Reflection+on+Yüce+College+Conference+by+Alp+Kaan+KILINÇ

I was one of those participants who attended the ELT conference in Yüce College. Thanks to this conference, i learnt great techniques and activities which are easily applicable in a language classroom environment. The conference’s main focus was on differentiated learning and the key note speakers actually made an analysis of learner profiles. This conference showed me how language teaching has evolved and developed since those days of traditional methods such as grammar translation. Speakers emphasized the differences in a classroom in general and explained us how we can approach to students and teach language despite all this variation. We ourselves did some activities with them. We stood up and sat over and over again to do these activities and even this shows how they attach importance to student autonomy.

After this general overview, i would like to talk about Dr. Annamaria Pinter’s speech. She is an Associate Professor of ELT/Applied Linguistics at the Center for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK. Her speech was about differentiated learning and student autonomy. She explained us what differentiation stands for from her perspective and showed some examples to illustrate the applications in classroom. She said that students had different learning styles, strategies, needs and interests. Therefore, as teachers, we should take into consideration these aspects. She emphasized that we should boost student autonomy and give them the right of choice to do this. Students should have this right because of their differences that i mentioned above and when they choose the activity, they take the responsibility as well so they become more eager to complete it. Also, she talked about grouping students. Grouping students is an important strategy, especially in large populated classes, because they learn from each other in this way and they enjoy as well as understanding what they are learning. They have more awareness about the learning process and the answer to “why are we learning this?” becomes easier to give in groups as students become a part of it. She also stated that motivation and improvement is inter-dependent. Therefore, we should use motivating activities and strategies.

Mrs. Pinter also showed us interesting and enjoyable activities to apply in a differentiated instruction. Firstly, she wanted us to talk to our neighbor – the person next to us- for two minutes. She didn’t tell us a topic to talk about. Instead, she gave us the right to choose what we wanted to talk. It was a different activity and it can be applied in our classrooms. Actually, this activity had some aspects of differentiated learning even though it seems a simple one. It was for student autonomy and we had the right to choose. The second activity was that she wanted us a poem after showing us a sample one. Again, we had the freedom about what to write on and we used our creativity to produce. Her last activity was related to a video. We watched a video and she wanted us to describe the video with five key words and then share them with our pairs. This activity was also meaningful and it had the characteristics of differentiated learning like the other ones too.

As for my comment on this speech and differentiated learning, i think that this is very applicable in language classrooms. Even if it seems difficult to apply in crowded classes, this problem may be handled by grouping students into smaller parts. Like in many other fields, in language learning, we should consider student differences. Each student has abilities and intelligence for learning but we need to find the right methods for every single one of them. I think, the “autonomy” and “choice” terms are of great importance because they directly aim at the target which is “learning”.


 * COMMENTS**

Comment by Esra CATE
==== To start with, my reflection was also on this session but I must state that you did a better job giving important details about the session. It is very nice of you to give such a detailed summary of the conference, especially I liked the way you explained all three activities that we did in that session, it helped me to remember them very clearly, since I had forgotten what we did as a sample activity there. I think you may be right about saying some of these methods, for instance giving everbody a chance to choose the topic they would like to talk about, could be difficult to apply in crowded classes, and I also liked your solution to this problem. You pointed out the fact that every student may be different in their preferences, personality, learning styles and strategies, and all we have to do is to deal with these differences and pick up the best method to make the language learning possible for them. ====