YONGHWAN'S PORTPOLIO

  One formidable truth that is too certain to me is that it is not such an easy game to be a good English teacher. Not a day passed without being conscious and a little guilty of the reality in my English classroom after a teaching lesson. A third of the students came to me without any passion or interest for English, and another third of the rest also would later give up learning English. To overcome this miserable situation and to be a better English teacher, I made up my mind and registered for a TESOL MA. During this course, I met and learned some valuable theories and came to seriously think about the why’s and how’s of English. While I follow the road of teaching, I will bear in mind the next three important things.

 

First, I have to always remember, like the old saying “even though you can lead a horse to a stream, but you cannot make the horse drink water by any force,” that although I want to deliver a really precious lesson, students cannot learn from the lesson unless they open their minds and are ready to take whatever the lesson is. The affective filter hypothesis from Krashen (1977)’s Monitor Model shows me how I should lower the level of the student’ negative responses such as worry, anxiety or boredom at the beginning of class and during the class to help students to be interested, engaged and ready for the learning. The effect will maximize the effect if students are allowed to personalize each lesson and use their own questions.

 

Second, it is about the question of retaining and retrieving of information. Human being’s representative feature is forgetfulness (Goodwin, 1987), and we are prone to forget everything as soon as possible. English is made up of an enormous amount of words, phrases, grammar, and so on, and it is almost impossible for children to learn and memorize at the same time except for really talented students. Their rate of forgetfulness and failure is so steep due to the fact that most lessons only encourage rote learning, which is when students memorize facts exactly without relating the content to themselves or what they already know. But Ausubel (1962)’s Subsumption theory gives a great solution. If I make a lesson meaningful to my students or students make it meaningful to themselves, or teach and let them practice categorizing the new lesson and subsume it under their already existing structure of better knowledge with systematic pruning, I believe that they will retain the information in their long term memory. Task-based instruction will be helpful for me to achieve this goal by providing opportunities for them to participate actively with greater motivation towards task and activities, co-operate with each other in groups leading to meaningful interaction, and making the memories more special to them and easy to remember.

 

Third learning English is not just a passive activity where students only receive input; students that really learn English can both understand and use it. We do not learn English to keep it to ourselves, but to use it for various purposes. And Swain (1985)’s output hypothesis gave me a fresh impression and helped me to have a new perspective. Swain (1985) claims that children’s output ultimately would lead to fluency, which is known as automatization. If the role of English is for us to communicate and interact with each other, I should give more chances for my students to produce English. While trying to express their thoughts in spoken or written form, students will be more fluent, whether their saying is right or wrong, and discern what they think they can do and what they really can do, this will lead to further noticing and modifying their developing second language system and let them know what they should know and try again. Language games, role play, picture strip story and readers theater will be satisfactory and sufficient activities for students to interact and output with interest.

 

While I was writing this philosophy, I came to know the importance of how I should organize my English class, how I should approach and deal with children’s socio-cognitive problems and motivation factor, and how I lead them to proficiency and automatization. There are a lot of language learning theories to learn, which I cannot cover here and I want to absorb and integrate into myself. Even though my knowledge is not complete, nor perfect, but I know that I will always try to change and to be a better person and teacher.

 

References

Ausubel, II.P. (1962). A subsumtion theory of meaningful verbal learning and retention. Journal of General Psychology, 66. 213-244.

Goodwin, C. 1987. ‘Forgetfulness as an interactive resource’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 50: 115–30.

Krashen, S, (1977). The monitor model for adult second language performance. In M. Burt, H. Dulay, & M, Finocchiaro (Eds), Viewpoints on English as a second Language, New York: Regents,

Swain, M. 1985. Communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass and C. Madden (eds), Input in Second Language Acquisition (pp. 235–253). Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.