Teaching Philosophy
After taking a deep breath, I went to the center of the stage with a smile and spoke, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Today, my topic is the generation gap...” This was how I performed at the English speech contest during my grade 10 at school. Just two days before the contest, the contestant from our class was afflicted with a sore throat, so the teacher asked me to substitute her. Though not adept in English, I unexpectedly won the second place. This result triggered my burning enthusiasm for English. Since then, my English has been greatly improved and learning English has become an indispensable part of my life. Unable to wait to share the great fun that the English world has brought me, I soon found that being an English teacher was the best way to share this pleasure.
From this unpredictable experience, I have learnt that enthusiasm or, let us say, interest is extremely crucial in English learning. My goal is to make my students come to class eagerly and happily rather than they are required to come. Teachers should first create a light-hearted learning environment and strive to filter students' anxiety in learning English. Based on this friendly classroom environment, teachers can connect the topics that arouse students' interests with English and involve them to join actively in the class. Furthermore, teachers can borrow some elements from games such as a dice and poker in activities. This would probably attract students attention, especially those who feel learning is boring. Apart from this, we can use some technology devices to make the class more interesting and fascinating. QR code, Socrative and Mentimeter are all excellent devices that teachers can employ.
Teachers should enlarge students’ communicative needs in classroom setting and wrestle to create more chances for them to use language in real life context. It is the communicative needs that motivate students to learn so that they can fulfill their needs to communicate and negotiate. If they experience no needs they won’t learn it at all; if they find that they can manage with whatever knowledge they have, they won’t go on learning. To solve these problems, first, information gap needs to be created among students to give them more occasions to communicate. Second, according to Krashen’s input hypothesis, “i+1” theory should be employed in classroom teaching. Therefore, teachers need to pinpoint students’ English proficiency and choose the right "1" to add to their original knowledge. With the part of “1”, students would never lack communicative needs in class.
It is an art for teachers to keep a good balance between students’ fluency and accuracy. Based on the characteristics of a CLT approach, a focus on students’ “flow” of comprehension and production and a focus on the formal accuracy of production are seem as complementary principles underlying communicative techniques. At times fluency may have to take on more importance than accuracy in order to keep learners meaningfully engaged in language use. At other times, the students will be encouraged to attend to correctness. What teachers should do is to encourage students to take risks in using language and provide constructive feedback, but not at the expense of their fluency. In this way, students can not only examine their hypothesis of the language but also express themselves without abrupt interruption.
As Maxine Greene says in many respects, teaching and learning are matters of breaking through barriers of expectation, of boredom, of predefinition. Teaching philosophy decides the behavior of teachers and it would change as teachers accumulating their teaching experiences and forming new perspectives on teaching. I will keep examining and rectifying my teaching philosophy as my teaching experience increases so as to provide my students with more appropriate instructions.
