Teaching Philosophy

You all might have this similar picture in your mind whenever you visualize a Foreign

Language (FL) class you once took, in which teacher stood in the front of the classroom,

sharing his/her valuable knowledge about the FL, and students sit on their seats in rows

quietly and passively trying to “receive” the knowledge without making efforts to figure out

themselves. The teacher, with no doubt, is knowledgeable about what to teach, however, the

learning process obviously is not that successful, because students might either let their mind

wander off the classroom or forget most of the content before the next class. Therefore, it’s

always easy to teach the knowledge but hard to help students learn it. And unlike the recalled

image, I think we should put emphasis on how to create a student-centered classroom in

which student could LEARN the language the best.

Students are not passive audience of a lecture, on the contrary, they are the major participants

of the language learning process. It is at least not effective or realistic, if not impossible, to

learn FL with all interpersonal, interpretive and presentational skills required without real

participation of students in this learning process. Students may tend to lose interests to what

is being taught because the long time lecturing will always bore people easily. Students

especially those who are sitting in the back or corner of the classroom may be distracted from

the class due to the less involvement in the class. In my career as a foreign language teacher, I

saw countless times that when the teacher dominated the class delivering knowledge all the

time, and students didn’t have enough opportunities to actively participated into the class,

most of them would automatically shielded the class, turning their attention

elsewhere--chatting with others, drawing a picture on the book or just sitting there idly.
On the contrary, if teacher could flip the class and “burden” the students with learning task,

they tend to be more active and responsible. In the student-centered classroom, students will

have more opportunities to learn important communicative and collaborative skills through

group work. Besides, students learn to direct their own learning, ask questions, and complete

tasks independently. So it can be imagined that students are more interested in learning

activities when they can interact with one another and participate actively. Class belongs to

students and the class time is also precious, it’s time to “return” the class to our learners.

In order to create an effective student-centered class, teacher should facilitate students’

self-learning of the target language with real-world activities or tasks. Real world tasks or

activities, in contrast to the mechanical drills, are meaningful and related to real world

problems, so students, with these clear purposes on mind, will be better motivated with strong

interests to try to acquire the new words, phrases and language skills individually or in a

group. For example, if a student has a task to make a travel plan to Beijing, China for their

family during the Christmas holiday, then she/he will feel she/he is obliged to take everything

into consideration to make a considerate plan, such as the weather there, the local

transportation, the flight, hotel, the luggage and so on. During the process, students will be

able to acquire the language better by solving the problem with peers interaction and

self-learning and etc.

In addition, to make the real world tasks more effective, teacher should provide support, clear

guidance, scaffolding of various kinds accordingly. According to sociocultural theory,

teachers are supposed to provide scaffolding for participants to construct a Zone of Proximal

Development (ZPD) when the tasks are slightly above learners current level and they are
unable to perform independently. The purpose is to enable learners to finally apply linguistic

features individually. In the student-centered class, more cognitively challenging and

context-embeded real world activities/tasks will be designed for learners to generate a pushed

output. Therefore, different forms of scaffolding are very necessary for a successful

accomplishment of the tasks by students. For instance, if the students are of intermediate

level, and the activities designed will be of the advanced low level. In this case, a teacher

needs to provide some scaffolding such as the key words, linking words, so students could fill

the gap and reach advanced low level of proficiency.

Corrective feedback of various kinds are critical to a successful student-centered class. Since

students are expected to learn the language themselves through solving the real world tasks,

they tend to focus on meaning instead of form especially when they are interacting with other

students, which means they will inevitability prioritize fluency over accuracy. According to

the Noticing Hypothesis that L2 learning will be improved when learners notice the linguistic

forms in the input. So the on-line and explicit feedback will provide students with an

opportunity to pay attention to the form while they are in the meaningful interaction without

sacrificing the fluency. Other feedback like Recast, Repetition or Clarification request can

also applied to minimize the disruption to the flow of conversation, but they sometimes are

too implicit to catch students attention.

Students are diverse in many ways, and the ways how they gather, sift through, interpret,

organize and organize, come to conclusions about, and “store”information for further use are

also widely apart from each other. So it is crucial to diagnose students learning styles and

tailor your teaching materials, classroom activities and the whole instruction accordingly. For
example, teaching materials should be selected scrupulously and the activities designed with

great care to meet the diverse or even totally opposite needs of students. You may need

involve pictures or a map to make the lecture more comprehensible for those visual learners;

You may want to integrate a short audio to please the aural students; You may also have to

add some hand-on activities in your class because some learners are ckinesthetic and will

learn better by “doing” it. So, taking into the consideration of different learning styles of

students, the goal of building an effective student-centered class will be more likely to be

achieved.

The learning process of another language is a process for the learners to learn with supports

from teacher rather than a process for the teacher to teach. Our learners are already ready to

take the responsibility to learn, all the teacher should do are creating a friendly environment,

providing necessary support, offering appropriate forms of corrective feedback in right time,

taking consideration of students learning styles, trust your students and then hand back the

class to them. They will never disappoint you.