Describing Teachers (V)

What is a teacher?
- How teachers see themselves:
a) Actors
b) Orchestral conductors
c) Gardeners
- ‘Teaching means to give (someone) knowledge or to instruct or train (someone)’.
- ‘to show somebody how to do something or to change somebody’s ideas’.

The Roles of a Teacher

- Their role may change from one activity to another or from one stage of an activity to
another.
- All roles aim to facilitate the students’ progress in some way or another.

Controller
- Teachers are in charge of the class and of the activity taking place.
- They take roles, tell students things, organize drills, read aloud and in various ways
exemplify the qualities of a teacher-fronted classroom.
- In many educational contexts, the controller is the most common teacher role
- Moments when acting as a controller makes sense: making announcements, bringing
class to order, giving explanations, lecturing, organizing question and answer work.
- Drawbacks: it denies students access to their own experiential learning by focusing
everything on the teacher, it cuts down on opportunities for students to speak, lack of
variety in activities and classroom atmosphere.

Prompter
- When we prompt, we need to do it sensitively and encouragingly, but with discretion.
- Drawbacks: if we are too adamant, we risk taking initiative away from the student, if we
are too retiring, we may not supply the right amount of encouragement.

Participant
- Teachers may want to join in an activity not as a teacher, but as a participant in their own
right.
- For the teacher, participating is more enjoyable than acting as a resource.
- Students will enjoy having the teacher with them.
- Drawbacks: teachers can easily dominate the proceedings.
Resource
- When we are acting as a resource, we will want to be helpful and available, but not to the
extent where students become over-reliant on us.
- No teacher knows everything about the language!
- However, we should be able to offer guidance as to where students can go look for that
information.
- Teachers can be one of the most important resources students have when they:
a) Ask how to say or write something
b) Want to know what a word or phrase means
c) Want to know information in the middle of an activity about that activity or wher to
look for something

Tutor
- Teachers work with individuals or small groups, pointing them in directions they have not
yet thought of taking (combining the roles of prompter and resource – i.e. a tutor).
- The term implies a more intimate relationship than that of a controller or organizer.
- In this more personal contact, the learners have a real chance to feel supported and helped.

Organizer
- Teachers organize students to do various tasks.
- Organizing students involves: giving them information, telling them how they are going to
do the activity, putting them into pairs or groups, stop the activity it is time to stop.
- When organizing something teachers need to get the students involved, engaged and ready.
- Drawbacks: if the instructions are not clear, students will no understand what they are
supposed to do and may not get full advantage from an activity.
- Summary of the role on an organizer:
Engage Instruct (demonstrate) Initiate Organize feedback

Assessor
- A teacher acts as an assessor when:
a) He/she offers feedback and correction
b) Grades students in various ways
c) Indicates whether or not students are getting their English right
- Students need to know what for and how they are being assessed.
- In this way, they will have a clear idea of what they need to concentrate on.
- Drawbacks: misuse of fairness, when facing a poor performance and constructive
criticism is not offered; students tend to feel unhappy, we should not make them feel that
 they are being unfairly judged, a bad grade can be made more acceptable if it’s given with
sensitivity.

Observer
- He/she observes what the students are doing, as well as the materials and activities.
- Success – gives us a different feel for how well our students are doing.
- Teachers need to be able to switch between the various roles, judging when it is appropriate
to use one or the other.
- Teachers need to be aware of how they carry out selective activities and tasks.

The Teacher as a Performer

- Different teachers naturally perform differently
- Each teacher has many different performance styles depending on the situation.
- Describing how teachers play their roles:

Rapport
- The relationship that the students have with the teacher and vice versa.
- Successful interaction with students depends on four key characteristics:
a) Recognizing students: students want their teachers to know who they are (their names
or some understanding of their characters). Good rapport involves knowing the
students’ names (although it is difficult).
b) Listening to students: students respond well to teachers who listen to them. Teachers
need to make themselves available in order to listen to students’ individual opinions
and concerns (along with eye contact and generally looking interested).
c) Respecting students: being too critical might demotivate the students, while too much
praise will result in them needing approval all the time. Students need to know that
teachers are treating them with respect, and not use mockery or sarcasm.
 d) Being even-handed: treating all students equally not only helps to establish and
maintain rapport but is also a mark or professionalism. ‘A good teacher is someone
who asks the people who don’t always put their hands up’.

The Teacher as a Teaching Aid

a) Mime and Gesture: the ability of using our body to convey meaning and atmosphere.
They work best when they are exaggerated (shrugging shoulders to indicate indifference,
gestures to indicate big, small, etc.).
b) The Teacher as Language Model: students get models of language from textbooks,
reading materials of all sorts and from audio and video tapes. Reading passages aloud can
capture imagination and mood like nothing else (the reading needs to be ‘performed’ in an
interesting and committed way, but not too frequently).
c) The Teacher as Provider of Comprehensible Input: language students understand the
meaning of slightly above their own production level. The teachers sometimes have to take
register, ask for quiet or suggest that students get into pairs and groups. However, there
needs to be a combination of STT and TTT (student talking time & teacher talking time).
d) Native-Speaker Teachers and Non-Native-Speaker Teachers: non-native-speaker
teachers needed to establish their ‘credibility as teachers of English’. Native-speakerism is
characterized by the belief that “native speaker” teachers represent the ideals of language
and methodology. Advantages of non-native-speaker teachers: the same experience of
learning English as their students, able to maximize the benefits of L1 and L2. Advantages
of native-speaker teachers: linguistic confidence about their language.

Describing Learning Context (VI)

The Place and Means of Instruction
a) Schools and Language Schools: students learn English in primary and secondary
classrooms. They have not chosen to do this themselves but learn because English is on the
curriculum.
b) In-School and In-Company: In schools, language schools, colleges and universities
teachers have to be aware of school policy and conform to syllabus and curriculum
decisions. In companies, teachers may need to negotiate the class content (with the students
and whoever is paying for the tuition).
c) Real and Virtual Learning Environments: in both real and virtual learning environments
students need to be motivated and teachers need to offer help in that area. However, some
students find it more difficult to sustain their motivation online than they might as part of
a real learning group.
Class Size
- Teaching One-To-One: Advantages;
a) In a private lesson the teacher is focused exclusively on one person
b) The student has opportunities to do all the student speaking
c) Teacher and student can tailor the course to what is appropriate for that one student
d) Students get greatly enhanced feedback from their teachers
e) It is much easier to be flexible when teaching individual students

- Disadvantages;
a) Rapport
b) Some teachers find individual students difficult to deal with
c) Some students are lacking confidence or untalkative for other reasons
d) Some students find the teacher’s methodological style difficult to deal with
e) Students and teachers can often become tired or sleepy
f) Students can be very demanding

Guidelines:
1. Make a good impression: a good impression is created by the way we present
ourselves and how we behave during the first lesson.
2. Be well-prepared: think beforehand what we are going to do in the lesson (if we come
well-prepared and with a range of possible activities, it will boost the students’
confidence in us).
3. Be flexible: if language work is proving more or less difficult than anticipated, we will
it easy to change the pace, move forwards or go back to something we studied earlier.
4. Adapt to the student: we can adapt what we do to suit particular student’s preferences
and learning style.
5. Listen and watch: we need to be extremely observant about how individual students
respond to different activities, styles and content.
6. Give explanations and guidelines: it is important to explain what is going to happen,
and how the student can contribute to the programme they are involved in.
7. Don’t be afraid to say no: we should say no in two specific situations: when the
personality match with a student is unsuccessful (be prepared to terminate the classes
or make alternative arrangements) and when the student’s demands are excessive (we
cannot do everything they are asking for).
 Large Classes
- Key elements:
1. Be organized: the bigger the group, the more we have to be organized and know what
we are going to do before the lesson starts.
2. Establish routines: the daily management of large classes will be enhanced if we
establish routines that we and our students recognize immediately.
3. Use a different pace for different activities: if we are conducting drills, we may be
able to work at a fast pace, but if we are asking students to think about something, we
need to slow down the pace.
4. Maximize individual work: the more we can give students individual work, the more
we can mitigate the effects of working with a large group ‘as a whole’.
5. Use students: we can give students a number of different responsibilities in the class
(collect homework, hand out worksheets, etc.).
6. Use worksheets: when the feedback stage is reached, teachers can go through the
worksheets with the whole group.
7. Use pairwork and groupwork: they maximize student participation.
8. Use chorus reaction: it may be appropriate to use students in chorus.
9. Take account of vision and acoustics: we have to ensure that what we show/write can
be seen and what we say/play can be heard.
10. Use the size of the group to your advantage: the lecturing, acting and joking offered
in such a situation can be beneficial.

Managing Mixed Ability

- In a differentiated classroom there are a variety of learning options designed around students’
different abilities and interests

Working with Different Content

- Teachers can provide students with different needs with different material (student A:
newspaper about a topic, student B: website to research the same topic).
- When teachers offer different content, they allow students to make choices.
- However, it may cause a problematic situation (it involves much more preparation time
and giving feedback to a number of different tasks is rather complicated).

Different Student Actions

1. Give students different tasks: same text, different tasks for it (charts and tables, open-
ended and multiple-choice questions, etc.).
2. Give students different roles: within a task we can give students different roles.
3. Reward early finishers: offer such students extension tasks to reward their efforts and
encourage them further.
4. Encourage different student responses: we can give the same materials and tasks but
expect different student responses to them. Flexible tasks are tasks which make a virtue out
of differences between students.
5. Identify student strengths (linguistic or non-linguistic): the teacher can include tasks
which do not demand linguistic brilliance but instead allows students to show off their
talents (good artists – make posters or wall charts, for example).

What the Teacher Does

a) Responding to students: flexible response is one of the main aspects of differentiation.
However, we need to make sure that in spending time with particular groups we do not
ignore or exclude others.
b) Being inclusive: the teacher’s task is to include and engage everyone.
c) Flexible groupings: teachers might put students in different groups to do different tasks
or put students at different levels in the same group.

Realistic Mixed-Ability Teaching

- Ideal classroom: to have the time and opportunity to work with individuals-as-individuals.
- Teachers need to work in what is possible and what is not.
- Learner autonomy is the ultimate achievement of differentiation.
- If we can get individual students to take responsibility for their own learning, they are
acting autonomous individuals, and differentiation has thus been achieved.

Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual

- Foreign-language students and their first language: English is the medium of
communication in a classroom. Sometimes students translate what they are learning in their
heads. Therefore, switching between L1 and L2 develops naturally. Our identity is shaped
to some extent by the language or languages we learn as children. Students operate in the
classroom in their L1 and in the language they are studying. Whether students grow up
mono- or bilingually, they are likely to be operating in more than one language.

The Benefits of Using the L1 in the L2 Classroom

1. It can be used in planning, self-evaluation and learner training, because these topics can be
discussed fluently in the L1.
2. It is useful for students to notice the differences between their L1 and L2
3. Translation exercises (activities)
4. If the teachers want to explain things or help students, teachers will have more success
using L1
5. Students can use L1 to keep the social atmosphere of the class in good repair.

Disadvantages:
1. The teacher may not always share the students’ L1
2. It can restrict the students’ exposure to English
3. Teachers can sometimes find themselves using the L1 more than they intended
4. When we are encouraging students to use English in communicative speaking tasks (to
give them a chance to try speaking in English)

Conclusions:
- Acknowledge the L1
- Use appropriate L1, L2 activities
- Differentiate between levels
- Make clear guidelines
- Use encouragement and persuasion during speaking activities