Chapter 1 - Choose a point Casanave makes about beliefs and realities and explain how it resonates with you.

Casanave argues that the best place to start in becoming a language teacher who is well-informed of the issues of L2 learning and self-aware of their teaching strategy and its improvement is through a graduate-level education. While I agree, it’s been interesting to begin teaching ESL with the instruction given through a Linguistics with a TESL focus degree, as linguistics is the focus. The only major TESL classes in the program are Methods of TESL and a TESL Practicum.

Many of the major assignments in Methods of TESL were writing journals. The first was a short paper about our writing background-- how we learned to write, what some of our earliest language-learning memories were, how our attitude toward writing changed as we aged, how we were taught a second language, how well our second language-learning worked for us, and so forth. Initially I thought this was a strange assignment, as I thought we’d be focusing more on how a classroom is run, but I quickly saw the benefits of this. I honestly had never thought about how I could use my positive and negative experiences from language learning-- in my second and first language-- and apply that to teaching English, likely because I was never in an ESL context but always in a foreign language context. I am glad my professor included a literacy autobiography as part of our content for the semester because it has made me a more thoughtful and flexible teacher.

Both classes had us looking into TESL research, practices, and reasoning, and I believe the courses did the best they could given the time allotted. However, I feel that my background in this area is not very well-rounded. I found that my first semester of teaching was more about staying afloat than about implementing thoughtful strategies. I’m glad for continuing classes which point me to the literature of SLA, and I’m confident it will have major effects on my teaching.