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Teaching Philosophy

The document outlines the author's journey as a non-native English speaker and their motivation to become a teacher, focusing on creating a comfortable learning environment for students. The author employs various teaching approaches tailored to their students' ages and proficiency levels, emphasizing engagement through interactive methods like games, role-playing, and the use of props. Their teaching style prioritizes student involvement and comfort, with a structured lesson format that balances teacher input and student output.

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FatimaZahraZahraoui
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4 views3 pages

Teaching Philosophy

The document outlines the author's journey as a non-native English speaker and their motivation to become a teacher, focusing on creating a comfortable learning environment for students. The author employs various teaching approaches tailored to their students' ages and proficiency levels, emphasizing engagement through interactive methods like games, role-playing, and the use of props. Their teaching style prioritizes student involvement and comfort, with a structured lesson format that balances teacher input and student output.

Uploaded by

FatimaZahraZahraoui
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Teaching Purpose

I am a late comer to English language. I walked the walk and learned another
language. During my learning journey, I had really good teachers that inspired
me and really bad ones that almost made me give up on myself. I took an
English test to be able to start my Comparative Literature degree at college and
by the time I was a sophomore, I could read old English texts such as Beowulf,
could write essays about philosophy, understand and translate Shakespeare
sonnets, could understand anything I hear; however I was very self-conscious
about my speaking. Between my sophomore and junior years, I took a leave of
absence and went to US for a year. The first days were horrible for me. I was so
scared to open my mouth and make mistakes, I didn’t talk at all. I was with a
friend and he did all the talking. I was shaking my head “yes and no”. We were
somewhere and I heard people talking about me not being able to speak at all
but they were unaware of my listening skills. I felt so ashamed. After some time,
I got used to be in the US and started speaking slowly and finally got over my
fear.

That period of my life really shaped me as a person and I decided to be a


teacher. So my long term purpose as teacher is to makes sure that my students
feel comfortable enough to lower their affective filter and can practice in a safe
environment before going into the real world. That’s my priority. To ensure that,
I let myself loose and try to be funny and silly most of the times. Right now, I am
teaching Chinese kids online and even though they are kids, I can tell they feel
nervous when it is their turn to produce the language. I use a lot of TPR, games,
toys and puppets to create a fun environment. And my short term goal is to see
the results in terms of weeks. One of my students, Nikki -a 4 year old-, I have
been teaching her for 2 months now and last week she started speaking a lot.
She trusts me and feels comfortable with me and she is not looking at her
parents anymore. This feeling is why I love teaching so much!

Teaching Style

Which approach I use at my class generally depends on my students’ age, English


level, and their purpose but I, as a teacher, have a basic style that I arrange
according to those factors I described.

Right now, I am teaching Chinese kids between ages 4-12 online. My 3 basic
approaches are Communicative Approach, Comprehension Approach and
Affective Humanistic Approach. Communicative Approach is my base for
everything. My lessons are about connecting with my students and creating
awareness about other cultures while producing/receiving the language in
reading, writing, listening, speaking and grammar activities. My Chinese
students learn Western world thru English. They learn the mindset, habits,
customs and traditions of English speaking countries.

As I stated before, one of my priorities is to make my students comfortable


enough to produce the language in a safe environment I use Affective
Humanistic Approach a lot. I always decorate my classroom friendly. I have a
virtual classroom right now. I spent time thinking about my teaching
background and I try to prepare colorful, cozy and educative backgrounds that I
change time to time. Class decoration is big part of my teaching style since I use
it as any other teaching tool. For example, I had colorful letters, numbers, maps
behind me and I use them during lessons when we talk about the alphabet or
different countries. Another example is my Christmas decoration. I made a
fireplace from scratch and decorated it with Christmas ornaments and we
talked about Christmas for a minute for 2 weeks before Christmas or my new
background is winter themed one and now we are talking about seasons as a
class extension. So it is part of the lesson. And besides this, I use role playing
and games in every lesson. I find it very effective when working with kids. I use
puppets a lot during role playing.

For Comprehension Approach, I use toys, flashcards, accessories a lot. I dress up


a lot. I sing together with my students even though I have no talent in singing. I
just be silly with them. I encourage movement. We jump, we run (even in front
of the camera) we do a lot of actions. I use TPR a lot.

Besides these, each of my lessons has these parts: review of previous content,
new vocabulary and structure, listening to songs and watching short cartoons,
blending exercises (b+ack, t+ack, s+ack), some role playing activities with lots of
silly actions, short reading passages and writing activities if my students are old
enough. (Sometimes they are not)

Teaching Techniques

Right now, I am teaching Chinese kids between ages 4-12 online. My starting
point as a teacher is to use warm, welcoming and engaging language. I always
use some kinds of props to engage my students to the topic I will be teaching
that day. For example, if I am teaching about fruits, likes/dislikes, I bring real
and fake fruits to my classroom. Pretend eating them, make funny faces of
likes/dislikes and ask questions to my students about what they are seeing. I
always think about the first 2 minutes really carefully because I believe
engagement happens in those first minutes of the lesson. My attitude is always
warm and silly. I try to surprise my students and I love making my students
laugh and when they feel comfortable I slowly take their attention from me to
the topic that I am teaching. I use a lot of TPR.

I value student involvement a lot so for my beginner students I try %70 teacher
talk and %30 student talk, for my intermediate students %50,%50 and for my
upper intermediate and advanced students I let them %80 of speaking time, %
20 teacher time. I use modeling to encourage speaking and I love using puppets
for that purpose. For example, for my beginner students:
Me: Hello
The Puppet: Hello
Me: What is your name?
The puppet: My name is Mr. Green Head.
Me: How old are you?
The puppet: I am 4 years old.

After I model a dialogue between me and the puppet, I encourage my students


using TPR to take place of the puppet and then me and repeat the conversation.
In time, when they feel comfortable enough to produce the language by
themselves, I ask questions and leave the answers to them.

At the end of each lesson, I review very briefly everything we learned that day
and ask them questions and guide them in their answers if needed. Since I
already taught and modeled everything so far, this assessment part is generally
%20 teacher talk and %80 student talk even with the beginner students. So to
sum up my teaching timing (my lessons are 25 minutes long, not 60):
3 minutes to greet and warm up
10/8 minutes of teacher input: presenting the new language points
10/12 minutes of student output: students practice the language thru role play,
repeating, mimicking, answering questions and then producing the language in
a free talk format.
2 minutes of summary and feedback

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