This week, I used two resources to develop my fifth and sixth lesson plans. The first part of this entry discusses the resource that I chose to read and to develop my lesson plan for the vocabulary and reading class. The subject that I chose to investigate for this part of the entry is facts and opinions. The resource that I used for my fifth lesson plan is an article called "Teaching Fact and Opinion" that was published on a website called Literacy Ideas. The article was created to help literacy teachers teach students about facts and opinions. I think that this resource is just as applicable to ESL, EFL, and EAP teachers who want to teacher their students reading and critical thinking skills.

I decided to teach reading strategies this week because I was dissatisfied with how the vocabulary lesson that I taught last week went. I think I am more comfortable teaching reading strategies than vocabulary. The reading strategies textbook has scaffolding where tasks are modeled and then practiced by students. In contrast, the vocabulary textbook has a variety of activities that can be used in the classroom but it can be difficult to assess the students' output and whether they understand the vocabulary that was introduced. The resource that I chose for this topic also directly applies to the reading strategy that was selected for this week in the course syllabus. The chapter in the textbook is about distinguishing between facts and opinions. I chose this resource because it expands on the section of the textbook by defining terms and providing more information about why the subject is important for students to learn and ways that teachers can incorporate it into their teaching.

Both the resource article and the class textbook frame facts as a claim that can be proven either true or false. This way of understanding facts is different than what I was taught in school and university. For me, a fact is something that has been proven to be true and there is no such thing as a false fact. If a fact is false, it ceases to be a fact. However, the arguments and proof used to support a fact can be called into question and additional information might disprove them. If someone continues to think that it is true, despite evidence for the contrary, then it becomes an opinion or belief and additional information will not change their mind because the opinion or belief is based on emotion rather than logical reasoning.

This resource helped me to understand the (sometimes subtle) differences between facts and opinions and ways that students can identify them in written texts. As the article states, learning ways to recognize facts and opinions is helpful because authors use a mix of facts and opinions in their writing and it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. Students will be able to think critically and identify an author's bias when they practice this skill. One of the ways that they can do this is to look for signal words and phrases. Signal words for facts include confirmed, discovered, according to, and demonstrated. Signal words for opinions include claimed, viewed, argued, and suspects. The article also provides suggestions for activities that teachers can use to teach facts and opinions to their students. However, my sponsor teacher has been trying to reassure me that it is okay to teach from the textbook and that modifying activities is not always necessary. As such, I am trying to become more open to using the textbook activities in my lesson plans.

The second part of this entry discusses the resource that I chose to read and to develop my lesson plan for the cultural conversational class. The subject that I chose to investigate for this part of the entry is teaching and learning styles. The resource that I used for my sixth lesson plan is a website called "VARK: A Guide to Learning Preferences" that was created by an organization called VARK Learn Limited. The article was created to help both teachers and students to identify their teaching and learning styles and are relevant to every teaching context.

I chose this subject because it was part of the study skills included in the chapter and I thought that it would be interesting to the students. The students would be able to follow along and interact with the materials rather than passively take in spoken instruction. I also wanted to make this lesson more engaging and to go beyond creating dialogues, which I worry that the students might find a bit stale. While the textbook for this class included a teaching and learning styles quiz, I thought it was lacking in depth and that adapting it could make it much more useful for both the students and myself. This is particularly true for students who were never taught these things throughout their education and who do not yet know and understand how they learn best. One of the purposes of the chapter is to outline the similarities and differences between the structure and curriculum of education systems in different countries. As such, it is possible that some students never learnt about this topic and could serve to benefit from a lesson based on these materials.

The resource that I chose for this topic includes questionnaires targeted towards adults, young people, and a general audience. I decided to use questions from all of these contexts in my own questionnaire and to create similar questions that may be more relevant to the students' interests and personal experiences. Since I had trouble holding the students' attention during previous classes due to my lack of visual materials, I was hoping that using a PowerPoint presentation would be more engaging. I also hoped that the quiz results would help me to determine the most common learning styles among this group of students and how I could modify my teaching approach and presentation to be the most effective and interesting to the students. In addition, I thought that doing the questionnaire myself would help me notice my own bias and implicit assumption that others learn the same way as I do. As such, my teaching style is related to my learning style and what is effective for me might not be what the students need from me as their teacher.

References

Literacy Ideas. (2018, October 1). Teaching Fact and Opinion [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.literacyideas.com/teaching-fact-and-opinion

VARK Learn Limited. (2006). The VARK Questionnaire (Version 8.01). Retrieved from http://vark-learn.com/