Philosophy of Teaching
English as a Second Language
In my future classroom, I hope to show my students that language is negotiable and a good writer/speaker knows how to follow the rules but also when it is appropriate to break them. I hope to encourage my students to find their voices and share about their life experiences, where communicating with others effectively will be vital. We will focus on proficiency as a class, which could be done through social interaction activities. These would include things like debates, role plays, and creating improvisations. I would like to implement the approaches of Communicative Language Teaching, Task Based Language Teaching and Problem Posing.
Drawing on CLT as a model, Task-Based Language Teaching is “an approach based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching” (Richards & Rodgers, 2007, p. 223). Tasks allow students to contextualize language and grammar; therefore, discourse is more natural. As with Communicative Language Teaching, this approach encourages students to negotiate meaning and experiment with language (Richards & Rodgers, 2007, p. 228). There is a wide range of tasks that key into student interests, such as drawing, maps, diagrams, timetables, money, etc. A younger student might enjoy discussing how to plan the perfect birthday party: how to order a cake, what kind of presents the birthday girl would like, writing out the invitations, etc. Planning tasks for students can be developed from their personal interests, because that is how they will gain meaning from the learning process. With my tutees last semester, we did an jigsaw task, where each tutee watched half of a silent short film and took notes on what he observed. After each tutee had watched his portion, they told the other what had happened in the segment and “fit” the story with the other’s. Then, we watched the whole short film to see if either had missed a part of the story. This could work even better with more students, because fitting the pieces together would get more complicated and require more debate between students, making them feel like they have something to solve.
I would also like to implement the Problem-posing approach with my more advanced ELLs. Problem-posing focuses on generating dialogue specific to the concerns/problems present in the lives specified to the learners in order to strengthen critical thinking skills. As a result, learners will be more aware of problems and the perspectives of other individuals, as well as how to address and solve issues (Nixon-Ponder, 1995, p. 2). In one of my education courses, our professor would facilitate Socratic discussions, in which she would map our discussion. As we sat in a circle, she marked who talked when and how the conversation flowed between people. In an ESL context, it would be interesting to consider who talks to whom and when people feel more comfortable sharing out in a group. Even when we had different opinions from each other in my education course, I felt that our teacher encouraged us to explore both sides of the argument and to hear each other’s opinions. Problem posing, however, does pose some problems for certain English language learners. For example, students whose cultures value listening to others and reflecting inward may have difficulty voicing their opinions about controversial topics. Some themes, like abortion or homosexuality, may be very taboo for certain cultures. A teacher should consider the backgrounds of each of his/her students before choosing which problem to pose to students (Nixon-Ponder, 1995, p. 6).
The problem-posing pedagogical approach encourages students to speak out and share their personal experiences, while considering other opinions and viewpoints. As a future language teacher, this is the area that I feel most passionate about: my students being able to express themselves in whatever language they need to and have the right competences to do so. All in all, “problem-posing is more than a technique that teaches critical thinking; it is a philosophy, a way of thinking about students and their ability to think critically and to reflect analytically about their lives” (Nixon-Ponder, 1995, p. 4). I would look forward to hearing from my students and learning about their perspectives.
Devoting time to studying the theories of past major orientations of language acquisition, with focus on English as a second/foreign language, informs the teacher of the most effective methods/approaches to reaching his/her students. The most dominant ESL/EFL theories have influenced the way I will teach my students, and I would like to implement the approaches of Communicative Language Teaching, Task Based Language Teaching and Problem Posing. I believe that these three approaches would create a comfortable space for students to share their experiences and voice their opinions about the world in which we live.
Citations
Nixon-Ponder, N. (1995) Using problem-posing dialogue in adult literacy education: Teacher to teacher. Washington, DC: Department of Education. 1995.
Richards, J. & Rodgers, T. (2007). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.