Teaching Philosophy

Foreign language acquisition has been a crucial part of my life. I was born in
Paris, France to an American mother and a French father. Since then, I have spent all 22
years of my life learning English and French. At first, English was my weakest language,
but after moving to Kansas in the USA when I was six years old, my French skills
quickly declined. I have spent much of my school life re-learning French. Then, in
university, I decided to start learning Korean. Because of my situation, I have had a lot of
experience with informal and formal language learning. It is my hope that I can apply this
lifelong experience with language learning and bridge the gaps I saw in my own
education in the hopes of helping other students learning English.

Much of my language learning has centered on communication. In learning

English, I wanted to communicate with my mother and my new friends and classmates in
Kansas. In learning French, I so badly wanted to communicate with my French
grandparents before it was too late, and keep in contact with my friends in France. As a
result, while form is important and must be taught, I want to emphasize communicating
meaning over perfect form in my students. I hope to encourage communicative
competence through exposure to real life examples and authentic language exchanges in
classroom activities and lessons.

As such, the teaching approach that I most closely connect with is the
communicative language teaching approach. This approach allows for a range of
practices and activities to foster interaction in an authentic context with a flexible use of

language. Activities that are typical of CLT such as role-play, interviews, information gap
games, pair and group work are both fun for the students and beneficial to
communicative competence.

I hope to create a warm and inviting learning environment for my students. I will
attempt to tailor lessons to the students interests and be available to them for
conversation, so that they feel comfortable reaching out to me with problems and
concerns. At the same time, I hope to create an environment of mutual respect in which
the students respect me, I respect them, and the students respect each other. This mutual
respect will allow for more open and honest communication and interaction and further
encourage language acquisition. Lastly, I would like to steer away from strict discipline
for negative behavior, and instead enforce a positive support system to motivate students
to behave appropriately.