Full Name: Trn Phng Thanh

ID: 16045252

PSYCHOLOGY FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

REFLECTION 2
This week we dealt with the big topic Cognitive Abilities.
Unlike last weeks the teacher gave lectures, this week we had two
presentations related to the topic. The first group discussed about
Aptitude and Working memory and my group made a presentation
of Multiple Intelligences. I found this lesson very interesting due to
the topic and because we can search for and study materials by
ourselves, which made us feel more engaging, more confident when
delivering knowledge to my classmates and easier to remember.

Firstly, in this lesson, I concern the concept of language

aptitude because I am a language teacher. It can be understood as
the potential that a person has for learning languages; and it has
four components: phonemic coding ability, grammatical sensitivities,
inductive language learning and rote learning ability. According to
Ranta (2008) A learners aptitude reflects strengths and
weaknesses of cognitive abilities which are related to other factors
such as motivation and opportunity; therefore teachers evaluate
their learners aptitude correctly in order to improve their ability.

Next, working memory is also a core phrase that I need to

remember. It refers the ability to remember and use relevant
information while in the middle of an activity; and this kind of
memory is not a unitary construct and its role varies depending on
the age of the target learners, the task and the linguistic domain. If
children have trouble with their Working Memory skills, they will
often have difficulty remembering their teachers instructions,
recalling the rules to a game, or completing other tasks that involve
actively calling up important information. Therefore, I think teachers
need to consider the amount of information that they deliver to
students so as to avoid overload working memory; and they can use
some technique to help your students such as: repetition or
visualization.

The last important thing of this lesson is my groups

presentation: MIs. About teachers, they also have their own
intelligences, but I think they must balance their interest with
students interest; and avoid overusing activities designed upon
their intelligences. About students, each student has their own
intelligences so in a large class teachers have to deal with a lot of
kind of intelligence, which is a challenge to the teachers. However I
think if the teacher can understand clearly their students
intelligences and design a variety of task, the lessons will be more
interesting and engaging. These lessons can definitely create
motivation for learning languages.

In conclusion, this topic is very useful for teachers. Before learning

languages, we need to understand our students to find out and
evaluate their aptitude, working memory and intelligence.