Week 3

I must confess that metacognitive, cognitive and social affective strategies are all new names to me yet they are not new strategies.

Once again I'll refer to my previous non-existent training in teaching English as a Second/Foreign language. Therefore the name s of these techniques are new to me. The techniques are not because I learned them as a student of ESL on my own, nobody taught them to me and specifically pointed out their names and usefulness.

I do agree with Chamot in that we need teachers who are prepared in the field and who can effectively explain and transfer these strategies to their students.

As I read Flowerdew and Miller's Teaching of Academic Listening Comprehension and the Question of Authenticity, I could not help relate this reading to what we've discussed in teh Reasearch Method's class with Misty Sato. I focused on the position of the researcher in relation to the researched. I tried to classify the research as positivist, Interpretivist or critical.
I thought about how these researches were just looking for a way to support an already stated idea of belief.

As Flowerdew compares real lectures to EAP textbooks I thought about my own personal experiences and how I DO enjoy a lecture better because of the interpersonal quality. This brings me to my third reading on teaching BBC English Teaching Children With Video. And how useful video can be in terms of presenting a large picture to the students about culture, clothes, manner, nonverbal communication etc.
Flowerdew mentions this as a highlight of lectures in which students are given the time to process the ideas in real time. There is interaction there.

Two things caught my attention.
One is the reference to Kellerman’s comment on Raggler-Eagel that states “Eliminating the visual modality creates an unnatural condition which strains the auditory receptors to capacity”

I have done some research on the Blind and inter personal communications and I am now extremely curious about the difficulties or not that blind people might then have in learning and listening to a second language due to the fact that there is no visual modality in it for them.

The second point is that again I was reminded of the Research Methodology course when Flowerdew and Miller mentiono the different structures in which a lecture is presented . For example Thesis method, problem-solution method. It reminded me of a conversation in class and a general reaction of how the Science teachers preferred the positivist types of research because they understood them better and how the Literature people preferred the critical or interpretivist structures better. We all have to learn how to listen and understand all types of lectures and research.
This opportunity is provided for byteh lecture and not by the textbooks.
The lecture has the human empathetic aspect and immediate feedback that the EAP Textbook cannot provide.