Assignment 2: Individual Presentation

Hi, this is Xuejun He. My key teaching area is Chinese language.

After I learnt Sweller’s cognitive load theory, I started to realise why students
struggled so much in writing sentences. Constructing a sentence in a foreign
language is a task with high element interactivity. Students have to process
many interrelating elements at the same time, including words, word order,
sentence structure and writing conventions.

Students would be overwhelmed by the high intrinsic load when they were
given the task. According to Kirschner’s cognitive load principles, I will keep in
mind in my future instructional design that I will break down those big tasks
into manageable processing blocks. In each block, students would be
processing no more than 3 pieces of new information and I would support
them to put those blocks together to achieve the task.

Braddly’s contribution to modality effect theory also reminds me of an

important practice in teaching language that using visual and auditory
materials at the same time can improve students’ working memory without
splitting their attention. As for my professional philosophy, cognitive
developmental theories empower me to support my future students to
achieve their highest learning outcome without frustrating them on the way.