Chapter 5 - Learner Strategies and Learner-Focused Teaching

Learner autonomy is an interesting concept that places the student more in control of what they are learning.  For English Language Learners, this ability to own and feel a part of the learning system, which includes inclusion into the adopted culture, while maintaining pride in their own, is especially important.  As a native speaker, I can only imagine the issues I would have living in another culture AND trying to learn the language.  Where does one get self-esteem?  From their peers, and unfortunately for many non native speakers, their peers and society in general are not forgiving of foreign accents – depending on the accent of course.  Pride in the importance and difficulty of second language acquisition should be emphasized over and over by the teacher teaching ELL’s.  Most US Americans have no idea of the difficulties of learning another language while assimilating to another culture and still hanging on to one’s identity and self-esteem.  And this is where the learning strategies come in to play.
    
A teacher who is sensitive to autonomy and knows how to employ different learning strategies to ensure the overall success of students from all backgrounds, is a successful one.  I realize that this means employing certain psychological – what I call “cheerleading” methods, but I think they are especially important in the instruction of English Language Learners. 

Chapter 5 also talks about metacognitive teaching strategies.  It has been a difficult concept for me to completely understand.  The book cites that is “learning about learning,” and I understand that, but how is this different than simple cognitive learning?  I am still not clear on this. 

I see CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) as being absolutely essential in the classroom today.  With the ability to recite and hear back your own words, and the other possibilities technology has brought to the language learning field, teachers should be using this technology carefully and with guided instruction to optimize the potential benefits ELL’s can get from this.

Response #1:  On Joseph Magda's blog, he writes that the "SLA student should be taught both direct and indirect strategies to support a balanced learning program." While scaffolding supports direct strategy methods, I think it is absolutely essential that all students have layers of scaffolding beneath them.  Without this, there is not any confidence towards the subject matter.  I know this from my own experience.  The less I know about my target subject, the less confident I feel towards completing an assignment.  In my EESL670 class, I feel completely unbalanced and unable to achieve the assignments because I do not have the proper scaffolding beneath me to understand and complete the assignments.  It is frustrating.

Response #2:  David Sosa cleverly writes in his blog that he uses "graphic organizers as a means to hold a student’s thinking while they move on to another aspect of a task or new concept."  I really like this idea and will probably use it in the future.   Anything that is graphic has often been confusing to me as I am not a visual learner.  But, when computers first came out on the market, and I was forced to organize information into files and folders on computer desktops, one teacher struggled with me (I am old so learning this stuff was part of my job and not part of a school experience)and my inability to understand.  She gave m a graphic organizer much like what David is talking about by giving me diagrams of file cabinets and folders and having me write what I know about them on cleverly-designed worksheets, that enabled me to "hold" my thinking in various locations - so that I did not become overwhelmed.