1. In this assignment on professional development, we were asked to study
different authors and produce a reaction paper with both a summary and an
evaluation. I considered this as a very helpful task since unfortunately we did not
have many opportunities to practice our writing skills during this semester.
Moreover, it undoubtedly reinforced some of the contents we learnt in Methodology
I when studying authors as Brown (2001) and introducing others of renown such as
Ur (2002) and Taylor (2002).
There are two aspects I value the most about this assignment; the first is the
chance we had to study the author’s perspective or reflections on this particular
matter and the second is the opportunity we had to analyze and compare their
writing skills.
Firstly, the professional development topic was introduced with a variety of
viewpoints which creates a very interesting opportunity to discuss and compare
them all even from our own increasing experience and knowledge. Actually, I
consider most of the ideas presented by the authors to be quite useful for us as
pre-service teachers since they depict our reality in a perfect way.
Secondly, I admit I found myself comparing each author’s style with my own,
since I tend to concentrate on someone’s technique to communicate in the written
form. One of the authors I enjoyed the most reading was Ur (2002) since she was
very straightforward with her message on professionalism and made good use of
comparisons to clarify the dissimilarities between the concepts mentioned.
As to conclude, I have to say I consider professional development as a
fundamental aspect we have to embrace in order to teach English as a second
language. This because it is a lifelong process that provides us with the expertise
required in order to develop our students’ communicative competence.
Camila Cuevas A.