Classroom context:

Ningbo Xiaoshi High School, number 86 ranked public school in China by their dept. of Education. Student backgrounds are native Chinese who have at least conversational English, and are preparing to attend universities in the west in which English is the language of instruction. Economic background is at least middle class, usually upper-class.

I am currently teaching Grade 11, DP1 (grade 12), and Extended Essay workshops. I am teaching IBDP1 Language B, which is a synthesis of a literature class and an ESL class. Students still need practice speaking and using a variety of sentence structures, along with the the more basic literature skill-sets of taking notes, annotating, summarizing, interpreting, analyzing, etc.

My Philosophy of Reading and Writing instruction:

I definitely consider myself a social constructionist, in that meaning is created through social contexts and is developed holistically. As a result, my philosophy is much in the same vein as whole-language learning; if the individual phonemes have no real meaning, how can we expect the students to learn them easily? Meaning is created socially, and so I emphasize to my students that English is the most important subject they will ever study in school. Command of literary and persuasive skills will have a massive impact on their daily life; whether they are negotiating a raise with their boss, applying for a grant or new position, or even trying to get a date. As a big believer in UBD(Understanding by Design), I always organize my classes around these sort of transferrable skills that I want students to learn.

 Knowing grammar by itself isn’t a skill, but using it effectively to support the author’s purpose is. As I personally hate grammar, hate talking about it, analyzing it, touching it in any academic context, I’ve always had a predilection to simply give students as many authentic texts as possible and hope they pick up grammar through osmosis. What I find important to mention is that there isn’t a single skill that requires a specific academic understanding of grammar in order to be successful. There are plenty of skills that tangentially require this, especially in terms of essay writing or where students are supposed to be writing a specific text type and develop a specific style, but during teaching these skills, grammar can be learned and improved upon without individual lessons focusing on them, instead, students can easily get a feel for the tone and style of texts through reading and they can be given feedback on how to improve grammar through a comparative analysis of high and low quality texts.

The IB curriculum uses a range of instructional strategies and best practices, and the curriculum’s ATT’s (approaches to teaching) is focused on holistic, conceptual learning based on student inquiry, developed through local and global contexts.(Also differentiated to meet student needs and informed by formative/summative assessments) The key enabler of this is digital technology, where the teacher acts as a facilitator of student driven learning enhanced through an integrated use of digital technology (internet research, modelling, etc.) The IB uses ATL’s (approaches to learning) focusing on strategies to improve the 5 learning skills. (thinking, communication, social, self-management, and research). I implement various strategies/models such as the “7 critical reading strategies” or “6 thinking hats” to promote the development of said skills.

As a language B teacher, the internationally required summative exams are written and oral exams. Students will be expected to show command of a few key skills assessed by the following three criteria- fluency/communication, vocabulary, and structure. In this context, balanced literacy means exposure to a broad variety of texts, utilizing basic skills such as annotating, active listening, identification, and interpretation.  Texts include articles, podcasts, youtube and TED videos, short stories, and novels among others. There are several detailed strategies students are taught at the beginning of the course, and the teacher needs to continuously check student work over the semester to make sure these strategies are used appropriately/effectively. For example, for annotating, students are explained what 4 things to annotate for, along with the appropriate symbol for each. (1. Things that provoked a strong emotional reaction. 2. Anything related to central themes/motifs. 3. Supporting evidence 4. Words you don’t know.) Summarizing, note-taking, active listening, reading quickly/efficiently, these all have specific strategies associated with them that help make students more literate. They need to be utilized on a constant basis through the text types mentioned. These should be used in various parts of the lesson as well, from the engagement phase to the reflection phase.

Writing strategies focus on production of individual text types, so there is a larger element of teacher involvement than in reading. My grade 11 and 12 students have most of the basic proficiencies, but the unique difficulties for students writing in a secondary language require additional responses beyond the typical writing strategies which follow variations of a simple linear process- brainstorming-outlining-drafting-editing-submission. There are a number of best practices that support this process, from peer reviews of drafts, to modeling high and low level examples, to consistent formative assessment by the teacher as students work in the various stages. Language B also requires some less natural instruction in the form of grammar lessons aimed at fixing common errors, usually seen in the tenses, subject verb agreement, syntax, and vocabulary areas. Student production is key to making such lessons effective- there must be immediate purposeful use of what the students have learned through the creation of texts linked to a local context.

For resources for my professional development, I am currently working on “Metaphors we live by” by George Lakoff. This is a part of my ongoing efforts to develop my command of English as the book is a very perceptive analysis of how and why we use various metaphors on a daily basis which bias how we view the world. I similarly read a number of cognitive sciences books (The Influential Mind, Factfulness) that analyze how our brains work, helping us to understand people’s motivations, what triggers them, etc. This is enormously important considering that a large number of literature text types are persuasive or argumentative in nature. Beyond this, my school has access to JSTOR, which is incredibly useful in finding research texts. As an IB teacher, I also have access to IBO.org portal and their resource center, some of which I referred to in research for this task.

"DP Resources". Resources.Ibo.Org, 2018, https://resources.ibo.org/?c=71350a0c. Accessed 9 Sept 2018.