My Teaching Philosophy

My Teaching Philosophy

In this assignment I will reflect on myself as an English teacher and which aspect of English teaching I consider to be of great importance. I will mainly focus on the importance of creating output in the classroom, Communicative language teaching and the benefits of inductive learning.

A very important value for me is having respect for the fact that all language learners are different. Because of this I will try to vary my teaching methods and the content of the classes the best I can, so it can benefit a variety of different learners. It is also vital for me that I encourage my future students to use their metacognition. By encouraging metacognition I can help my students reflect and be more aware regarding which learning methods that work best for them (Ellis & Shintani, p. 26).

I will of course give my future students language input, but I think It is especially important for me that student's create output in my classes. This is because Language acquisition is a creative process where we create our own hypotheses about the language we are trying to learn. When students get the chance to create output through speaking and writing they get a chance to test if their hypotheses about the target language is correct or incorrect (Ellis & Shintani, p.10). Through this process learners can revise their hypotheses which leads to new language learning.

Personally, I like Communicative language teaching because it is a great method to use when you want output from students. CLT is an approach to language teaching where the focus is to develop communicative competence. Ellis & Shintani (2014) describe the strong form of CLT in this way: “ The methodology is fluency oriented-directed at getting students to use language for communication rather than to practice correct usage”(p. 43) Through CLT the students can work with communicative tasks fitted or real life situations and use English authentically. I have tried using this type of teaching in practice, and I have noticed that students often get highly motivated when they get an opportunity to do tasks where they can collaborate and communicate with their peers.

It is also important for me that students are not afraid of speaking English. Many students might fear making mistakes during the English acquisition process. I want to help create a good learning environment where students feel comfortable enough to express themselves in English. Therefore, doing motivating CLT-tasks can make students less self-critical so they “forget” they are speaking English because they get so engaged. After all, learners making mistakes when speaking English is natural and errors are a natural feature of the language learning process (Ellis & Shintani, 2014, p.6).

With heavy subjects like grammar, I think it would be beneficial to use an approach where the students work inductively. Therefore, I will give the students a task and not explicitly tell them which grammar aspects we are going to work with. For example, we might do a task where the students give advice through working with authentic cases of teenagers who have asked for advice on the internet. After the task, I will discuss with the students which type of verbs they used when giving advice, and then explain more in-depth regarding the function of modal verbs when advising. Ellis & Shintani (2014) describe that a benefit of inductive presentation is that: “it involves greater depth of processing which assists memory” (p. 85). From my own experience, working inductively with grammar can be more motivating as opposed to the traditional deductive approach, where the students are told beforehand which grammar aspect to focus on.

All in all, in this paper I have examined some key factors related to English teaching which are important for me. I have discussed the importance of student output and creating a learning environment where the students do not fear making linguistic errors. I have also discussed how I consider CLT a very useful method for language teaching, in addition to the benefits of using an inductive approach when working with heavy subjects like grammar.

Literature:

Ellis, R., & Shintani, N. (2014). Exploring language pedagogy through second language acquisition research. New York, NY: Routledge.