Aiyana Moyer

C&T 491

Dr. Cho

June 29, 2017

Teaching Philosophy

Since I was a tutor for roughly three years before coming on this practicum, I thought that

I had a general idea of what kind of teacher I would be. However, I did not take into

consideration how different tutoring math would be from teaching full English lessons. Over the

course of the practicum, I came to find my teaching methods following those of the

Communicative Language Teaching methods. Personally, I prefer either the audiolingualism or

reform approaches if I were a student, but that is because I prefer to know how to sound

intelligent and understand what I hear. Simply understanding enough to carry a conversation

feels suffocating to me, but I understand that other language-learning students are not like me.

The lessons I taught were based on communication and neither exact grammatical

knowledge nor extensive syntactical knowledge is necessary so hold a conversation. For these

classes, I heavily relied on the Communicative Language Teaching method because that was

what the students were used to and what they needed in that class. I was only a temporary

teacher, so I was unable to implement a completely different style of teaching as it would have

completely thrown the students off, but I did use my own unique style of CLT.
 Judging from how I altered my approach as a teacher from my own preferences as a

student to CLT, this proves that every student learns differently and it is up to the teacher to

understand what his or her students need most in order for them to succeed academically.

Understanding the needs of the students and being able to adjust his or her approach to their

needs are the most important things to keep in mind if one wants to become a teacher. As such,

flexibility and understanding the students needs are the main elements to my philosophy as a

teacher.