Group Reflection
The practicum at Nha Trang University (NTU) was a golden opportunity for our group to review, reflect, synthesize and apply the pedagogical knowledge and skills in English teaching that we acquired in the previous 5 academic terms. Thanks to the tips and practice sessions in the Advanced Teaching Methods course, we were able to decide on the most appropriate teaching approaches for the target students. We also took into account the theories about learning styles, motivation and age factors from the Second Language Acquisition course to develop our lesson plan. Since the students at NTU were non-majors, we mostly adopted the grammar-translation method because it directly addresses the primary need of these students which is acquiring new vocabulary and grammatical structures. Besides, when we listened to the sharing of the lecturer at NTU about the students’ frustration and low motivation, we also revised the lesson plan to adopt the Desuggestopedia method to create an inspiring learning environment. In order to achieve this purpose, we also applied the knowledge from the Syllabus Design and Material Development course to personalize the contents in the textbook to make them more relevant to the students and to include authentic materials to make the lessons more practical. We also utilized games to entertain the students, and instead of traditional classroom games, we deployed online platforms which were introduced in the Technology Assisted Language Learning to deliver our games. The combination of the knowledge from all these courses indeed enabled us to give an decent learning experience for the students.