Arnel Francis

T he shades just wanly passed my way Of once colorful splashes of hue Skies turned silver The yellows gone You smashed the red and changed my greens too You left me paley white At this golden instance Now all I can remember Are hazy shades of YOU . . . I made this poem way back my Masteral days in 2006. We were tasked by Prof.  Concesa Lagare  to create poems using COLORS. I chose blue (being my favorite) not realizing emotion surfaced.Reading this now,I could still feel its intensity and nostalgic whip...I guess, my twist of a Limerick one gave the stance and attitude to make it as it was...enjoy!

A semester’s worth of effort has finally been realized after handling my first ever English Speech and Communication class. Sixty students proved to be a challenge as I was wondering at first how is it possible for me to “listen” to all of them. A feedbacking program proved to be working. I found this very interesting article on Feedbacking by Maria Spelleri and tried it. Accordingly, there are four choices teacher can elect for correcting errors of students on utterances they make: Rising intonation question, Recast, Explicit, Meta-language. Giving it a thought, a rising intonation question has been the trademark of a teacher 's teacher. I call it as such because they are the traditional spoon-feeders, prescriptive in their approach and sometimes intimidating. A correction like “You go to the store YESTERDAY?!” for a student making a mistake over verb tense could bring further anxiety. Recast, aggravatingly, would be more direct putting the correction as “I WENT to the store...

Foreign language learning is experiential. It ferries learners on a big bus ride where they may ‘see’ more along the way rather than what they benefit upon reaching their destination. Teachers should see it as pragmatic, valuing the content of their course- seeking and reflecting on why they need to learn the language and what they need to learn in the language. My experience for five years on different classroom settings and different cognitive levels of learners gave me the nudge to go FUNCTIONAL. I always tell my students the old adage of linguists, ‘the language you use is the language you know’..For what better way can we really assess the competence of our learners if they cannot use it outside the four corners of their ‘warm’ yet predictable classroom. I put a challenge more on developing students’ lingual ability. As I entered Graduate School (as a student in Language Teaching), my practice and beliefs were strengthened. I was no adherent of the Grammatical approach, not that ...