My Teaching Philosophy
Before I started taking classes in Teachers College, Communicative Language Teaching (CTL), which includes integrating skills and aims at enhancing learners’ communicative competence, Getting access to the theory of CLT and applying it to my teaching is really a great opportunity for me to reconstruct my teaching philosophy.
Among all the models of skill integration teaching, I am the proponent of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). Under the framework of TBLT, pedagogical tasks will be derived from real life tasks. Students’ comprehensive language ability will be greatly enhanced and their motivation will be raised in the process of task completion. The teacher’s in-class role is more like a facilitator, creating the most opportunities for students to practice and giving them necessary corrective feedbacks. At the same time, the teacher has the responsibility to conduct needs analysis and to design the sequence of tasks accordingly. It is especially essential for the type of classes in Community English Program (CEP) which contain much diversity.
Speaking of diversity, we have to admit it is a big challenge for teaching. Diversity of students demands us to introduce wide range of teaching materials to the class, as well as considering the students’ individual needs and their uneven language abilities. To solve this problem, we could ask students to choose their own topics and leave the outcomes of tasks open. For example, after reading a story, the students can be asked to either finish some comprehension questions or to write an essay about it according to their interest and their ability.
Besides integrating all the skills, it is worth thinking how to optimize the conditions of input, negotiation, feedback and output to provide students with optimal opportunities to acquire language. According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, acquisition takes place when “i+1” is included in input. Therefore comprehensible and authentic input will be introduced into my class, for example, advertisement, newspaper, or any other authentic materials related to the theme of the class can be used and tailored to fit students’ ability. Output production is another stage where acquisition takes place according to Swain’s Output Hypothesis. To optimize output, students should be given various opportunities to produce language, such as group discussion, presentation, and essay writing. What is essential in this output production stage is negotiation, which can effectively enhance learners’ language. To optimize negotiation, tasks with convergent goal orientation should be introduced during the interaction, such as jigsaw, problem solving and so on. Feedback is also a necessary step to provide students with positive and negative evidence to restructure their existing knowledge. Different corrective feedback techniques should be used to grab students’ attention and help them reformulate their language system.
Another issue we need to consider is assessment. Since students in CEP had been placed at different levels according to their performance in the Placement Tests, I conducted diagnostic test at the beginning of the program and achievement tests regularly for each unit. The data collected from these tests gave me an overview of the students’ competence and necessitated the adjustment on my syllabus. For example, after the test on writing, we figured it out that the organization component was the biggest trouble for most of the students, so we emphasized on the structure of writing in the later stage. Also, I could get a better idea of the students’ individual needs and paid much attention to each student’s weakness. A well designed assessment is really informative for teaching.
Besides doing assessment on my students, I would also like to do self-reflection. I took record of almost every class I taught and played them again and again to find problems and thinking about how to deal with them. Watching me teaching raises my awareness and motivates me to improve my teaching skills.
This is my teaching philosophy under the umbrella of CLT, or TBLT. According to my understanding, a successful teaching cycle should be started with individual needs analysis, followed by a sequence of tasks involving comprehensive skills and adjusted according to the assessment on the students. The teacher should set a long-term communicative goal for the students and try to involve the comprehensive language skills in the class. Certainly it is easy to speak out these ideas, but I still need a long time to do self-observation, to discuss with peers and then to get improvement in teaching.
Before I started taking classes in Teachers College, Communicative Language Teaching (CTL), which includes integrating skills and aims at enhancing learners’ communicative competence, Getting access to the theory of CLT and applying it to my teaching is really a great opportunity for me to reconstruct my teaching philosophy.
Among all the models of skill integration teaching, I am the proponent of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). Under the framework of TBLT, pedagogical tasks will be derived from real life tasks. Students’ comprehensive language ability will be greatly enhanced and their motivation will be raised in the process of task completion. The teacher’s in-class role is more like a facilitator, creating the most opportunities for students to practice and giving them necessary corrective feedbacks. At the same time, the teacher has the responsibility to conduct needs analysis and to design the sequence of tasks accordingly. It is especially essential for the type of classes in Community English Program (CEP) which contain much diversity.
Speaking of diversity, we have to admit it is a big challenge for teaching. Diversity of students demands us to introduce wide range of teaching materials to the class, as well as considering the students’ individual needs and their uneven language abilities. To solve this problem, we could ask students to choose their own topics and leave the outcomes of tasks open. For example, after reading a story, the students can be asked to either finish some comprehension questions or to write an essay about it according to their interest and their ability.
Besides integrating all the skills, it is worth thinking how to optimize the conditions of input, negotiation, feedback and output to provide students with optimal opportunities to acquire language. According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, acquisition takes place when “i+1” is included in input. Therefore comprehensible and authentic input will be introduced into my class, for example, advertisement, newspaper, or any other authentic materials related to the theme of the class can be used and tailored to fit students’ ability. Output production is another stage where acquisition takes place according to Swain’s Output Hypothesis. To optimize output, students should be given various opportunities to produce language, such as group discussion, presentation, and essay writing. What is essential in this output production stage is negotiation, which can effectively enhance learners’ language. To optimize negotiation, tasks with convergent goal orientation should be introduced during the interaction, such as jigsaw, problem solving and so on. Feedback is also a necessary step to provide students with positive and negative evidence to restructure their existing knowledge. Different corrective feedback techniques should be used to grab students’ attention and help them reformulate their language system.
Another issue we need to consider is assessment. Since students in CEP had been placed at different levels according to their performance in the Placement Tests, I conducted diagnostic test at the beginning of the program and achievement tests regularly for each unit. The data collected from these tests gave me an overview of the students’ competence and necessitated the adjustment on my syllabus. For example, after the test on writing, we figured it out that the organization component was the biggest trouble for most of the students, so we emphasized on the structure of writing in the later stage. Also, I could get a better idea of the students’ individual needs and paid much attention to each student’s weakness. A well designed assessment is really informative for teaching.
Besides doing assessment on my students, I would also like to do self-reflection. I took record of almost every class I taught and played them again and again to find problems and thinking about how to deal with them. Watching me teaching raises my awareness and motivates me to improve my teaching skills.
This is my teaching philosophy under the umbrella of CLT, or TBLT. According to my understanding, a successful teaching cycle should be started with individual needs analysis, followed by a sequence of tasks involving comprehensive skills and adjusted according to the assessment on the students. The teacher should set a long-term communicative goal for the students and try to involve the comprehensive language skills in the class. Certainly it is easy to speak out these ideas, but I still need a long time to do self-observation, to discuss with peers and then to get improvement in teaching.