All posts by Wenxi Zhang

Create an environment that helps

December 9, 2015Creating Classroom CommunityWenxi Zhang

“Their (Young adolescents) social and emotional actions can range from childlike behaviors to adult perceptions… Young adolescents are making transition from the dependence to the childhood to the dependence to the adulthood. They are moving from the safety and security of their families to the insecurity of finding a place in the adult world.” — Brown & Knowles (2007).

Response: Sometimes we adults may think adolescents are consistently changing, nothing could satisfy them. I think it may because they are going through the transition from the childhood to adulthood and trying hard to look for a place for themselves and fit in our world. School is a place to help them to successfully go though this transition. Our personal characteristics as a teacher and professional knowledge are important components to help adolescent learners to achieve success.

Gender is not the real reason

November 10, 2015Gender Socialization & Identities, Urban AdolescentsWenxi Zhang

“By the time young people reach adolescence they have had years of educational experiences influenced both by biological factors and by the ways society socialized boys and girls.” – Would Girls and Boys Tend to Answer Differently? Galley
I totally agree with this. Identity is often given by social experience and self-identity is also influenced by this factor. Adults like to dress up a baby boy in blue and dress up a baby girl in pink. While they are growing up, they receive the message that blue is a boy color and pink is a girl color. But does color really have a gender? No. It is just a social habit and everyone receives it and accepts it. It is the same token in educational setting. Because of the difference of biological development in the early age of boys and girls, people developed the social impressions such as girls are better at language learning than boys are and boys tend to behave aggressively. But we don’t have any research result showing that adult women have advanced ability in language while men do not or there are any aggressive factors in men’s body and affect their actions. Therefore, it is not fair to judge people by gender.

Learning does not only happen in school

October 27, 2015Differentiation as an Approach to Teaching Diverse Learners, Urban AdolescentsWenxi Zhang

“Delpit’s work demands recognition that simply going to school and following the explicit rules of schooling are not enough for students from marginalized communities to benefit from the rewards of educational achievement. As Carter (2008) has noted, one of the real dangers in not acknowledging how school success is culturally laden is that the entire burden for lack of achievement or school success gets placed on children’s supposed innate abilities and/or motivation” – Doucet
My reflection: Sometimes parents, especially Asian immigrant parents, mistakenly believe that getting good grades on school work is the symbol of success of a student. They care more about their children’s GPA and/or if they are following school rules than their social lives. I read a news report about Ivy League colleges admissions preferences. According to an admissions officer, most Asian students have excellent academic achievement, but they do not have outstanding extracurricular activities and achievements. An ESL teacher at elementary school suggests parents to talk more with their children and to explore the outside world with them. Increasing knowledge is helpful to children’s English development. Only when children developed their own ideas and thoughts can they increase their language proficiency. ESL teachers teach children to use English to express their thoughts, but we can not teach them to express the “idea” that they do not have in English. Most Asian parents only think that children should absorb knowledge at school. The process of learning is to draw a colorful picture from a piece of white paper. But they forget that students should firstly sketch a draft under their parents’ lead and then the teachers help them to color the picture.

YouTube: A New Platform for Foreign Language Education

October 21, 2015eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Media and Technology Critiques, Urban AdolescentsWenxi Zhang

In today’s society that is filled with a variety of media and technology, social networking is a part of poeple’s life and the network community has become a component of our everyday community. In addition, the national standards of foreign language education requires to extend learning experience from the classroom to the home and community. It is not hard to understand that the application of media and technology in foreign language education has inevitably become a trend. YouTube, as a famous video watching website, is very popular among adolescents. I think it is a good idea to properly include YouTube in foreign language class.
Watching videos gives students’ a visual and audio support in learning a language. Since adolescents enjoy spending their leisure time online watching YouTube videos, then watching YouTube videos would be a form of learning that adolescents may not cause their antipathy. Without the limitation on only one source such as watching videotapes or movies, YouTube recommends similar videos according to your previous search. This feature allows students to explore more on the same topic. As for adolescents, they are experiencing self-awareness development. They have a strong desire to show up themselves or to perform their funny novel ideas so as to catch people’s attention and to build up their self-confidence. Therefore, I think it would be great to videotape the play that is created and acted out by the adolescent language learners’ own and then to share it on YouTube. This will not only stimulate adolescent learners’ enthusiasm for learning, but also allows them do what they want and like to do.
However, YouTube also have some disadvantages in adolescent language education. Language education requires students to develop their ability in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The application of YouTube in language education can not meet the reading and writing requirement. In addition, some videos may have advertisement before they were played or in the middle of the video. We have no option to opt out the advertisements and no choice to choose the advertisements we see. Even most of the advertisements are legal and proper to show to adults, but it still contains some teen inappropriate contents and we have no control on it. So I think the best way to avoid our students to be exposed to inappropriate content is that teacher select the videos used in class instead of the students who select the videos.
Compared with other media or technology, I think YouTube is a relatively safe and proper media to be used in foreign language educational setting for adolescents. It is a free website that people used almost everyday and it is one of the most popular public media in the United States.