to learn. I once learned Spanish when I was freshman in the university. Then, I didn’t speak or study Spanish until this language learning project. Therefore, the number of Spanish vocabularies which I recall these days surprises me. I can’t be more happier to pick up Spanish once again. However, I should also remember the fact that a rarely used language can be easily forgotten. In order to keep my Spanish level, I want to connect my life with Spanish, like listening to Spanish songs, watching Spanish dramas, and so on. It’s amazing that I encounter Spanish again through this language learning project!