THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH
“People here do not study English; they only study the philosophy of English.” - Dr. Giles Witton-Davies
“People here do not study English; they only study the philosophy of English.” This is an illuminating quote from one of my professors on how Taiwanese students, including my past self, only study English as a sort of mental exercise for the test but hardly ever use the language for communicative purposes. The first time I read about TESOL methodologies, I was struck by the description of the Grammar Translation Method and realized that was exactly the way I learned English as a dead language before college. In addition, I didn’t know English could be and should be taught in a communicative manner and that there are a million interesting ways to do so. It was an eye-opening moment when I knew there is a field called TESOL and a joint effort from researchers and practitioners to establish principles of effective language teaching. Since then, I’ve been drawn to this field and started to take a keen interest in English teaching.
MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that language teaching should be, in plain language, interesting, relevant, and meaningful to learners and I will elaborate on each belief in the following paragraphs.
Maintaining student interest level
In a teacher-fronted learning environment where teachers basically just lecture on grammar, vocabulary, and reading skills, only a handful of field-independent learners can stay in sync with the teacher and therefore are more likely to experience success in class whereas the rest of the class cannot find the lesson engaging and might just shut down. Especially in the school setting, students, unlike adult learners who sign up for language classes by choice, are obliged to attend English classes and may not be motivated to participate. To engage every student and create an atmosphere conductive to learning, teachers need to pique students’ interest in staying with them with techniques likes promoting teacher-student and peer interaction, building rapport in the classroom, utilizing a variety of activities to name a few.
Relevance to the learner
Keeping lessons relevant to students not just helps strengthen student engagement, a key component of effective teaching as stated above, but it also ensures that they are acquiring practical and useful language that may actually come in handy in real life. For instance, in an ESL setting where students need to survive in the target culture, expressions for opening/closing a conversation deserve greater attention than a reading passage on, say, nature’s mysteries. However, it’s almost impossible to have a perfect textbook and find each unit in the book interesting and relevant to learners. Therefore, it takes effort and creativity on the teacher’s part to tweak the textbook and tailor the lesson to students’ needs. To know what is relevant to learners, it is also crucial to conduct needs analysis at the very beginning and mindfully observe them over the course of the class so that the teacher can get a better picture of their personalities, backgrounds, learning goals, and so on.
Meaningful teaching
Unlike simple lecturing, meaningful teaching draws on the teacher's ability to deliver a language focus in ways that actually benefit the learner. For example, I don’t believe in “telling” a grammar point and then assuming students have acquired it just because I might’ve done a good job at presenting and explaining it. Instead, I believe the real meat of teaching is when students have ample practice in different ways, receive feedback from the teacher, and eventually start using the language taught with more ease. And that is where and when learning actually takes place. In a similar vein, because it takes a lot of procedures, or time simply put, to have something register in the learner’s brain, I do believe less is more when it comes to the question of how much I have to cover in a single session. I’d rather teach 5 words and ensure solid learning of those 5 words (i.e., showing a good command of their registers, collocations, pronunciation, etc.) instead of bombarding students with 20 words and seeing them end up mastering none.
TO BE CONTINUED...
“Welcome to the language teaching profession! Helping your students to learn an additional language will guarantee you more than your fair share of challenges, growth, joy, and fulfillment.” - H. Douglas Brown
To sum up my teaching philosophy, I believe a teacher should give considerable thought to making lessons interesting, relevant, and meaningful to students. The main reason why I can never get bored with teaching is that I can talk about what teaching should look like and that it's in fact incredibly difficult to make it so. Teaching is hard, and teaching a language is even harder in that the target language is both the content and medium of teaching. And as language teachers we also see students at their most vulnerable since language and identity are inextricably intertwined. It's so challenging that I think there are few jobs as delicate and complex as language teaching. Challenging as it may seem, it also gives me a sense of achievement that nothing else can rival whenever I see myself getting a bit better at teaching than I was yesterday.