Each teacher should
have a philosophy in teaching. The
teacher must follow an eclectic approach which means the teacher should take
the best from each method and technique.
The first step toward
developing the principle approach of language teaching is to look at the past
and the present language teaching techniques and also try to research always
for better techniques and stay up to date with the new methods. This helps the teacher to apply in the
classroom various activities, methods, techniques that are appropriate for the
students. The teacher must follow an
eclectic approach which means that the teacher must take from the different
methods and techniques of teaching what suits the students in the
classroom. In other words, she has to
take into consideration the students’ level and their situation to know which
activities suits their abilities. For example,
for native speakers we might use a different approach from that we use with
foreign language learners, and also we might use different approaches with low
and high achievers in the same classroom.
In addition, a teacher
must know that each student has his/her own ability to learn and we are born
with a language acquisition device (L.A.D) but it depends on the conditions
that the student is exposed to. For
instance the parent’s attitude, social economic states (S.E.S), their level of
education and many other things affect the percentage of learning of their children
and how much the quality and the quantity of information that they get from
their parents benefit them. So, a child
who lives in a rich environment that supports him with several sources of
learning contributes in a way or another in his/her positive attitude and
motivation to learn the second language.
Adding to that, we as
teachers must work in order to make our students intrinsically motivated which
means something within you pushes you to learn the second language or to do
anything else for your benefit not because you wait a reward from your teacher
or parents. We as humans are driven by our inner drives including: exploration,
manipulation, activity, stimulation, knowledge, and ego enhancement. As well as
you need to ensure the basic need in order to reach high levels of motivation,
you need to achieve the basic skills to reach the more cognitive skills. For emphasis, you can make students choose a
certain activity to solve or which activity to start with that will make the students
feel that they are in control as well as intrinsically motivated and this will
result in constructing long term goals.
Teachers must expose
students as much as they can to authentic materials and we have to help our
students as beginners in reaching fluency then to accuracy because we want them
to get started but later on we must focus on accuracy because we want our
students to speak and write correctly without pretending to have a native
accent because we are not native speakers. The most important thing is to be
understandable. Our activities must
range from controlled (warm up, context explanation, drills, dictation) to semi
controlled like (Brainstorming, storytelling, dialogue) and to free techniques
(stimulation, drama, role play, problem solving, writhing journal, interviews)
therefore we as teachers must take into consideration the variety, sequencing,
pacing and timing of activities as well we have to gauge difficulties in other
words, the teacher must expect or predict difficulties before it happened since
she knew the level of her students. So based on experience of the teacher she
would be able to tell when students are facing difficulties. Individually differences must be taken into
consideration, for the teacher she has to know the different back grounds and
cultures of students in order to know how to deal with students concerning
their way of thinking.
Another important
aspect that our approach and philosophy must be built on is interaction which
is in fact the heart of communication. Also, interaction is the collaborative
exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or more people resulting
on reciprocal effects on each other.
Theories of communication competence emphasize the importance of
interaction as human beings use language in various contexts to “negotiate”
meaning. Interactive students can use all
the things that they possess in the language in any of the skills like reading,
writing, listening, or speaking. The
interactive teacher has different roles: the teacher as a manger, controller,
facilitator, director and the teacher as a resource. So, the teacher must range her roles
depending on the situation. But the most
important thing is to know how to keep interaction go on. Interaction can be sustained by group work
that needs to think deeply before using it, since group work has advantages and
disadvantages and the teacher should only use it for the beneficial of the
students. Grouping students requires the
teacher when to use it and how to behave with students. As teachers we should start with our students
with bottom-up to prepare them for top-down activities and then they will have
an interactive approach with these two techniques.
Also, we should start
with display questions in classroom and then move to referential ones. When
correcting, the teacher should be selective in errors as she must look for
global errors which affect the whole understanding of the topic and not for
local errors. Global errors affect the global or whole understanding of the
topic. By this way of corrections,
students will not be frustrated but they will be more motivated to learn. In addition, our feedback should be specific
to students, always positive, and it’s better to give the feedback individually
and face to face in order to let them know if what they did is correct or not
and how to improve as well as we must start with positive things then with the
negative ones for the purpose of motivating them and preserving their self-efficacy
and self-esteem. A teacher must
integrate the 4 skills to support the other and facilitate the process of
learning.
Moreover, a teacher
must believe in her student’s ability as she should know every student have the
ability to learn and if the teacher is motivated, then the students will be
also motivated. Furthermore, a teacher
has to take every chance that allows her exposing her students to language use
in real life. A teacher must keep in her
mind that learning could take place with other entertaining and pleasurable
conditions and activities as she can apply from one time to another. Concerning tests, we should take in to
consideration that the test assembles what students have already learned since
that gives validity to the test.
Validity refers to the degree of which the test measures in a specific
area of knowledge. The test must cover
most of the levels of thinking according to blooms taxonomy who states the
following levels of questions:
knowledge, comprehension applications, analysis, synthesis, evaluation
and creation that should be taught and modeled in class. Students should be given enough time to answer
all questions in the test or in the classroom, taking in
to consideration the time needed for the students to accomplish with the new
atmosphere. We are responsible for
offering the adequate atmosphere for test taking.
Finally, there is no
perfect teacher but we have to keep in mind that a good book is bad in a bad
teacher’s hand and a bad book is good in a good teacher’s hand. So, the matter
is on energy of the teacher and on the teacher’s personality and patience that
encourage her to give from her heart because she is raising children who are
the future generation.
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