Learning Reflection (14th) of Seminar in English Language Teaching Course

  For this class, teacher reviewed about Communicative Language Teaching again. The contents was the same that I learned before. She talked about the tenets and principles of CLT, 4 competences of CLT, classroom activities, strength and constrain of CLT ,Teacher's roles, Students' roles. But for today teacher added in formation about the priciples of learner-centered and teaching method: Top-Down and Bottom-Up.

 So, I will talk about the new thing for learning  as follows:

Learner-centered or student-centered learning 
  It refers to a wide variety of educational programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, or cultural backgrounds of individual students and groups of students.

The principle of learner-centered/child-centered approach

1. Learner-centered teaching engages students in the hard, messy work of learning.

2. Learner-centered teaching includes explicit skill instruction.

3. Learner-centered teaching encourages students to reflect on what they are learning and how they are learning it.

4. Learner-centered teaching motivates students by giving them some control over learning processes.

5. Learner-centered teaching encourages collaboration.

In conclusion, the learner-centered/child-centered approach is an application within the field of child development that allows the child to make their own choices and establish their own ideas towards promoting competent communication and learning.

Teaching methods: Top-Down and Bottom-Up

   Two common teaching methods are known as top-down and bottom-up, which take opposite approaches to providing students with an education.

Top-Down

A top-down teaching style focuses on providing students a large view of a subject, immersing them in the big picture without explaining the components that make up the subject. For example, in an English as a Second Language class, a top-down approach would begin by immersing students in all aspects of learning English immediately, including writing, reading and pronunciation. Students would not be taught the intricacies of vowels, nouns and pronouns first, instead they would be plunged into the totality of learning English and then gradually learn the building blocks that make up the English language.

Bottom-up

Unlike a top-down teaching approach, which takes a macro view of a subject first, a bottom-up teaching approach begins with the component parts of a subject, and gradually builds up to the whole. For example, in an ESL class, a bottom-up approach would begin with things such as phonics, letters, vowels and syllables, which are the building blocks of language. It's only after students have mastered these specific rules and systems that they move on to speaking and reading.

   The difficult for this class, I think about how to manage classroom in the Thai context as the learner-centered/child-centered approach, because Thai students familiar with the traditional teaching. So, it quite be difficult to manage my classroom in the near future like a child-centered approach.     For the solution, I think I should apply learner-centered/child-centered approach in the Thai context school.