Alec Bulin

Lewallen, Leahy

EDT 180E

26 November 2019

EDT 180: Expression Module Reflection

Although I feel that I did a good job with diction and the overall format of my podcast,
there are a few things I would do differently. For one thing, I would have included an interactive
worksheet so that students could practice the material after listening to the lesson. I would have
have extended the length of the podcast by adding a few more examples so that students would
feel more confident about knowing the material, as response times to questions regarding
grammar would of course vary over the Internet. On the other hand, while it would have
beneficial to give a more thorough explanation rather than provide multiple examples as
supplements, I do not currently have any official expertise to teach English as a foreign language.
So, even though I tried to convey the information as clearly and as plainly as possible, I lack the
knowledge on how to effectively teach complex concepts like English tenses and grammatical
aspects.

Through this project I gained a greater insight into the planning involved in teaching.
Additionally, this project gave me the opportunity to think critically about the English language,
both by utilizing plain language to offer explanations of grammar to non-native speakers and by
dissecting official and personal understandings of English tenses. If I were to do this project
again, I would do so with correct TOEFL certification so that I can accurately convey my
information to English learners.

However, I would argue that while the lesson is somewhat short, I would not make my
podcast exceed 10 minutes. This is because while the topic of the grammatical aspect in English
can be difficult to define and complex to explain, I think that learning a target language in a
target language is already a productive method of learning a language. So, it might be difficult
for intermediate learners to engage with longer texts or other materials.

I did another podcast through iMovie. In a previous reflection, I had mentioned that
iMovie is chiefly effective with making videos and other visuals. For this project in particular, I
could have used the same application to create a short, simple video to visually convey the
lesson. Many people are self-proclaimed visual learners, so this would have been more
accessible for these people. Furthermore, iMovie and other video editing applications can be
useful as a presentation tool, so the material would also be visually represented, but it would be
written out so that learners can engage with other key components to learning English such as
considering spelling, sentence structure, etc.