Teaching Purpose
I was always interested to be a teacher when I was young. I remembered watching an old movie from the former Soviet Union. It described a teacher who spent her whole life teaching in a rural village but she produced many high achieving students. From then, I had such a dream that I wanted to be a teacher. I remembered helping my classmates with their homework and they would compliment me that I could be a good teacher. However, I never had the chance to pursue my dream. I became a professional translator in China and then became a software engineer after I went to the graduate school in the US.
I became interested in education again after I had my own daughters. I started to teach them Chinese at home, and then I taught Chinese in Sunday Chinese schools. Teaching became my hobby. As the challenges grew, I decided to pursue a professional training as a teacher. So I received my MAT degree and my Teacher Certificate, and now I am teaching in a private boarding school.
I am a non-stop learner and I enjoy a continuing professional growth. As I am teaching Chinese to American students, and am struggled to find good teaching resources, I found a lot of ESL resources and I realize that they are actually very useful for my Chinese teaching. Now I want to get a Certificate as ESL teacher. It can broaden my teaching profession. My short-term goal is to gain some experiences as an ESL teacher. My long-term goal is to keep growing and to expand my experiences in the educational field.
Teaching Style
The Communicative Approach(1980) and the Comprehension Approach(1980) are the most relatable to me and the way I teach. I am also favorable of the Affective Humanistic Approach(1970).
With the increasing globalization, the purpose we learn a foreign language is to be able to connect and communicate with the people in the target language and to understand the cultures in the countries the languages are spoken. Thus, we should maximize our instruction in the classroom. The Comprehension Approach uses the comprehensible input to immerse students in the target language as much as possible. Students feel comfortable to speak the target language. The Communicative Approach focuses on communication. Students are encouraged to apply the skills they learned. Therefore, the students are motivated to continue learning the language. The Humanistic Approach respects learners’ feeling as they learn the target language. The language becomes alive with the music and props from the cultures in the target language and with no doubt, students are engaged and this speeds up their learning. I really couldn’t find any other approaches can produce such amazing results.
I am teaching elementary to high school level students. As being said above, by combining these three approaches, learners’ needs are served the best. These approaches meet the purposes of young language learners, and contents and techniques all are appropriate for their ages.
Teaching Techniques
I use warm language to make students feel comfortable with me. I do a lot of self-talk so students can be exposed to as much as the target language as possible. I plan my lessons based on students characteristics and needs. At the beginning of the year, we discuss language learning strategies to help students overcome their anxiety for language learning. Each lesson has the same structure. Warm up, review old skills, learning new skills, guided practice, independent practice, wrap up and exit ticket. For the warm-up, students can either work alone to do a K-W-L chart to prepare for the new learning, or they can solve a collaborative problem using the Postit App. I spend 20% of the class time to teach new skills, and 80% of the time for students to practice. For guided practice, students can do information gap activity, read aloud together, and role play, etc. For assessment, we use a lot of authentic materials and do performance assessment. Students can perform Fashion Show, have a Birthday Party, based on the themes. For lower levels and younger students, we do a lot of actions, movement, and games. Students have a lot of opportunities to practice their skills. For shy students, I have them do “think-pair-share” to help them open up. We also learn a lot of cultures and make food in the classroom for holiday celebrations. Students really appreciate these activities and they are motivated to learn more.