11/14

QUE MALA SUERTE! what bad luck! I lost my Myths book, so now I am sad!

But anyways, like I have discussed before I am focusing on strategies for my 345 research paper, however I am having a hard time narrowing it down! I am not sure how to do so, because I feel like all strategies are great for the students, although I feel like I am going to be focusing on strategies that build the students literacy and how this will effect them in their regular classes. This material, is hard to find since there is not much research on how strategies can be implemented by the students in their regular classes, however I am interested to see if there is any research that discusses the benefits of literacy strategies in general. Luckily, there is a big focus on reading skills and writing skills in my ESL clinical classroom, so I am able to get many observations to support my paper.

I need to find a focus for my observation hours, however I have already been focusing on the use of strategies in the classroom, using these notes to hopefully benefit how I teach in the future. One thing that I wish to do with my students is prepare them for mainstream classrooms but I feel that there is so much that I need to do to prepare them, and not enough time. It is unfortunate that students cannot stay in ESL throughout their entire schooling experience, because I feel that the time they spend in the classroom is not sufficient to provide them with the competence they need to survive in the academic communication that school requires, There is so much to teach about culture, about the language, and about how to become autonomous in their learning that I fear I will not be able to completely prepare them! My only hope is to provide them with useful information that they can use outside of the classroom, and I truly advocate that strategies are a great way to do so!