According to the data from National Center for Education Statistics (2013), a diverse population of English learners (ELs) continues to grow nationally and is currently at approximately 10%. As the diversity of our student population grows, there is an increasing need to prepare our pre-service teachers to equip themselves with the knowledge of different cultural backgrounds and skills to communicate with students of different language proficiency levels.
English Learner Simulation is developed to bridge the gap between what our pre-service teachers learn in class and their practice in real classroom, using motion detector and simulation technology. The simulated class is made up of students of beginning, intermediate and advanced English language levels that are from different cultural backgrounds. The pre-service teacher could practice their lesson plan with English learner simulation and get feedback from our TESOL faculty immediately. Therefore, they can improve their lesson plan and their communication skills before bringing it to a real classroom.
Our qualitative study shows that English Learner Simulation could help to improve language teaching skills of our pre-service teacher in two ways that traditional real-class internship cannot offer: 1) pre-service teacher could get immediate guide and help from professionals while the simulated class is proceeding; 2) students could go back to the same scenario and practice different teaching/communication strategies. Other benefits include building up confidence, feeling of security and protected privacy, etc.
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