Teaching Philosophy
Over the last seven years I have taught in a variety of ESL and EFL institutions. From private language schools to public universities; one-to-one tutoring sessions to lecture halls of 50 students, I’ve had the pleasure of working with learners in a number of different contexts. However, my experiences inside the classroom have always entailed a heavy investment of time outside the classroom. Whether in professional development workshops or researching new ideas or methods for the classroom, every new group of students I encounter has brought about a set of new questions and challenges to which I’ve sought to respond. The result of this process has been the development of my teaching philosophy which rests on the three principles below:
• The use of contextualized input, in the form of authentic materials, in order to generate comprehensible output.
Providing input that students can make sense of is as much about fairness as it is a pedagogy. I cannot expect students to produce the desired output if I haven’t first given them the tools to do so. The way in which I provide these tools is through the use of authentic materials. Whether in the form of newspaper articles, youtube videos, podcasts, etc., using authentic materials in conjunction with basic scaffolding techniques provides students with input that is both practical and often more relevant to their interests.
To illustrate this principle, consider a jigsaw reading on the subject of Miley Cyrus. One half of the class has an article about how young people don’t find her performances offensive while the other half have an article about how parents disapprove of her behavior. Each article has difficult vocabulary words highlighted along with other aspects of English I would like the students to recognize (grammar, tone, etc.). After introducing the topic, with newspaper pictures of Miley Cyrus and eliciting the meaning to words the students will encounter, the task can begin. Ultimately, the goal of the task is to have students read the article, recognize the point-of-view of the writer and then compare their opinions (first with people who read the same article, then with students who read the other article). By the end of the task, students will have been exposed to new English vocabulary or grammatical structures in a context they’re much more likely to encounter outside of the classroom.
• Developing language learner awareness and autonomy is the aim of every class.
As my own experience learning French has taught me, acquiring proficiency in a foreign language is difficult if you don’t first understand yourself and your motivations for learning that language. Accordingly, the first homework assignment I always assign students is to express why they are learning English and what they hope to accomplish in my class. Knowing this information not only helps me make my lessons more relevant but provides students with a goal. In addition to this, as I plan, I’m always careful to integrate time for students to reflect and self-assess their progress towards this goal. This reflection helps students recognize their own strengths and weakness which they can then use to help make more effective use of their time outside of the classroom.
Here again the jigsaw reading serves as an example of this principle. Throughout the entire activity students are using a range of different skills in order to find specific information and communicate it to a partner. When the activity concludes, students are asked to identify which elements of the task were the easiest and which were the hardest. With this information, the class can then discuss strategies to deal with these challenges thereby developing a set of tools they can use to navigate complex situations they will surely encounter outside of the classroom.
• Every effort should be made to maintain a classroom environment that is mindful of the affective dimension of language learning.
In short, minimize anxiety. This, however, is easier said than done. Especially when students come from cultures that place a lot of pressure on one’s English ability. Therefore, I strive to develop lessons with the concept of “flow” in mind so that materials are adequately challenging for the students, but not overly so. When this concept is combined with a healthy serving of my own sense of humor as well as daily reminders that mistakes are part of the learning process, I feel I’ve created the ideal learning environment for everyone.