Tuesday, July 31, 2012

State of English Education (1)


Question: What are some educators’ assessment of English education today?
Answer/Quote: “For me, however, one idea that resonated was the importance of ‘emotional’ or affective engagement in teaching and learning. Being ‘engaged’ with one’s learning is acknowledged as crucial if students are to be successful learners. The concept of engagement has been described as including three aspects—behavioral, cognitive, and affective…. To be fully engaged students need to experience all three of these aspects simultaneously, but for most students in schools this rarely happens. Usually we can coax or cajole our students into being behaviorally engaged, and sometimes we successfully design tasks and activities that promote good, active  cognitive engagement; in my experience, however, it is rare that we are able to get students to really engage emotionally with what we are doing in English, and their most frequent feelings associated with what we do and study in English are boredom or indifference.” P. 289.

Comment: How’s that for an honest assessment of students’ “engagement” in English studies? RayS.

Title: “Teaching English in New Zealand: An Experience of ‘Ache’ ”? Shaun Hawthorne. English Education (April 2012), 288-292.

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