Reflection+on+Yuce+College+Conference+by+Mahmut+Karaca

**REFLECTION ON DIFFERENTIATED LEARNING ** 7th Foreign Language Teachers’ Conference about ELT was held on Yüce School. I participated this conference thanks to my Teaching Language Skills teacher Isıl Günseli Kacar’ suggestion. This was my first participation to a conference about ELT and I found it very beneficial for me. I believe that every student in Education Faculty should participate this kind of conferences. I found all the sessions very beneficial for me and I learned many things from all of them but I would like to mention Annamaria Pinter’s session. Annamaria Pinter’s session was the first section in the conference and it was about differentiation in teaching skills. Mrs. Pinter tried to give us information about differentiated learning and its effects on students’ autonomy. According to her, differentiation means different levels of competence, interest needs, personalities and learning styles. Also, Mrs. Pinter suggests every student to take responsibility for their own learning and she gives importance to group activities. In group activities, the students can learn from one another and it is very helpful especially for crowded classes where teacher cannot reach every students. Teachers should give importance to differentiation but I believe that teachers cannot reach to every student and the more crowded the classes are, the harder teachers observe all the students. Thus, I think it is very difficult to apply it to crowded classes but we can use it in classes which have about 10 – 15 students. Furthermore, Mrs. Pinter talked about the importance of giving students right to choose; she said “choice is very important because one may not want to do something if teacher tells him what to do”. So, teachers should give importance to the students’ opinion. It affects students psychologically and increases motivation; if the students enjoy the activity, they want to do it again and again. I believe that I learned many things and improved myself about teaching process, styles, strategies and techniques used in English Education. I learnt how to apply some techniques of differentiation in a language class and I hope I will be able to use them in my own classes. Even if our education system does not give English teachers so many opportunities to use these styles, techniques, etc. I will try to do our best for our students in my teacher career. <
 *  Reflection on Yuce College Conference by Mahmut Karaca **


 * COMMENTS:**

__Barış ERGÜN__

Yuce College Conference was also the first conference for me in ELT branch. Before I went to this conference, I had some hesitations about the conference. I thought that it would be boring for me to listen these speakers. All of my hesitations went off when I listened the speakers. There was a nice athmosphere in the conference hall. All the speakers presented their subjects in an attractive way. As future English teachers, I believe that we learned a lot about differentiated learning and learner autonomy. Dr. Annamaria Pinter conveyed her thoughts in an interesting way. She applied some activities with the audience. She put us into her presentation while mentioning about putting learners into the learning process. Despite the crowd, she managed to hold us to do activities. By getting involved in these activities we saw that we enjoyed the presentation, thus the massage I got from the presentation of Mrs.Pinter was that we can apply some activities to arise learners' motivation and interests. We can lead them to monitor and evaluate themselves. We can offer them activities which provide each student to produce different things. In that way, we can have variety in our classrooms. In my opinion, we have enough resources and technology to apply such kind of simple activities of Mrs. Pinter in Turkey. As Mrs. Pinter's activities are just simple examples, we cannot generalize them to all learner groups. Before applying the differentiated tasks, we should consider the learners' needs, interests, age levels, motivation levels, etc. In general, I liked her presentation and I have no negative comment about it.

Alp Kaan KILINÇ

In this conference, i also learnt many things like you and i really liked the activities that we did during the conference. Speakers were experts in ELT field and they explained their topics quite well. The one i especially liked was the first one and i also wrote my reflection on it. It was Annamaria Pinter's session. She explained what differentiation means with the help of PowerPoint slides and showed us some sample activities. As you mention, she talked about students' different interests, competence, personalities and learning styles and she said that we should take these into consideration. Also, the matter of giving students the freedom of choice is of great importance. In this way, they take the responsibility for doing the activities as they decide what to do. Grouping students is also a good strategy, especially in crowded classrooms. This both helps the teacher control the classroom and the students corporate with each other. Lastly, students' motivational level should be high. To do this, as you mention, we should give them the right of choice. Materials should be attractive for them. We need to do different activities to keep the motivational level up. In short, i appreciate her and thank you for sharing her ideas with us by mentioning the important points.

Betül İLHAN

In my opinion Mahmut’s reflection is really clear, understandable and comprehensive. I have the same opinion with him on most of the points. Although it is being tried to modify, in Turkish education system, differentiation is mostly ignored, students’ interests and desires are not taken into consideration and the learning depends on memorization. I really like the idea to provide the students with learner autonomy and to apply this, optional activities in lessons, strategy training etc. could be beneficial. However, I believe that the weaknesses of group work are underestimated. It is true that students learn from each other, gain collaborative skills, learn to take responsibility etc. but there are some drawbacks like time management, dominance of some students, difficulty of evaluation of individual progress etc.