Looking Back on The Whole Experience

 My Reflection on Learning Theories and My Review of the Language Learning Project 

          Knowing the historical development of learning theories in class, I established a broad conceptual frameworks of language teaching and learning. I got to know how to analyze each teaching method with theories. For example, I could tell the teaching methods displayed in Chen Lily’s YouTube videos were basically based on constructivism. She filmed her daily life speaking English and her viewers could learn communicative skills from her vlogs. Additionally, I could tell that the youtuber, Skritter, taught her viewers Chinese through repetition in her flower market vlog. Her teaching method was based on behaviorism. After I gained the basic knowledge of TESOL, I thought it was quite interesting to be able to observe the learning theories behind each teaching method.

         It was actually a fabulous way for me to learn a new language through fun videos. Not until I had chance to watch the three YouTube videos in class did I realize there were a bunch of interesting videos on YouTube teaching languages. In my past language learning experience, I normally studied grammars and crammed for exams to learn a language. Although I could memorize numerous grammars and vocabularies within little amount of time, I easily lost my interest in learning with these strategies. Referring to professor’s statement that the boundaries between the three learning theories were blurry, some teaching methods were hard to be classified into one specific learning theory. The implement of teaching strategies with mixed theories seemed to have been a while. I could actually blend various teaching strategies from different theories into my language learning. To start from combining video watching and vocabulary memorizing was a great idea for me!

         As for the review of my group’s language learning project, expecting to have fun learning Spanish, I thought we could enrich different strategies into our practice. My group started from learning the pronunciation of Spanish alphabets and the only teaching strategy we were using is repeating each alphabet. In our last class, the professor shared many teaching strategies of Practice and Drill, including back chaining, substitution, transformation drills, chain drills, and the growing-text drill. I had never learned a language in these ways, thus they were quite new to me. It must be fun to put these strategies into our learning project next time.

         Apart from increasing different teaching methods, I thought it would also be fun for us to take turns being teacher teaching other group members Spanish. There were three members in our group having learned Spanish, including me. However, I didn’t volunteer to teach our group member Spain for the first time, because I almost forgot all of the Spanish I had learned before. It was sad that I could easily forget a language if I didn’t use it often. Therefore, another group member who had learned Spanish became our teacher. He was a great teacher guiding us to pronounce Spanish alphabet. In order to give him a break and to make our teaching experience fun, I was thinking to propose that we took turns to be the teacher. We could probably learn more while we prepared what to teach!