At first learning reflections may feel a little strange. However, this is one of the best strategies for helping you develop not only your language learning skills but other skills too. By making connections to your learning and thinking about what you do well and ways you can use the language, you will gain confidence in communicating with native speakers and completing languages activities, including assessment tasks. Through identifying what you find challenging, you can quickly identify what to work on and where to get support.
You can be creative.... use a digital journal or a hand written one. Draw pictures, add photos, set goals, make checklists! Use it each lesson, three times a week, once a week... make it work for you!
What do I write?
understand
What is important about what I did?
For example:
- These skills are important because...
- I can communicate more authentically with native speakers and build relationships.
- Expressing opinions is a common thing people do when communicating to learn about each other.
- Building the number of characters I can read and write helps me communicate in writing too.
- I can read price tags in shops and when online shopping.
apply
Where could I use this again?
For example:
- I can express opinions about other things like food, music, movies.
- I can use these when talking to exchange students that visit our school or when we go overseas.
- I could use past form sentences to write a blog or journal.
- I can use these characters and sentences in my assessment task.
analyse
Are there patterns in my work? In my behaviour?
For example
- I went onto Quizlet 3 times for 10 minutes this week instead of 2 times, and raced my friend for the fastest time on shopping vocab.
- I wrote a simple past form sentence each night in my learning journal which helped me remember the structure.
- My friend and I had 2 quick SMS message chats this week asking and giving our opinions about a TV show and our teacher.
evaluate
How well did I do? What could be done differently? Where can I go for help?
For example:
- I feel really proud that I now know how to read and write 74 characters. Regular repetition through Quizlet helped.
- To improve my speaking and listening skills, my friend and I could do a voice chat this week instead of an SMS chat.
- I need to ask my teacher for help breaking down my ideas into simple language so I don't use Google Translate for sentences.
extend
How can I use this knowledge in the future?
For example:
- I can use these structures at our local shop where they speak the same language or when chatting online when playing games with native speakers.
- I can easily use past form and opinions in my end-of-term assessment task about a movie review. Even though it is a different topic I can use these structures.
- I can add sentences starters like however... or in fact... and adverbs like really... or not too... to create more complex and natural sounding sentences.
Credits:
Created with images by NeONBRAND - "untitled image" • AbsolutVision - "Things to do" • bruce mars - "success" • Júnior Ferreira - "Lamp Magic" • Marvin Meyer - "untitled image" • John Gibbons - "untitled image" • Jungwoo Hong - "Upwards arrows"