Having completed all of my LTS courses, I now have a language teaching philosophy that I can say I truly believe in. I have combined my philosophy statements and statements of beliefs from three courses (LT 535, LT 536, LT 548) into a language teaching philosophy statement that includes concepts from all of the courses I have taken. In my philosophy statement, I include specific examples of work I have done to support my beliefs. The statement includes a lot of what I write about in the other areas of this capstone project, such as communicative and intercultural competence, needs assessment and student-centered teaching, differentiated instruction, constructive feedback, flipped learning, content-based instruction, task-based instruction, project-based instruction, use of authentic texts, translanguaging pedagogy, digitally-mediated learning, and inclusion of pragmatics, pronunciation, culture, and literature in language instruction.

Reflecting on my teaching experiences, I decided to share my Teaching Demonstration Reflection from the pronunciation course (LT 539) and my RUS 101 Internship Reflection. Even though I have experience teaching English, Spanish and Russian, both of the artifacts are about teaching Russian, since it is the language I have been teaching the most so far. I am not sure what language I will be teaching the most in the future, as I specifically chose this master’s program because it provided me with the flexibility of training and experience in all three languages. I also chose this program because I had flexibility in the ages of learners I would like to teach. Thus, my first artifact demonstrates teaching children, while the second one is about teaching adults. 

In LT 539, we taught a short pronunciation lesson of our choice with our classmates taking the role of the students in the context of our choice. I chose to teach a segmental lesson on the Russian [ɨ] sound, which is one of the most difficult sounds for young Russian heritage learners to produce. It is also a very important sound, as it affects intelligibility. In the lesson, I demonstrated to students through a short story how pronouncing [ɨ] like an [i] sound can change the meaning of a word. I included activities from all five steps of the Communicative Framework for Teaching Pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010). 

The feedback I received from my peers helped me see the lesson “from the outside.” I received the most positive comments about framing the lesson by starting out with a story context and also about the circle/water bottle game, which got students moving. The suggestions I received mostly revolved around description and analysis. My peers felt that it would be a good idea to incorporate more explanation and include visuals of the mouth position(s). I agree with my peers that more description and analysis might be beneficial. This was probably the weakness in my demonstration. In future lessons, which I will be teaching my real students, I will try to find a video where they can see the mouth diagram, with the tongue moving, while hearing the change in sounds. I also agree with my peers that my strength overall was making the lesson engaging for young learners - I put in a much effort into planning that. I enjoy teaching children and I have some experience, so I think my peers noticed that.

Even though I enjoy teaching children, I would like to teach adults more. That is why I am grateful that I had the opportunity to intern in a university first-year Russian language class (RUS 101). One of the most valuable lessons I learned during that term was how to give directions to students who are just starting to learn Russian. I know it is important to use as much target language as possible, but it is a balancing act between comprehensible input and overwhelming input. I came across challenges in giving directions because I am a native Russian speaker and had no experience teaching a classroom full of adult beginners. For example, sometimes I would use too much English when giving instructions. I am grateful that the instructor would email me afterwards with tips on how to use more TL. The instructor also let me know when I used too much TL, or in a way that was overwhelming. To prevent these challenges, I tried to carefully observe the instructor, take notes, and copy when it came time for me to teach.

During the internship, I also experienced adapting to student needs. Initially, the instructor and I had planned to incorporate plenty of cultural exposure through daily routines. We had “City of the Day,” “Weather of the Day,” “Number of the Day,” and “Word/Phrase of the Day”. Four days a week, we would start the first five-or-so minutes of class with these for the purpose of cultural exposure (DeCapua, 2018). With scaffolding, it is possible to expose even novice learners to the culture(s) of those who speak the target language. We had planned them to complement each lesson. Students seemed to be accepting of the daily routines. However, by the middle of the term, the instructor realized that this specific class would benefit more from repetitive drills than from the daily routines. About half the class was still struggling with the alphabet well into the middle of the term. At the same time, there were other students who were far ahead of the struggling students. This made a very non-homogenous class in terms of student needs. For this reason, the instructor took away the daily routines. Instead, she provided more scaffolding and repetition. She also asked me to assist the two lowest-achieving students with all in-class work. At the same time, to meet the needs of the more proficient students, every day she wrote on the board extra workbook assignments they could work on if they finished early. Though this might sound repetitive and uninteresting, they too needed the extra assignments. Ideally, the extra work would have benefited all the students, but it was not possible to cover all the required material by spending so much time on every topic.

This internship gave me the opportunity to practice techniques and strategies we had learned in the LTS program. I could have simply taught the activities from the textbook, but that would have gone against all of the research-based principles we had studied. Some things I tried out were successful, such as asking students to close their eyes and give a thumbs up, to the side, or down to a specific question as a way to gauge how much explanation I would need to do of the grammar point students were instructed to learn by completing homework the night before. Other activities I tried, such as the fluency circle, needed a little bit of modifying. I adapted practice from the textbook into a fluency circle activity. When I was planning the lesson, I decided to use a timer, as was done when I learned about fluency lines. However, when I put this into practice, I quickly realized that the timer was not useful in this case. I first changed it to fewer seconds, but students still finished early, so I abandoned the timer altogether. Afterwards, the instructor suggested that the timer is useful with open-ended questions, but since students were giving a close-ended response in this case, the timer was not necessary, especially because students in first term cannot say much past 20 seconds. Teacher observations were enough in this case.

Knowing the theories of language teaching is good, but being able to use them successfully is achieved through trial and error. Writing out a teaching philosophy is also one of the steps necessary in evaluating one’s own teaching practices. I have seen my teaching philosophy evolve throughout my time in the LTS program. I would like to print it out as a reminder to myself when I am teaching and to share with prospective employers. I will also continue to reflect on and make changes in the way I teach languages. I believe that a great teacher is one who is also a student, and I consider myself a lifelong learner. I hope that my current and future students are also inspired to continue learning beyond the classroom.