Teaching Philosophy
What do I believe about teaching and learning foreign languages?
The essay below presents key principles that I use to guide my language teaching and also explains how I carry out those principles in my classroom. As an educator, it is my belief that learning is never complete. I am learning new concepts all the time from my colleagues, from the current research literature on language learning and teaching, as well as from my students. I am a better teacher each year because of these three factors.
In sum, my language teaching philosophy revolves around several key points that I have learned and that have been reinforced for me during my time in the MAFLT program. Among those points are:
Language learning is cognitive, and this involves input in the target language
Language learning is also a social process; interaction in and with the language allows students to make sense of it in different ways
Students use feedback from the teacher and from each other in different ways, mediating their language use based on this feedback
Grammar can and should be incorporated into the language classroom, but through what we call "focus on form" which focuses on meaning via language presented in class. Oftentimes, I will help students construct their grammatical knowledge via meaning-based activities that also include the use of authentic resources
For me, the "formula" to language acquisition consists of input + mediation + interaction. The focus is not on covering content or getting through a scope and sequence. The focus is on students and their language learning experience!
Stanko_TPhilo_portfolio.docxTeaching Philosophy--started during my very first semester in the MAFLT program in September 2019! It has been revised once in Fall 2021, and revised a final time during Spring 2022, my final semester in the program. To say I have learned so much would be an understatement.
I entered the program, ready for the readings and professors to confirm what I had known: "Comprehensible Input" approaches were THE best methods, hands down.
What I learned was astonishing, humbling, and, for the most part, logical. We need to think about our students' needs first and foremost, as well as the purpose and goal of the activity/lesson/unit/course. Certain approaches will be more suitable for certain portions of a lesson or activity.
