ENGLISH CLUB

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 I believe teaching is to facilitate someone’s learning. When students don’t know how to start or have some problems, teachers help or guide and give some advice to them. That’s all for a teacher’s duty. Teachers don’t have to take all the responsibility to make a perfect apprentice because it’s almost impossible. We can’t stay with someone all day or teach them from A to Z. Furthermore, it is much better to learn something in various ways such as through books, experiences, or discussions. We are not our students’ only teachers. For these reasons, I focus on how to facilitate my students’ learning in class, not conquer the class and students through giving them a lot of academic homework. There are two important beliefs in my class.

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 First, the class should be fun and interesting through various activities. I was inspired to think of this from the task-based approach. Prabhu (1987) argued that doing meaningful tasks with authentic language would be more effective for students’ language learning. It focuses on students’ fluency and helps build their confidence. Students can interact with one another a lot through many tasks and this would help them to develop their language skills. I experienced this in my workplace. When I worked in a private academy for English, I used to teach children. The academy’s curriculum was based on many books which were set for students’ levels. My students read the reading books and answered the questions in the workbooks, so their studying was individual. They looked bored and often didn’t do their homework. To solve this problem, I sometimes prepared some materials, played games or prepared some easy tasks. Then, my students seemed to enjoy our class. They had fun and listened well to my feedback. Although they didn’t do their homework continuously and didn’t develop a lot, at least they looked happy in class. For this experience, now I believe that if I use meaningful and interesting tasks related to language learning, students can not only enjoy the class, but learn language easily and fast.

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 I also believe that the teacher could be a habit maker. I believe that if a student has a habit of using English, he or she could improve his or her language skills a lot. For example, there is a boy who loves playing a game which is popular internationally. His teacher helps him to get information from English game forums or gamers. Once he gets used to interacting with them, he could use English many times while playing the game and beyond the game as well because he needs to gather information online to develop his game character. By doing so, he will ultimately develop his language proficiency. This kind of meaningful and effective habit could be made from many sources according to one’s preferences. It could be about celebrities, food, TV shows, exercise, or whatever. Thus, we should find out about our students’ interests, what they like and what they do in their free time. If we connect their preferences to using English, our students could develop good habits for language learning.

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 Those two beliefs form my philosophy of teaching English. As a facilitator, I prepare interesting tasks so that students could have fun by interacting with each other. They would enjoy coming to class. I also help them to make it a habit to use English. Hopefully, during their free time, my students could keep learning the language with many foreigners who might have the same interests. As a result, my students will be able to use English in class and out of class in a fun way. If they do so, I am convinced of their English language development.  

         

Reference

Prabhu, N. S. (1987). Second language pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.