ESL Capstone Portfolio

Abstract

The ESL Capstone Portfolio demonstrates my understanding of teaching English as second language during my two-year English Language Learners Program (the ELL Program) at Vanderbilt University. I believe that communicative language teaching should be conveyed in language instructions, with the support of cultural responsiveness and scaffolding strategies. The capstone includes three parts: philosophy of teaching, artifact analysis, and application to practice. In the philosophy of teaching, my ideas about how to teach ELL in a Chinese high school are conceptualized through the current situation and theoretical background. In artifact analysis, several examples are selected from my teaching experiences during my study in the ELL Program, and they are analyzed according to the guidelines of TESOL Domains. In application to practice, instructional application and possible challenges in the future teaching are discussed.