Joseph Buckley's Learning Style

Joseph Buckley3880875

AEB1101. Learning in a Changing World.Assignment 1B: Learning Style Presentation

ghotighoti

coughcough womenwomen nationnationghgh ooff ii shsh

titi

Questions?

Questions?

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Joseph Buckley's Learning Style

Joseph Buckley3880875

AEB1101. Learning in a Changing World.Assignment 1B: Learning Style Presentation

I used to work at an English Language school as a teacher's aide, helping to teach English to kids who had just arrived in Australia.

One of the problems kids have in learning English, whether as a first or second language, is involved in learning to read and write.

One of the reasons why this is difficult is because English spelling is a mess. (It's a fascinating mess, but a mess, all the same). And to help children learn to navigate through this mess is part of the job of teaching them how to read.

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ghotighoti

coughcough womenwomen nationnationghgh oo

titi

ff ii shshtiti

We all know that there are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. But these twenty-six letters have represent forty-four phonemes (or distinct sounds). The difference, for instance, in the pronunciation of “hit” and “hot” is an example of a phonemic difference.

There are in English, one hundred and twenty graphemes, ie, one hundred and twenty unique correspondences between a letter or group of letters and a sound. To become a competently literate English speaker, one must learn them.

This seeming absurdity of English spelling is illustrated in the classical linguistic example of ghoti (falsely attributed to George Bernard Shaw), in which the word spelt g-h-o-t-i would be pronounced fish, if one took the pronunciation of the gh from cough, the o from women, and the ti from nation.

But, despite this seeming hodgepodge of sound-letter correspondences, most adults in Australia do know how to read and write.

The issue I faced was that that knowledge I had of English was implicit. So I set myself the learning task of trying to take that implicit knowledge and make it explicit.

The method I used to do this was to create a resource book, ostensibly for teachers, which helped make explicit the knowledge is implicit in all literate English speakers.

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This is a sample from that book. It shows, on the left, the chart of the forty-four English phonemes divided into vowels and consonants and colour-coded according to shared properties. On the right is a sample of one page detailing how each sound is made, words containing those sounds, and what language speakers might have difficulty producing those sounds

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This is a photo of an eruption of Alaska's Mt Redoubt taken on the twenty-second of March, 2009. Of more relevance, however, is the inset, which is a photo taken by a scanning electron microscope of one of the particles of ash from that eruption.

Some people focus on the big picture. Others, however, like myself, are more detail-oriented – we are analytical thinkers.

Analytical thinkers tend to see the individual elements of patterns, as opposed to the whole. We also prefer information and details to be structured in a logical hierarchy.

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Analogous to the analytical thinker-global thinker dichotomy is the distinction between left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking.

Left-brainers, such as myself, are analytical. We like logical processes and order.

We also like to adopt a bottom-up approach, where we start on the details and combine them to form a more holistic picture. This helped me in my learning task because it allowed me to focus on individual sounds and then to connect them to closely related sounds and to see more clearly how these individual sounds and groups of sounds connected amongst themselves and with other sounds and sounds families.

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In the VAK model, I am more visual than aural or kinaesthetic. Visual learners, shockingly enough, prefer visual modes of learning and of presenting information.

This is fairly obvious, I think, in the work I produced because I decided to distinguish the various groups, mainly by colour-coding them, even though I was dealing with sounds, which are not intrinsically visual, in any sense of the word. Colour, however, is an exclusively visual phenomenon.

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I have already discussed the logical/mathematical and the visual aspects of my learning styles, so I'll not repeat myself, except to say that in Gardner's Multiple Intelligences I scored highly in both the mathematical/logical (represented here by the maths symbols in the upper left) and in the visual (symbolised here by the prism).

I also scored highly in the verbal intelligence. This, perhaps, was the cause of the surprising fact that in learning about the sounds of the English language I actually spent more time reading about them, than listening to them.

I am also quite intra-personal. Intra-personal intelligence – represented here by the self-portrait of Albrect Dürer – has, as one of its characteristics, the need to learn and think in solitude. This manifested itself in my learning task in that, although I did receive guidance from one teacher in particular as to what resources I should use, the bulk of the learning task was completed individually, not in a group discussion or any other collaborative manner.

But, I am aware of the need to work more with other people and, in that vein, …

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REFERENCES

Slide 4: Boston.com's The Big Picture, Alaska's Mount Redoubt

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/alaskas_mount_redoubt.html

Accessed: March 22, 2011

Slide 5: Mercedes-Benz Advertisement

Accessed via: Fuel Your Creativity website.

http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com/left-brain-vs-right-brain-advertising/

Accessed: March 22, 2011

Slide 6: 1903 Lithograph Model

Accessed via: CQ Out website.

http://www.cqout.com/item.asp?id=11975924

Accessed: March 22, 2011

Slide 7 (Upper Left): Drift Away: Mathematical Symbols

mimi68200

http://mi9.com/uploads/windows/2627/drift-away-mathematical-symbols_1920x1200_35527.jpg

Accessed: March 22, 2011

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Slide 7 (Upper Right): Self-Portrait at 28 (Self-Portrait in Furcoat)

Albrecht Dürer

Accessed via: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/durer/self/

Accessed: March 22, 2011

Slide 7 (Lower Left): Extract from Diary of John C. Thornily

John C. Thornily

Accessed via: http://bananamagic.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/diary-entry-of-a-character-week-5/

Accessed: March 22, 2011

Slide 7 (Lower Right): Fraunhoffer's Solar Absorption Lines

Hsiang-Kuang Chang

Accessed via: http://crab0.astr.nthu.edu.tw/~hchang/ga1/ch05-03.htm

Accessed: March 22, 2011