Reflection Paper Siyuan Wu

Reflection on the group project

Introduction

In the past few weeks, Dan, Matt and I worked together on our group project—Social

approaches to SLA. The Purpose of our group project is not only allow us--- the

instructors as well as the learners to investigate SLA in social situation but also try to

help our classmates put “SLA in the head” aside and look through SLA from social

prospective. When we three were conducting our project, the questions of how to

organize our sessions, how to relate our topic to the previous groups and lead out the

next groups, and how to make our presentation as successful as the prior groups are

always our top concerns.

What I have gained from my participation?

When I first got the terms and scholars list of our group, I felt very unfamiliar with

them since I have little background knowledge about this field of research. Then I

kept asking myself how to teach others what I am not familiar with. The only answer

is reading papers and discussing with my group members. Reading can help me have

an overall understanding of the terms, and discussion can exchange our thoughts thus

to expand our knowledge. After reading and discussing, my previous understanding of

those terms has been overturned. For example, in the past I considered

Communicative Competence as simply a person’s innate ability to communicate. But

in fact, when we look through it in social context, we have to investigate its

history—how does it come from? What are the different perspectives of the scholars?
Reflection Paper Siyuan Wu

How did it developed during history? What are the related fields we need to talk about?

Are the components of communicative competence comprehensive? During the

project I found the value of group work---collaborative work could multiple the

effectiveness of the project. Also, I learnt that when looking through various scholars’

papers, I should no longer just accept their views but think critically.

The difficulties we’ve met

In this group project we have investigated in many related scholars’ papers, but I

always felt that it is very difficult to pick up the readings for our classmates. How to

find appropriate papers which could help the classmates to have an overview of the

main concepts we are going to talk about is not an easy task. For example, before the

first session, we went through many papers about communicative competence;

however, some of them are too focused on language teaching, some of them just

discuss it from a narrow perspective. We tried to find papers of the main scholars’ and

kept in mind they should not deviate from our topic---social approaches to SLA. We

exchanged our thoughts on each paper; we also asked Dr. Hall’s opinion on the papers

we have selected and she provided great help in picking up the class reading material.

Activity design is anther challenge for us. Since activity is a great aid in teaching, we

attached high importance on it. We tried to come up with appropriate activities which

are not only interesting but also incorporate the abstract conceptions. However, when

we discussed about activities, we found it is really hard to design activities which

connect to the class content. We looked for the examples of the scholars’ explanation

to the terms and make them as class activities; we also set up given scenarios for the
Reflection Paper Siyuan Wu

classmates to understand the concepts in real situation. We really appreciate Dr. Hall’s

helpful suggestions on designing activities.

As the project is a group project instead of an individual project, it emphasized more

on group work rather than individual work. We need to make compromises when we

confronted with differences—different cultures, different schedules and different

perspectives on a particular question. We sent emails and met each others during the

preparing time. We exchanged our views on our understanding of the study and

collaboratively came up with our approaches to do the research and techniques to

implement in our presentations. Thanks to Dan and Matt, they helped me a lot in the

project and I learnt a lot from them.

Self-reflection

I am very lucky to cooperate with Dan and Matt in our group project, they are great

companions who always refreshed my mind and enlightened my creativity during our

group work. As we have three people in our group, we came up with the idea that two

of us collaboratively teach one session-I am mainly taking charge on the first session

with Dan (Communicative Competence and Ethnography of Communication) and the

last session with Matt (Intercultural Communicative Competence). I have prepared a

lot for our presentations, but during the presentations, I went through the content

quickly and sometimes lack of explanation. The posture and speech speed were not

appropriate. In the future I should pay much attention to the voice speed, posture,

gesture, and interaction with the listeners. I will try to overcome my nervousness and

be more confident and interactive in the presentation.

Reflection Paper Siyuan Wu

Project reflection

I think our group effectively drew the connections and comparisons of “social

approaches to SLA” with “SLA in the head” and “instructed SLA”. And I feel that by

our presentation and class activities, we helped our classmates understand the terms

and the field of research. But we are still on our way to become good teachers and

researchers. What I gained from this group project is not only expertise on the topic,

but also methods of teaching and researching. The project contains many

tasks---reading paper, selecting reading materials, designing classroom content,

making power point, and in class presentation. All of these tasks were challenging but

beneficial for me. I think this project is just a start in my academic life. It gives me a

great opportunity to prepare to be a good curriculum designer and language teacher.