Reflective Journal #2

Both Whole Language and Multiple Intelligence Theory have an interesting contribution to our Methods 'palette'. They resemble more the later 'communicative' methods that we haven't yet discussed. Still, what make them different from the 'Alternative methods'?

More importantly, what are the unique challenges to implementing either Whole Language or Multiple Intelligence Theory?

Due on Aug. 6th. at 5pm

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Sara Newton
These methods differ from the alternative methods because the alternative methods stress certain important dimensions of the teacher-learning process. Alternative methods offer particular insights into the way learning should be taught. As with the communicative approaches the focus is on language for communication, trying to make the environment for learning language as authentic as possible. WL and MI seem to resemble this second type of learning there is not such a strong focus on one type of language learning as there is with the alternative methods. With the alternative methods they focus on one particular aspect of language learning and that is their main focus. WL and MI feel as if the focus is on keeping language together and not breaking it up, but focusing on communicating and keeping it as authentic as possible.

One of the difficulties in implementing MI is that in traditional schools the focus is only on linguistic and logical intelligence. It is harder to bring in different types of intelligences if a teacher has to follow a strict curriculum. Another obstacle is the fact that the theory does not have any set goals it does not tell you exactly how to implement this method but more of what you have to do “Awaken the intelligence […] Amplify the intelligence […] teach with/for the intelligence.” These types of outlines are hard because they can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Which makes it hard to know if you are performing the method correctly or if the students are really benefiting from what you are doing or if you need to be doing more to “awaken their intelligence”, which brings the other question how do you know when these points have been completed? This is an ambiguous method which leaves lots of room for interpretation which can be beneficial but also frustrating for a teacher trying to implement something they are unsure about.

javierramirezjr
WL and MI most definitely resemble to spirit of communicative language teaching in that they want to keep language use in the classroom as authentic and natural as possible. The fact that their theory is based on learning the second language naturally, as you did your first helps lower risk and pressures of learning a language. It makes it feel more comfortable and even fun. This level of comfortability and confidence building is also present in the use of MI where each intelligence type is catered to to have individualized consideration of each student and therefore more conviction in the learning process.
These methods are seemingly very nontraditional and therefore harder for the scholarly community to take seriously and accept. This would be the reason why these methods are so much different from alternative methods and harder to implement. They have a unique approach to teaching and learning in general regardless of language. WL tries to work very inductively which is counter intuitive to the traditional deductive classroom. MI focuses on the different types of intelligence that present themselves variously in each class.
Ka-Yan Lee (Anna)
One of the key differences between the Whole Language theory and Multiple Intelligence theory and Alternative methods is the amount of options they leave open for teachers. The Whole Language theory and Multiple Intelligence theory emphasizes that learning should go beyond what is in the textbook. For instance, the design of the whole language approach may include the use student-produced text. Teachers are not stuck to preaching material from traditional, boring books. With the Multiple Intelligence theory, teachers can use multiple channels to deliver the content to students. For instance, if a teacher has a group of students with high bodily/kinesthetic intelligence, he or she may choose to teach through activities that would allow students to get up from their seats and exert their energy. If a teacher has a group of students with high musical intelligence, he or she can choose to incorporate songs in his or her lessons. The whole language theory and multiple intelligence theory allow teachers and also the learners to choose learning strategies that actually work for them. Although, I am an advocate for these two theories, I do see a difficulty some teachers may face implementing them. To go beyond the textbook requires a lot of creativity and effort. They must spend extra time to tailor each activity they will present.
Christian Niedermayer
Our two new methods WL and MI have their differences such as the main idea of WL is to treat language as one whole entity. Its approach is heavy on reading and writing naturally and using real communication. Human communication is meant to be comforting and allowing one to develop socialinguistics. Main emphasis is on producing authentic language at the appropriate time, apply sociolinguistic skills. Strong student-centered learning in deductively reasoning meaning/grammar out of the target language. As a teacher ,which plays the role of facilitator, must create the environment that allow students to talk with another easily. In the class students will learn from each other by creating activities in small groups.
MI has its approach by tailoring lessons on the 8 intelligences to learners and teachers. A strong understanding of the various types allows the teacher to construct lessons revolving around these groups. As you teach numerous activities you begin to feel out classrooms and what works for them best. It will be challenging to implement a class plan that applies to a wide audience of learners. This as a teacher is a good idea to talk with other educators with a strong intelligence in where you lack. With the many variable factors it does take a keen sense of intelligence understanding of others in implement MI.
Catherine Hsieh
Wi and MI definitely opens up more flexibility and creativity for the teachers so that inductive learning occurs, whereas the deductive approach from alternative methods may come off as too structured and rigid. Although alternative methods have strong points of memorization, drills, pronunciation practice and such, natural communication is lost. The design for WI approach keeps the learner comfortable, emphasizes on authenticity and uses real literature. This allows the students to think for themselves as well as outside of the box. The flip side to WL is making sure students are genuinely happy about learning the literature and keeping them focused on material. I would think that since the type of learning depends on phonics, the teacher should balance the amount of time learning phonics to avoid boredom from those kinesthetic and naturalistic learners.
MI encompasses a wide spectrum of human abilities allowing the teacher to tap into different activities to accommodate all the students. This method allows for flexible lesson plans and gives students opportunities to use and develop different intelligences, not just the one they are familiar with. However, this does put more work on the teacher as he or she will need implement lesson plans that cater to each intelligence. Both of these methods are unique to the education world and stray away from the traditional teaching methods but I have seen them being used successfully with Alternative methods in language classes.
Erica Ko
I agree with Catherine about the differences between communicative methods and alternative methods. About how material can be deductively or inductively taught, and how group of methods does more of one or the other.
The unique challenges to implementing MI is how there are so many different types of learners and a limited amount of time to teach the material that needs to be covered. Many students are a combination of the different types of learners, so even if just one or two more intelligences are covered in trying to teach a lesson, it can be helpful to many more students than just teaching the material deductively or through the focus of rote learning. Teachers have only a limited amount of time to teach certain material, so it can be difficult to cater to every learner. Material can be presented and reinforced in several ways by focusing on other types of intelligences, but choosing which ones to focus on can be a challenge also. With WL, I think it is a challenge to motivate students to want to read, even if the text might seem interesting or the literature is authentic. Or having students reading for comprehending can be difficult if the students are at a very beginning level and have little or no vocabulary in the target language, which could leave students defeated, overwhelmed, or less willing to read texts. WL can be very helpful to students, but the teacher needs to know when to implement and how in each classroom he or she encounters.
Tim Fung
Whole Language supports the theory that true language is based on communication. In order for a student to truly grasp language, they must use it in class. Splitting language into words or phrases, like the alternative methods, will hinder the student’s ability to use language in a communicative environment. Whole language attempts to have students create sentences by asking them to have input on a subject. WL is difficult to implement because it requires students to have a strong bases of language. WL would be near impossible in a beginner class.
Some students are higher in intelligences other than the typical logical (science) and linguistic (languages). Multiple Intelligence approaches learning by implementing different types of activities. This could be difficult to implement, as certain intelligences may not look like a traditional class. An activity that has a high kinetic aspect may just look like a game to an outsider. These are the activities that administration or parents usually complain about.
Matthew Hwang
Whole Language or Multiple Intelligence Theory is unique in a sense that it must be molded into each students' requirements. This creates problems and challenges for teachers who are in charge of multiple students. WL and MIT are designed to be specific and beneficial for specific individuals and methods, thus implementing them in a setting where numerous individuals are present would not be ideal. Also because both methods "break down" or "categorize" learning into various forms, it could present a problem in real life situations. Student using WL may not be able to communicate clearly, or the student instructed through MIT might show strength in certain areas while lacking in others.
John Capuchino
In my mind the biggest difficulty when implementing MI or WL is the time restraint. For multiple intelligence theory, I've heard the idea mentioned that having stations built around the classroom where different intelligence styles could be catered to is a good way to effectively teach MI. The problem then becomes how the teacher is supposed to facilitate each station at once. Its a wonderful idea, and I think Gardner is correct that there are more than two types of intelligence, but I don't see how it can be implemented in the classroom on the real world level.
Now Whole Language is a little bit different. I think the idea of incorporating literature in the classroom is smart and would promote a desire in students to read beyond the required the texts. The difficulty teaching Whole Language though becomes the reading and building of curriculum from large texts. I imagine this would be very time intensive.
So now what's a teacher to do? It's my understanding that in CLT you can incorporate MI and WL into the daily schedule as activities. Here, there are no fixed ideas forcing an emphasis on literature or multiple intelligences requiring multiple lesson plans. You can incorporate a little of both, which makes CLT pretty cool.
chrismcq
I thought that Whole Language and Mulitple Intelligence Theory were part of the "alternative methods" category? Anyway, I think MI is different from the other alternative methods because it is a theory about human intelligence in general, that can be applied to any field, not just ESL. But in its applications to ESL it certainly encompasses a wide variety of methods and ideas. The only overlying principle is to identify strengths and weaknesses of the students and play to the strengths, while keeping in mind that some students may learn best through physical action, music, conversation, visualization, or other methods, rather than memorization and recitation. Actually I think TPR relates to MI because it is useful for kids with high bodily/ kinesthetic intelligence. But if a class had maybe 30 students, application of MI theory might be difficult. It can still be done, though, by varying the types of activities we use. Also, if we make students aware of the theory and encourage them to try to apply it to themselves when they study independently it might make them more confident about themselves (if they struggle with traditional methods).

As for WL, I think it can only applied at advanced or intermediate levels. It seems more like a statement of fact (that language is whole and becomes artificial when broken down) than a practical method of teaching. It seems there's very little consensus about what exactly Whole Language approach is, even among academics. But yes, I agree that authentic material should be used as much as possible. For practical purposes, this could be limited to reading news/ magazine articles (or listening to the news), or reading short stories, rather than long novels or books.

Courtney Lam
I agree with Chris, I thought Whole Language and Multiple Intelligence were both under alternative methods. However, they are different form the original methods we learned about earlier because they start to become more communicative. They differ because Multiple Intelligence takes into account the student's ability to learn and their strengths and weaknesses. Whole Language allows students to be more creative and to be able to create language rather than just repeating it. They can take language as a whole - literature, and interpret what it means to them.

They are both difficult to implement because there is not a lot of agreement on Whole Language. Literature that is considered to be "great" can be subjective. However it does emphasize the writing process. Like John said it is a little reading intensive, and it may only apply to upper levels. It is really difficult to have a beginner read a passage and say what it means to them. As for Multiple Intelligence, students come from different backgrounds and excel in different intelligence areas. It is hard to come up with an activity or lesson that caters to every single intelligence to help benefit the students.

Hang Nguyen
WL and MI differed from other Alternative methods in that they emphasized on authentic language and student directed learning. This means that the classroom is catered to the needs and abilities of the students rather than a set curriculum. WL was designed so that students would learn their second language in the same way that children learned their first language; through experiencing in a natural environment. In similar ways, MI, called on the intelligences of the students and focuses those intelligences towards learning a language.
Both methods depended on the innate abilities of the student as well as the skill of the teacher to direct the class. These two methods are difficult to implement because each students have different needs and intelligences and teachers needed to create a classroom that would be customized to the needs of every student. Both methods are impractical for a classroom setting with many students. Also, the schools and institutions would need to rehire or retrain many of their teachers because the methods require the teachers to be fluent in the target language.
omjih
While WL and MI both represent a departure from the so-called alternative methods, WL and MI differ from these more traditional methods of language teaching in different ways. For WL, the main difference between this method and the alternative methods lies in language’s definition and intended purpose. Whereas alternative methods tend to view language as something that can be drilled into a person through repetition and reinforcement (almost like math), WL sees language as a medium through which humans interact and think. This more organic view of language is reflected in WL’s implementation, which emphasizes “authentic” language and thus makes it distinct from the alternative methods. For instance, WL utilizes a lot of text that normally may not be conceived of as ESL “materials” for its language source whereas ALM and TPR rely on heavily scripted language that is not necessarily authentic or natural. As for MI, its main difference with the alternative methods lies in its approach towards teaching. The alternative methods use a very strict methodology that is applied indiscriminately to all students with no regard to their strengths or weaknesses. On the other hand, at the center of MI is the principle of finding what methods work best for each individual student.
I think one major challenge in implementing WL would be that you really have to choose texts that students are ready for. On that train of thought, even the most basic WL texts would be pretty difficult to teach to beginning level students as students must at the bare minimum know a language’s structure/mechanics/basic words before they can even attempt to read or understand text. Additionally, the fact that WL encourages students to be self-directed makes starting with WL all the more challenging. As for using MI, I feel that the biggest challenge would not be using the approach to teach the class, but rather dealing with the potential responses of using such a “new” method in places where traditional education is highly entrenched. For instance, I can imagine where students—and more likely parents—may have some very critical comments for a teacher who uses physical games in a language class to cater to kinesthetic intelligences. In such a case, the teacher’s role would have to go beyond just teaching and defending his/her own method.
Mika
I think that we have to consider the practical implementation of both WL or MI in classrooms. Certainly, there is a move towards more authentically produced language and a higher level of communicative competence. Definitely, WL may be a more integrative approach, and emphasizes on reading and using the teacher as more of a facilitator, whereas MI relies on different, tailored activities to different students. However, this is a large strain on the teacher. I think that subconsciously, MI is used in classrooms, even with a WL methodology. Using MI does not necessarily have to be a very visible choice. There can be a multitude of varied activities that the teacher may implement in a class (in an ideal situation, of course) that may ascribe to the different theories of MI and integrate different intelligences.
Brandon
Both WL and MI are innovative methods of teaching a foreign language to the students. They emphasize on the practicality and the authenticity of the language learning process than other methods that were introduced before. The WL method is based on the idea of teaching a second language to a student as if the children were learning a new language. Instead of looking at each grammatical structures and phoenix, it looks at the language as a whole. The MI method is more based on personalizing the language learning process to best fit their unique personality. However, I believe that both of these methods would need to come to play in the classrooms to give the students broader perspective. Even though practicing communicative learning style can be more beneficial to the students, I believe that there areas where boring grammar structure and GTM would need to be provided to the students as well. If the teacher wanted to only use these methods in the classroom, perhaps there would be cases where too much time would be consumed for the materials that they are learning.
SandyARose
I definitely agree with @Javier - what you’re saying when you compare WL and MI to CLT is exactly what I was thinking. They really are all geared toward authentic language as well as giving students stepping stones to get comfortable working in the language. One thing that I thought would be appropriate to add when talking about the difficulty in implementation is that, at times, both WL and MI could become impractical while most alternative methods retain their practicality even when there are different types of learners. When dealing with a classroom of students with a number of differing intelligences, it would be difficult to implement MI at times, as you would be giving focus to separate groups of students. (@John, you did a good job explaining that with the example of the elementary school classroom… separating out stations works with very young students, but what about middle/high school/adult learners??) WL could have a similar issue in that you leave behind students who need to be able to use phonics to sound out their words. I know that my sister learned to read by memorizing whole words and sentence structures because she has dyslexia, but I learned to read through phonics and was able to apply that method more easily to new sentences and books. I see the difference here with my example, and I can definitely note the merits of whole language, but sometimes I think breaking things down into more manageable pieces can really work in our favor.
Momo
As my other classmates stated, WL and MI are unique challenge to the mainstream methods in 1970s to 1980s. WL concetrated on"real communication" to read and write more naturally. It has a similar approach as TPR, as adult leans the language as if they were learing a first language, but built on interational learning in social perspectives and in personalized, self-directed approach. It is very similar to CLT as it based on authentic communication, use a real, meaninful situation and learning, and teacher and students are both responsible for classroom communication.
MI is more like applied to the classroom naturally as Mika stated, it can be used as a background materials and environment in the classroom.
without necessarily be seen. To know the strength and variety of intelligences of both students and teacher her/himself helps to build more effective way of the classroom teaching.
Challenges to implement either WL and MI are both might be difficult because it is a broad idea and have so many way to implement. More over, application of each method ( approach or theory ), such as real communication and authenticity could be used more outside of the classroom. As teachers will be facilitator of the classroom, teacher needs to create those environment. Also as both of them aims for more personalized, self-motivated learning, teacher needs to be patient for the students to catch up with the ideas.
harrymin
WL and MI resemble to communicative methods rather than alternative methods. As humanistic psychology has evolved from behavior and cognitive psychology, communicative method has evolved from alternative methods. I think it is hard to separate the linguistics and psychology, because the linguists develop the methods with the help of psychological points of view. With the help of Roger's humanistic psychology, communicative methods develop into interpersonal nature of learning such as WL and MI.

WL is focused on making meaning in reading and espressing meaning in writing. With WL focusing in the meaning aspect of different types of lessons, teacher will be very busy to assess each student's progress. Furthermore, students' level has to be about equal to be able to participate the meaning discussion. Gardner's MI is more interesting and difficult to implement, because of the high cost of setting up 8 different skills lab and the high cost of faculty recruiting. It is very hard to assess each student' s strength and weak points for 8 different skills, and build a lesson plan to enhance his or her weak points to certain proficiency. The student to faculty ratio has to be very low to handle the needs of each student.

Luke Brunda
Whole Language and Multiple Intelligence theory allow instructors to tailor instruction to be more open ended and student-centric. Although it can be difficult to coordinate and cater to the preferences of individual students, Multiple Intelligence provides a framework to adapt activities and instruction to better benefit the different learning styles that students may have. Whole Language allows teachers to capitalize on the interests of the students and hopefully provide stronger motivation to students - although it can be difficult to establish a complete curricula that extensively utilizes WL.

More traditional methods may seem to match real-life scenarios. Vocabulary lists with phrases like "Where is the bus station?" and other transportation lists can be useful - but all too often, students are well equipped with skills that do not suit what they actually want to communicate. Using a recent news story as a lesson is an excellent example of using WL in order to tailor learning to student interests.

Still, this might not always be the best idea. A vocabulary and skill set entirely focused on pop culture may be very interesting to students, but not very practical or useful. Similarly, it is very time consuming and difficult to accurately apply whole language and multiple intelligence theory to the classroom. A teacher may incorrectly guess what strengths a student may have, stunting their learning experience - all because of misinterpreted MI theory.

Ultimately, I think that MI and WL provide useful theories and practices in the classroom, but should not be exclusively relied upon - and in some institutions that "teach from the book," applying these methods could be even more difficult.

jeffteachgood
Sorry this is late.

I think the most difficult part of implementing Whole Language or Multiple Intelligences is presenting it as language learning to groups of students. Many students expect the structure of grammar to be representative of learning a language.

MI is especially difficult because there can be too much focus on implementing MI versus language learning. Teaching the language is the ultimate goal and MI helps to reach that goal, but there is a high risk of going out of your way to integrate MI. MI also has issues with there being several intelligences to work on. Trying to work on too many in a single activity can defeat the purpose of MI by not really working on the intelligences. There are also two differing approaches: working on strong intelligences, or weak intelligences. Some believe that students should learn with strong intelligences and maximize their learning. On the other hand, working on weak intelligences increasing students' ability to learn with that intelligence.

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