Hi everyone! I’m Jane Chien. Here I am doing a selfie with my beloved sophomore students from the department of Children’s English Education at the National Taipei University of Education. I’m a TEFL teacher trainer specializing in training pre-service teachers to teach English to young learners. Our program is set up for our students to enhance their English proficiency, and take linguistics and literature foundation courses in the first two years. Then they take core courses in TEFL methodology, second language acquisition, language testing, literacy instruction, EFL materials design, and teaching practicum, etc in their junior and senior years.
In 2019, I brought a group of students to Kagoshima, Japan for their overseas teaching internship and for hosting an English camp for junior high school students. We had a great time interacting with Japanese students. Teaching has always been my passion because watching my student teachers grow professionally and thrive to become elementary school English teachers fulfills me.
Blended Learning: Freshman English Course via Google Classroom & New York Times Learning Network
In partial fulfillment of the required tasks from taking part in an online blended learning workshop provided by English Language Specialist Vance Stevens, I’d like to share the way I conducted Freshmen English course using google classroom and New York Times “The Learning Network.” No, I did not use a textbook for my class. I had my students subscribe to NYtimes for 4 dollars a month because I wanted them to read the most current issues and write comments at the bottom of the news articles. They would read other people’s comments and they knew they were writing for real readers out there, instead of just writing for the sake of submitting assignments for me.
In the screenshot above, you can see that students were assigned to read an article a week from NYtimes and to jot down ten vocabulary items that would help them re-tell the article and share information in class. I got the idea of having students jot down vocabulary for oral sharing from the TESOL 2019 conference in Atlanta during a vocabulary learning panel discussion led by Dr. Keith Folse. He pointed out that a lot of times students have been putting too much effort memorizing less frequent words that they’ll never use in their daily conversation. That’s why I taught my students to use the Compleat Lexical Tutor website for word frequency to help them decide which words to use during re-telling. For formative assessment, I used an app called iMagic developed by my own university to help my students conduct peer evaluation of their oral sharing. I paired students up by their speaking proficiency level so that advanced learners got to listen to the sharing of advanced or intermediate learners and I spent time listening and giving support to students who needed my help.
VoiceThread for Digital Re-telling
This is a VoiceThread digital re-telling assignment my students had done in the past. I asked them to read an article on Taylor Swift and draw a concept map for retelling. Here’s a link to their work.
For more detailed information about what I teach and how I teach, here’s a google slide I created for a talk I delivered in 2019. Feel free to give me some comments on my slide. Thanks! 🙂
