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.

In my classroom, I focus on encouraging students not to learn Spanish but to acquire the language in a more natural way. To demonstrate this philosophy to my students I like to do a Tennis Ball Demonstration.

In my classroom, we use the 50% philosophy. This means that their acquiring of the language is 50% my responsibility and 50% their responsibility. This means that I have to provide them with loads of input but they have to do the work with the input to actually acquire the language. This makes my class a team effort rather than solely on me or the students. We work together to build our language skills through a variety of different inputs.