Part 5: Holistic Reflection I started the MA TESOL program two years ago, in the fall semester of 2011.

Moving from Norway to Hawaii was a big step for me. Before HPU, I had taken a bachelors degree in Sports and Physical Education at the University of Stavanger. I had also been a substitute teacher in physical education at a junior high school. I applied to HPU because I wanted to be able to teach more than one subject. My goal was to be able to teach English in addition to physical education. Although I had some experience teaching physical education, I had no ideas on how to teach a language. Everything introduced to me in my first semester in the program, such as linguistics, phonology and language acquisition theories were completely new to me. This felt a bit intimidating, especially since most of my other classmates were already experienced teachers. However, I quickly realized that the courses did not require any prior knowledge or a teaching background. In this reflection, I will discuss how I have changed throughout the MA TESOL program. As a student, I have been able to develop my academic writing skills. Creating this e-portfolio has allowed me to see how much I have grown as a writer. At first, I found it difficult to write research papers. Looking back to my first research paper, I see that it was a bit weak, in terms of academic writing. For example, there were some errors relating to the APA style. My writing was also sometimes vague, and often lacked specific examples to illustrate my points. However, now that I am at the end of the program I see that my writing skills have greatly improved. I have grasped the APA style, and my language is also more varied. My research skills have also changed for the better.

For example, finding sources for my research papers used to be difficult. Now, however, I am better at selecting the key words so that the searches are more specific and relevant to the topic. Furthermore, I am very grateful that many of my teachers gave us freedom to choose the topic of our research papers. For example, in my phonology class one of our tasks was to do research on pronunciation difficulties common for a certain group of ESL learners. In other words, I could select the target audience myself. I therefore chose to focus on Norwegians problems with English pronunciation. This was very motivational, since my goal was to teach in Norway. As a result, I felt I would have use of the knowledge presented in the paper. As a fellow student, I have become better at cooperating in teams. Several of my courses required quite extensive group work. Dividing the work, and finding time to meet were some of the challenges I experienced with this. However, in most cases, the people I worked with were able to distribute the workload fairly, to avoid one person(s) doing more than the others. With group work, I believe it is important to show that you expect your group members to contribute. It is also important that everybody gets to share their views and opinions, and to get and give feedback on individual work. Lastly, communication is also key. It can be very challenging to get every one in a group to meet. One solution to this can be to use Skype. This worked out fine in on of the groups I was involved in. Furthermore, establishing an e-mail group thread was another way one of my groups kept in touch. This also allowed us to have a log of all the emails we sent to each other. We used this frequently, and at the end of the project we had exchanged over a hundred messages. I really benefited from all the group work because I got to collaborate with reliable people that had great ideas.

As a new teacher, I have been able to create and develop my own philosophy of teaching based on my experiences form the MA TESOL program. My philosophy centers on three major points. Firstly, I believe it is important to make the lessons authentic. Students need to understand how the knowledge gained can help them in real life situations. Besides creating authentic tasks, I want to expose my students to authentic language material. Meaning, I want them to listen and read how successful speakers of English use the language, in real life situations. I also believe that social interaction is essential for language acquisition. I hope to create lessons that allow students to interact with their classmates through peer work and group projects. Furthermore, I believe authenticity and social interaction are ways to motivate students. Motivation is also essential to my philosophy of teaching. I think motivated students will learn a language more efficiently. I am very glad that I picked the MA TESOL program. I liked that the program focused on pedagogy. Writing this portfolio has allowed me to see how much I have grown. As I mentioned earlier, my goal was to be able to teach English and physical education in Norway. Thanks to the MA TESOL program, I was able to accomplish this goal. I am currently teaching both subjects at a Norwegian high school. I recently started this job, and I have already started using teaching material I developed at HPU. I will admit that starting a new job with lots of responsibilities is a bit intimidating. However, I feel that the program has greatly prepared me to deal with future challenges, and that it has given me many resources to use. I am really motivated to help my students develop their skills, so that they will be able to achieve some of their future goals.