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Critical Moment in the early days of my MA TESOL experiences

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Critical Moment in the early days of my MA TESOL experiences

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I was very impressed and inspired by what Richard said in one of our the academic advisor meetings when I felt anxious and uncertain about my academic study: "Worry is the early grave". And this keeps reminding me to take actions and believe in myself. Thanks!

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On my first day, when I coming to the first meeting during the welcome days online, I was so nervous for everything. At first, I was worried that I didn't know how to communicate with foreign teachers and how to talk with students from different countries. I'm not sure if there are great cultural differences. I feel uneasy about the unknown study in the next year. But when I saw Zeynep's super sweet smile, I felt everything relaxed.

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When I coming to the first lesson on the welcome week with MA TESOL programme team, I was attracted to the guessing game. The game is to guess which collogue corresponds to the self-introduction segment added on the padlet. This game is an excellent way to increase our understanding of each other.

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At the beginning of my first term, I was overwhelmed by the refresh new information on my programme, making me extremely stressful. I doubted whether I could handle the situation and adapt myself to the new environment. The previous experience about dealing with difficulty instructed me to be positive and attempt to do things step by step. As the days went by, I started getting familiar with my situation and learning context. Though I am still struggle with some tasks,yet I know clearly that I can find a way to work it out.

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For me,  it relates to my social life. :)  I first joined the online classes and as much as I enjoyed them, I was dying to meet my classmates. On the first day of my face to face class, I found everyone friendly. After the class one of my classmates invited to go to an Henna event, I went with her and that's the beginning of our friendship. :)

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For me,  it relates to my social life. :)  I first joined the online classes and as much as I enjoyed them, I was dying to meet my classmates. On the first day of my face to face class, I found everyone friendly. After the class one of my classmates invited to go to an Henna event, I went with her and that's the beginning of our friendship. :)

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I am surprised that simple as it is, the machenism of reflection can be so helpful for doing the MA TESOL programme.

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I am surprised that simple as it is, the machenism of reflection can be so helpful for doing the MA TESOL programme.

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I like the design of LA where we can complete the assignment and reflect our potencial assignment topics week by week. I also feel that coursea which only have a final assignment is less supportive than the ones (i.e., BA, Psy) with a middle assignment.

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My critical moment was receiving a lot of encouragement and guiding when writing my assignment. It was then that I noticed that the key point of testing was for learners to learn things ,explore things and become more confident and competent

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My critical moment in Psychology of Language learning.

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My critical moment in Psychology of Language learning.

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I think it is very interesting to combine the behaviour or activities in language learning with the knowledge of psychology especially in sociocultural knowledge. This process impressed me most in last semeter. To find puzzle from my previous teaching experience, then try to find explanation from lots of articles and think critically.

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Because I transferred to MA TESOL three days after week 1, I felt overwhelmed for the first class. The professor was talking about the terminologies from the previous post-activity which I had no idea. I felt anxious and doubted myself if transforming the major was a good idea for me. The first few days were a nightmare for me because I felt my classmates were so experienced in teaching and so much more fluent in academic English than me. I tried to be a good student to read the assigned journals however I found I could not remember any after finishing reading. I spent more time studying compared with my bachelor's studying.

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My first suprise was the steady pace of studies. In my country, people who studied in western countries are used to saying that studies in European universities are not difficult compared to studies in my country. I have realized from the first week that this is not the case in my context.
The second surprise is that Manchester is described on the web as one of the less expensive city in the UK. It looks to me that everything is expensive here.

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During the first days after I arrived here but before the welcome week, I was exploring school websites and anxious about many things, like how to enroll option courses, where the timetable was. So I sent an email to Daine but didn't get a reply, because the next day we met all TESOL tutors and almost all my questions were answered there. I found tutors all very nice and friendly, which made me relax and built my confidence in studying here.
Also my colleagues were very helpful. By talking with them, my other questions were answered and I was happy to have many of them sharing the same feelings.
When it comes to critical moment, it must be the replay email from my academic advisor. I asked some questions I felt really confused. He told me that my questions were shared by many students. There was no need to worry too much. His reply made me reassured and I could handle the next courses and assignments better.

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One of the 'Critical Moment' of my Tesol experience was that Diane told us that we didn't need to use very complicated vocabulary or sentence patterns in our essay writing, we just needed to express our understanding, develop our own writing style and not worry about whether it was wordy or not, which helped me a lot.

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The first few days of my MA TESOL were during the welcome weed when I was still in China. Everyone of us attended online zoom meetings and we met each other as well as our teachers. I felt that everyone was friendly and teachers were informative and helpful. I got loads of information about my upcoming study in Manchester.

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I remembered we had a warm up seminar to meet everyone. We wrote our self-introduction in a padlet with eveyone posting their own photos, which was very intereting. I remembered we met Zeynep, Diane, Richard, Nahielly, Juup etc. We had a quiz based on the padlet, which was full of fun.

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It was the first group meeting. After working out one-slide-PowerPoint together, my groupmates and I wanted to have dinner together, so we walked on the street and tried to find a proper restaurant. We went into four restaurants and couldn't find the right one. Finally, we went home embarrassed and disappointed.

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I wanna talk about my first days of using BB. I've never used it before and it seems there are lots of key information on it. But when I just opened the website and see lots of lists and numerous buttons, I really got a headache so I just shut it down and took a rest. Later, there are no other choices and I have to explore the website by myself. Regardless of the distress, I click every link and see what information it contains. Little by little, I get used to it and can make use of it.

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When I think about the early days of my MA TESOL course, the first word come to mind is "Professional". The pre-reading before the courses are professional and the ideas are very different from what I used to have. And it made me to think about the possibilities of teaching methods.

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I was frustrated to find out it was so hard for me to understand British accent, and I cannot effectively express what I really wanted to say sometimes. Then, I reached Diane for help, and she encouraged me that  as a native speaker, she cannot understand 100% what other people say. Then, she taught me to say "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that" whenever I am not sure about what other people are referring to.

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I was surprised by the patience from teachers when I had the first class because every students were getting an answer from their questions.

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It was the first week of S1 if memory serves me right, the tutors held an activity on the forum. They asked us to share our self-introduce on one padlet and suggested us to read all the others' posts. Then they held a game in which we answered questions related to colleagues' self-introduction. I still remember one question about me was "who is happy to be a schoolmate with the actor of Sherlock Holmes?" So impressive and fun game. It is a very good ice-breaking game. I would use it in my future teaching. I think this is a beginning of learning how to learn even from a game.

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The first class I attended in MA TESOL is Beyond Approach. Before the class, there was a pre-reading material, it was about 30 pages long. At the beginning, It was very difficult for me to struggle with so many abstract terminologies. When I entered the zoom, Diane and Zeynep were very good and experienced teacher, with their guidance, I started to understand more about this class. But it was still hard for me to keep up with their speech. So after the class, I re-watched recording once again to help me digest new knowledge.

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During the very first days in my TESOL study, I was very uncertain about the visa issuing process, my flight and the covid testing as well as what the place I was about to land. Thus I felt nervous and also curious. After fulfilling the quarantine and went to the on-site class, I began to feel a bit excited about the upcoming one-year exotic life, however, also worried about the covid and afraid of being infected.

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The thing that impressed me most is in the welcome week, during the meeting, Zeynep invites us to play a simple question answer game by using KORTEXT. we need to choose right answers about our new teachers and peers. it made me feel we are close immediately and all the teachers are very kind, friendly and nice.

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In my opinion, one of the critical moments of my TESOL experience was the time where I received feedback of my first assignment for Beyond Approach. I had a vague idea of the requirement and rubrics of what is expected from my writing. It wasn't until then where I had a clearer picture when i received my feedback and learned all my shortcomings. That was a turning point and change my way of writing to tackle the needs to fulfill this MA course.

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I was impressed by the first class when Diane asked us to draw a picture of one specific teaching class. This task even helped with my further writing because it made me realize the importance of specific context.