26
CHAPTER FOUR: REFLECTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
4.1 Reflections
The design of this project has been a life-changing experience for me which
opened up my eyes to the actual side of my profession as an English teacher and
curriculum designer. Not only that, but it also shaped me as a teacher as well as my
standards and goals when teaching an English course in various ways. Given the
opportunity to teach young Chinese learners English as a foreign in a virtual
classroom along with my mentor’s positive feedback on my teaching techniques and
style gave me the confidence to add value to the course to enhance these learners’
language learning experience.
In the first half of the course, my main concern was to bring more entertaining
activities and exercises to make their learning experience fun and memorable, and
also focus on their writing skill which most online schools in China avoid or lack due
to the massive difference between English and Chinese when it comes to the
elements that represent a specific sound. Therefore, I developed new goals and SLOs
for my online course which undoubtedly emphasize writing as well as other
communication skills not taking into consideration the importance and difficulty of
the process of developing the needs assessment plan. However, as I started thinking
and analyzing what should and should not be focused on in such an online course in
terms of interactive communication, observation and monitoring, presentations,
review tests, and picture journals, I decided to grant myself some more time to
deliver more materials and conduct different activities and exercises to see how each
student responds to them. By doing so with mixed level students, I realized that I was
struggling to deliver some classes due to difficulties learners face when receiving and
producing English as a foreign language not because of their weak knowledge of