Quang Dang Le

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MY CHANGE THROUGH TIME

Beliefs about teaching methodology

To begin with, teaching was not what I initially aimed for when I studied at university or even
when I first got into the workforce. Therefore, through my one a half year of teaching, my
viewpoints, beliefs, and classroom practices have shifted considerably as I have been learning
from my mistakes in class, my peers, and mostly from my students.

According to Calderhead (1996), there are five essential beliefs that Language Teachers have:
● Beliefs about learners and learning
● Beliefs about teaching
● Beliefs about the subject
● Beliefs about learning to teach
● Beliefs about self and the teaching role

Since I am a language learner myself, when I started teaching, my beliefs about learners and
learning was from a learner’s standpoint, which was that to be able to learn well, students only
needed to complete the homework given. However, after a short period, I soon realized that
finishing these practices were not enough to produce language efficiency, as they cannot apply
what they learned into a real-life context. Learning a language, as I realized, should not be a
passive process that students follow the teachers’ directions and finish the practices in the
textbooks, but should be an active process that the scholars can initiate their study by actively
finding and researching information for their leaning under the teachers’ instructions.

Consequently, the alteration in beliefs about learners and learning led to the change in my
perspective of teaching. Initially, I believed the teacher should be the center of the class, control
students’ activities, and head the pupils to the directions that they aimed for. However, as I
realized that my students could make much better progress in their learning when they study for
their interests, I gradually let them be the leaders of the class. In my class, students can pick
their topics, learn at their own pace, and the assessment process is based on what has been
discussed in the classroom. This also affects my views about myself and the role I have in
class. I believe teachers should provide a comfortable learning environment, I view myself as a
facilitator, and the majority of student’s time in class is dedicated to tasks that help students
improve a specific set of skills.

As for my beliefs about the subject, which is English, I believe what I teach is no more just a
subject at school or a test for people to go abroad, but more on a communicative aspect. By
that, I mean English, just like any other language, should be used for communication, and the
learners should be able to convey what they have learned into real-life situations. Hence,
English, as a subject at school, ought to focus more on practical practices rather than total
structural lessons, which is how it is taught at most Vietnamese schools.

However, my beliefs about learning to teach have not changed through this one-and-a-half-year
journey. Since I did not receive proper training on teaching, I know I lack effective methods to
deliver knowledge to my students. Thus, I always want to learn how to teach from all sources I
can find, from observing my peers to enrolling in teaching courses. By doing so, I am now able
to imply suitable teaching methods to different types of students, and I will continue to learn
about pedagogy as long as I am still a teacher.

Classroom practices

As my beliefs in teaching methodology vary, so do my classroom practices. Here are some

examples of how my practices have altered in 4 sets of skills in English teaching.

In my first few months teaching English, IELTS to be specific, I stuck to the traditional way of
learning, which is providing students reading and listening materials and input on vocabulary in
lists, and I expected them to learn the words by heart and finish the questions one by one. To a
certain extent, it was effective; however, I could not help but notice that my students were bored
and they wanted something more intriguing in class. For speaking and writing, I used to
introduce them with the structures of the texts and how the answers should be, then after they
presented their answers, I gave them feedback and improvement that could be made in lexical
resources and grammar structures and variety. Although this conventional method of teaching
produced decent results to my scholars’ study, it did not give them space to think creatively, and
when it came to students at a higher level, the effect of this method was constrained due to the
absence of critical thinking and flexibility in learning.

After that, I started to try new things in my teaching. I came up with an idea that instead of
teaching each skill set separately, I would use one topic chosen by the students, and provide
them with lots of related materials in audiovisual from newspapers to online videos for them to
have a deeper understanding on that particular phenomenon. They can practice listening by
transcribing audios to text or improve their reading by highlighting the main ideas and
information from various articles. From the vocabulary from these sources, they can work in
groups or individuals to make a presentation or a piece of writing about their own opinion on that
particular topic. Since this style of study gives the students more freedom in class, they tend to
be more active and give them opinions quite regularly in class, which assists their critical
thinking development and their fluency in the language.

Nevertheless, this task-based language teaching method could be unsuitable for beginners, as
their input level is still not enough to process these tasks. Therefore, in a course, I usually begin
with the more conventional way to build a good base for my students before changing to the
new method.
Personally, adapting to new methods of teaching is harder than changing beliefs and the main
reason is in the process itself. To create effective teaching methods, the teachers have to go
through several trials in their class, which can be failures at times. It can strongly affect the
teachers’ image and lead to confusion in class when the teachers are unfamiliar with the
method. Besides, unexpected events could take place during the trial, and if the teachers are
not experienced enough to handle the situation, it can be harmful to students’ study
performance. Furthermore, language teachers need to have good observation skills to identify
the difficulties that students may face during the process and give effective and immediate
instructions to solve the problems.