Tuesday, October 6, 2009

The one where everything starts!

This is the first time in my whole life that I'm trying to write a diary.I have no idea how should it be, but I'm going to figure it out gradually. Honestly, at first I thought this would be an absurd task to do; 'what does it have to do with our academic career?' I thought; but after the class I found it out that it would be beneficial in a case that we can review the materials we've covered and for later investigations we can refer to them easily. Moreover we can be informed of our class-mate's experiences in dealing with materials; are they, too, disappointed at this first step by the enormous amount of assignments or not? It's not just about the materials, but also about the Professor. She is such an unpredictable teacher that one can easily predict her/his unsatisfying outcome of the class. But I should be optimistic, right? In fact that was one of the schools of linguistics that I covered. I should wait for class to observe actual responses getting from the Professor to measure and evaluate my progress. To follow structural point of view I have to segregate my feelings and emotions from the overtly observable reactions. But is it all? Is the life a linear route to walk on? What about my active and actual thoughts and understanding of the materials? That is where generative school of linguistics manifests itself. In behaviorism – the psychological correspondence of structuralism – you see what happens and then you come to conclusions. But as cognitive psychology states the mental processes should play the central role in the process of learning. This view is subdivided into two different trends:
Information processing: which deals with taking in information, process it and act upon it. The theorists in this field construct models and, separated from emotions or feeling, make comparisons with brain and other complex systems in terms of rules and patterns.
constructivism: the movement is considered the sequel of cognitive psychology thoughts and ideas with reference to learners as one of the central aspects of learning process and see tem as a whole person, with their own emotional and logical preferences and the kind of unique reality and meaning that every person bring with him/herself into the classroom. So the teachers should treat a class of 10 capacities of students as 10 separate classes with an integrated technique of teaching or methods which are specialized – in fact, personalized – for every individual, because each one is a new experience and a new world in itself. But during the session, I found out that it's an idealistic view towards learner and the learning process. But the possible solution which was given was that teacher can take account of the majority of class capacity and encourage learners to choose among the choices given by her/him. One aspect that was somehow ambiguous for me was the concept of "learning how to learn", which was demonstrated by Dr. Hassaskhak that it refers to not feed learners with solutions, but pave the way to find them on their own by means of thinking. We also came to the conclusion that whatever represented as some techniques or methods should not be applied in classes – as Widowson says – but be used as a tentative method to find the strength and weaknesses of it, and that using some haphazard methods for different classes without having the methodological basis behind it, is fulfilling the duty of teaching not enriching the art of it.

2 comments:

Nima Sadeh said...

Hi. You are doing well!Everything seems fine.should you require any info, I'll be at your service.

Nima Sadeh

Unknown said...

Don't worry. I am sure you won't regret the experience. BTW I can understand how it feels to have such an unpredictable person as a professor!! Take it easy, you'll get used to her!

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