REFLECTION+PAPER+ON+ELT+CONFERENCE+HELD+IN+YUCE+COLLEGE++By+Büşra+ELMAS

The first speaker in the conference in Yüce College was Annamaria Pinter who is associate professor of ELT/Applied linguistics at the Centre for Applied Linguistics at The University of Warwick, UK. Her session title was “Differentiated learning-links with autonomy and learning strategies.” The main aim of this session was to inform the audiences about differentiated learning styles and the strategies which should be used according to learners’ autonomy in this understanding of differentiated learning. She briefly mentioned about what differentiation was in language teaching, different levels of competence, what autonomy was, autonomy cycle, and lastly how differentiation came up. She linked the last subject with selective perception. The thing I have heard for the first time during the session was to autonomy cycle. Mrs. Pinter explained this term firstly introducing what the autonomy was. To her conception, understanding what learning was, understanding about the self, resources, and evaluating the outcomes were constituting the autonomy. When it came to autonomy cycle it was kind of implementation based on choices. It began with choices because in many schools students were not allowed to make choices about the topic they would cover. She underlined that letting the students free for making choices gave them autonomy and that kept their motivation high. Pinter advocated that autonomy cycle provided better understanding of both the self and the learning process. In that point some contradictory situations could have occurred because now that every student show diversity in their personalities they could suggest many separate offer for the subject choice, and this could be a challenge for the teacher due to the fact that s/he should pick up just one topic offer for one lesson, but Mrs. Pinter enlightened that point indicating three main constituent which teachers should be aware of. One of them was, in every class environment there are always different level of competence, interests, needs, personalities, and learning styles. Another one, in differentiated class, grouping the students provided more awareness about learning. The other one, the teachers should know the strategies for learning to take some control alone and with others because this lead to autonomy. Moreover to these, it was very interesting and surprising approach for me to learn how one could cope with differentiation. There were two solutions. They were to give all the learners a different task or give all the learners the same task. To me, these are the both strongest and the most complex part of the session because in the first one how can the teacher monitor all the students having totally different activities at the same time? Moreover, how can the teacher respond these different needs? What if she cannot? I would like to ask these two questions to Mrs. Pinter owing to the fact that I found her approach unclear and challengingat that point. I also would prefer to receive more information about this strategy. After explaining these strategies she applied two activities. One of them was writing a poem freely about which I think very positive because it was very useful activity to develop students’ meta language skills. The other one was writing five key words after seeing a picture story. (A video also could be used instead of picture story.) This activity can be accepted as a lead-in which makes the students incorporate to the lesson. All these two can be applied in Turkish schools because they are established on improving the second language and everybody can learn something different from another’s answer by participating in the activity. As a consequence the students feel better and they learn from each other if the teacher applies the same tasks with different activities because if there is an accomplishment, learners want to do it again. Now that I am aware of the fact that every students has a different personality, needs and interest I will integrate these ideas in my teaching style applying to grouping techniques, and same task with different activities principle. Although this conference very formal, I found it useful for my future teaching life.
 * REFLECTION ON YUCE COLLEGE CONFERENCE BY BÜŞRA ELMAS **