I remembered the day when I felt exhausted after playing for two hours while those two little kids acted as nothing happened. The difference was clear—they received professional training yet I taught myself. Aiming to be an English teacher, at that time, I understood that it was not only a practical vocation but also an intellectual pursuit.

My exploration of the literature related to language teaching began when I watched TESOL courses on Coursera. I was impressed by the Task-based reading teaching skills that professor Paran focused on in the Mooc Teaching EFL/ESL [University Name]: A Task Based Approach. He showed us many tasks in his reading classes such as designing a book cover, designing a board game or card game, and writing a diary entry for the characters of the reading materials. Finding th long reading texts and conventional pre-, while- and post-reading (PWP) method had already bored my students, I tried to introduce the reading topic with an attractive video clip. It helped activate students’ schemata regarding their experiences in an amusement park. I designed a guessing game in the form of audio to pre-teach the blocking words of various vehicles in the passage. Also, I adopted Professor Paran’s idea of designing a book cover, after which I encouraged my students to design their advertising posters for the Halloween Carnival in Guangzhou Chimelong Paradise. As the task related learners to real life, everyone was highly engaged in writing and orally presenting the posters. This attempt inspired me of the utiliation of materials other than published textbooks for reading in second language acquisition (SLA) classrooms. I wish to change the form of presenting reading materials, such as via audio, video, and interactive games to attract learners.

I wanted to know students’ opinions on the reading materials and found that both teachers and students were overwhelmingly in favor of using literature in language teaching classrooms and the main benefits were the development of vocabulary and reading skills (Duncan and Paran, 2017). This finding motivated me to find out whether my students welcomed literature genres such as dramas. Hence, I introduced a readers’ theater in my reading class. In one lesson, where we had focused on comparative and superlative adjectives within a reading passage, I divided my students into groups of four; each was required to transform part of the story into a dialogue. The rationale for this activity was that students would be obliged to visually present target comparatives and superlatives. I was pleased to find fewer self-corrections and pauses in their roleplay. Moreover, less confident students participated actively in this exercise. Drama can enhance learner comfort levels when speaking the L2 (Galante, 2018). Furthermore, in accordance with the supposition that learners are most fluent when narrating personal stories or engaging in a conversation (Derwing, Rossiter, Munro, and Thomson, 2004), I asked students to give presentations based on changes in their appearances since birth. As per Dixon’s recommendations for lowering affective filters, I reduced participant anxiety via scaffolding, or the form of model sentences. The final performances surprised me. Most Students brought their own costumes and props into the classroom to tell their personal growth stories and demonstrated considerable progress in their oral fluency.

In this lesson, drama role-play was a post-reading activity and was welcomed by most students. This inspired me to introduce drama scripts as input materials in my future reading lessons. In addition to drama, what other genres of literature can be used as teaching materials to get students engaged in reading? In my graduate research, I shall study learners’ attitudes towards different literature genres in ESL reading and how these different genres influence learners’ reading outcomes with a quantitative methodology.

I was also Dr Ana Pellicer Sanchezresearch on incidental vocabulary acquisition from readingto modify the texts from Young learners Classic Readers Level 6 to develop students’ word learning abilities in reading. I encouraged them to study the book and write a review of their choice linked to their own life experience. I chose 50 straightforward words from the text, replac them with less common synonyms and underlining them in bold. Following the suggestion that the optimal word repetition is around eight encounters (Pellicer-Sánchez, 2016), I ensured at least eight repetitions of target words and encouraged them to use newly acquired words in their review writing. I was pleased to find that two-thirds of the target words were to be found in commonplace writing. Students were led subconsciously to take note of the frequently repeated words and bold words. This experience of modifying materials showed me the benefit of learning vocabulary in reading. I will work on this in my future study.

When I that Dr Paran, Dr Revesz, and Dr Pellicer Sanchez worked at [University Name], the program of Teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) In-Service was the only one to excite me. The combination of two Compulsory modules and three optional modules will permit me to extend my research interest in literature use in reading classrooms and vocabulary acquisition from reading. Dr Paran’s module Fundamentals of Second and Foreign Language Teaching will enable me to to construct a solid academic foundation in SLA, whilst Dr Pellicer Sanchez’s Dissertation module will enable me to choose suitable research methods. Dr Paran’s Materials Development for Language Teaching is most attractive to me as I wish to learn the criteria for critiquing existing teaching materials and experience the process of materials development. Also, I wish to learn Second Language Acquisition because I was impressed by Dr. Revesz’s innovative utilization of technology. She used eye-tracking to record learners’ attention to target grammar structure and found that textually enhanced captioning could promote grammatical Lee and Révész, 2018 and 2020). This encouraged me to use eye-tracking to study incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, observing the gradual decrease of learners’ fixation on novel target words. I wish to follow her guidance to explore the optimum proportion of textual enhancement in reading materials to draw learners’ attention to target vocabulary.

My intention on graduation is to return to the Research and Development Department of Teaching Products at New Oriental Education Training School. In the following two years, I wish to integrate literature of various genres such as drama and poetry into reading materials and produce three sets of textbooks for 9 to 12-year-old intermediate English learners. My long-term goal is to draw up a program to adapt literature of different genres as reading texts and introduce these texts to learners in various forms to keep them reading. hile improving incidental vocabulary acquisition by highlighting vocabulary via textual enhancement.

References

Duncan, S., & Paran, A. (2017). The effectiveness of literature on acquisition of language skills and intercultural understanding in the high school context. London: [University Name] Institute of Education, University College London.

Galante, A. (2018). Drama for L2 speaking and language anxiety: evidence from Brazilian EFL learners. RELC Journal, 49(3), 273-289.

Derwing, T. M., Rossiter, M. J., Munro, M. J., & Thomson, R. I. (2004). Second language fluency: Judgments on different tasks. Language learning, 54(4), 655-679.

Pellicer-Sánchez, A. (2016). Incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition from and while reading: An eye-tracking study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(1), 97-130.

Lee, M., & Revesz, A. (2018). Promoting Grammatical Development Through Textually Enhanced Captions: An Eye‐Tracking Study. The Modern Language Journal, 102(3), 557-577.

Lee, M., & Révész, A. (2020). Promoting grammatical development through captions and textual enhancement in multimodal input-based tasks. Studies in Second Language Acquisition.