Summer's wonderland
Teaching
philosophy
We like to call a teacher as a mentor, but I think a language teacher is more than that.
A teacher is like a gardener, working hard to take care of all the seeds. The teacher provide the necessary elements and try to create the optimal condition for the seeds to grow, like sunshine, water and air, let them absorb themselves, let learning happen in its best condition.
A teacher is like a life-friend. On professional level, the teacher owns higher level of knowledge. But it is really important for a teacher to know the students very well to help them get progress, especially for language teaching. Different people have different personalities and language background, and they have different needs and purposes to learn the language, the details become important to the teaching. Also, language is a life skill, the way a teacher treats the students while teaching the language will affect their whole life.
A teacher is like a guide-light, generously giving the light to people in the dark. As the students choose their destination, they needs the guide-lights to give them brightness, strength to be brave and motivated and hope to carry on until the destination. They might still bump into a lot of obstacles on the way, but the guide-light will keep shining and leads them the way, help them to conquer the field.
As a fan of communicative language teaching and a golden digger in Second language learning, I am always curious about helping on learners to process the language input effectively. I always want to design my class into a dynamic setting and let learning happen implicitly through a lot of meaningful activities.
Language is a tool for communication, and language learning should always start with the meaning. By adapting the task-based language teaching approach, I think teachers should design varieties of tasks that are relevant to the learners and in compliance with an appropriated task sequence to achieve ultimate and optimal learning outcome eventually. The important and challenging part in task designing is to integrate language-focused and form-focused parts as language acquisition is all about connecting meaning and form together.
And as learners have bias in language learning, teacher should not just work with learners but also work against them. That brings a very critical part of teaching that is “always focus on form at the end”, which gives emphasis on the language terms or mistakes that the learners have experienced, highlights some parts they might encounter in the future and gives them more confidence that motivates them to actually produce.
I am on my way to be a “good” teacher, and now my ambition is to see the smiles of my students and to have more people to enjoy my designs and to let learning and acquisition happen unconsciously.