I attended the IEP Poster Presentation activity on Monday 04/23/2018. This activity aims to give the second language learners an opportunity to present their research conducted in their coursework in a different environment rather than a regular classroom. In this activity, the second language learner participants share their research and communicate with native students or another second language learners. In addition, the second language learner participants can have a richer experience to practice their communication skills in real-world settings. They can take advantage of this experience to develop their communication and academic skills.
The IEP Poster Presentation theme was about National Parks in different places in the US and around
…show more content…
As mentioned above, the presenters have different proficiency levels even though they all are in level three. Through this activity, I discussed with a presenter who had a hard time to explain his ideas. I noticed that he spoke very slowly when he tried to say a sentence with free errors. I think that focusing on form impacted his automaticity by reducing his fluency, and increasing the time to structure a sentence correctly in his cognitive process (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.67). Throughout my conversation with presenters, I noticed some presenters seemed confident even though they made errors while some ELL presenters seemed anxious, or fearful to speak up to native speakers or me as well. These effective filters or feelings influenced their willingness to communicate and reduce their interaction with the audience (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.79). Indeed, I told one of these presenters that he did a great job when he finished his presentation. Afterward, he seemed to be a bit more talkative. I thought the extrinsic motivation increased his willingness to communicate and practice his language. Talking with another presenter through this activity, I noticed the presenter had limited vocabulary that impacted his ability to communicate. I tried to support him and provide some words he needed to explain his ideas. In fact, he told me the word in Arabic, and I gave him the word equivalent to it in English. I thought he could generate his ideas with my support, which related to the zone of proximal development (ZPD). With my vocabulary support, he could achieve a higher level to communicate and explaining his ideas comparing to his communication without support (Brown &Lee, 2015, p.80). In addition, I thought vocabulary limitation prevented him to present himself as he did when he speaks Arabic. I observed