Teaching

Teaching Philosophy Statement

The first artifact is my teaching philosophy. As it states, I believe that learning a second language allows learners to open many more doors than possible with only one language; it allows them to become global citizens and explore the diverse cultures and people that live throughout the world. The language classroom should reflect this communicative and diverse nature of language. Communicative language teaching in general (Brown & Lee, 2015) along with other teaching approaches such as task-based language teaching afford students opportunities to co-construct language and view language as a tool for communication rather than a list of grammar rules and vocabulary words. Teachers are not just transmitters of knowledge, but are facilitators of learning, managers of activities, and fellow humans. Yes, different contexts will call on a teacher to lean more into one kind of role, but finding balance and accepting that you are viewed as many different things all at once is key to creating an environment where students feel safe and willing to communicate in their second language (Brown & Lee, 2015). In my own teaching, I believe in using student-centered activities such as group discussions, jigsaws, and small group presentations to allow students to learn from each other and build their agency as language learners. Student-directed activities help learners build critical thinking skills—they start to think critically about why they choose to learn and use a language which leads to embodiment. My teaching philosophy is a general overview of my beliefs as a teacher. Language is a complex subject, and learners have many reasons to begin learning one. As a teacher, my goal is to help learners meet their goals while also realizing just what language is: a tool for communication and a door to a whole new world. 

LT 537 - Second Language Teaching Practicum

Talking With Ducks Teaching Reflection

The next two artifacts are reflections from teaching experiences as part of the LTS program. The first is a reflection of a lesson I co-created and co-taught with fellow LTS MA student Bibi Halima during LT 537, our English teaching practicum. This reflection focused on clarity of instructions, my energy and teaching persona, use of support such as gestures and visuals, as well as reflection on the development of activities and materials post-implementation. This was one of four reflections I did in this same context, as I took this practicum course twice. When I look at my development over just one year between my first iteration of the practicum and this teaching reflection, I can see that my clarity of voice, energy and engagement with students, and use of supportive materials have all positively increased the effectiveness of my teaching. Gesture itself is very important for communicating sometimes complex instructions, as it assists in listening comprehension by contextualizing speech (Dahl & Ludvigsen, 2014). For example, when explaining bingo during this lesson, I used the sheet itself and drew my finger across the sheet while explaining the different ways five-in-a-row could be created. The activities that Halima and I chose for this lesson also focused more on communication between students and their group leaders—fitting for the conversations course we were co-leading that day. Although there was some covert teacher control, students were free to choose how to phrase questions to learn whether someone could fill a slot on their bingo sheet, aligning with our goal of developing some learner agency among this group of learners. 

This group also had a highly variable level of proficiency—learners ranged from novice to advanced—meaning that Halima and I would need to be considerate in finding ways to differentiate the materials and activities so all learners could participate and use English. One way we accomplished this was by including definitions of certain terms on the bingo sheet. For example, we provided definitions of the terms ‘early bird’ and ‘night owl’. We used specific verbs such as ‘obsessed’ and ‘enrolled’ to provide intermediate-level terms while contrasting those with bingo slots that included simpler vocabulary such as ‘speak’ and ‘likes’. This differentiation helped all learners participate in the activity (Tomlinson, 2014). We also encouraged learners to expand on the conversation if they could; novice learners could just ask the question, but advanced learners would try to have a conversation. This teaching experience provided me with an opportunity to act as a facilitator and manager. It gave me a chance to work with a diverse group of learners and practice implementing differentiation strategies, while also improving my use of nonverbal support, my clarity of speech, and my volume levels. 

LT 439 - Design for Language Learning Pronunciation

Tutoring Report

The final artifact is a reflection from a set of three tutoring sessions I did with a fellow SLAT student, Lauren Hudson, during LT 439. This tutoring gave me practice in teaching pronunciation to an expert speaker already in a PhD program at the University of Oregon. Specifically, we worked with an L1 French speaker who had been learning English for many years and had been exposed to it in her community growing up. Although her English was already at a highly proficient level, she wanted to work on her accent and some areas of pronunciation. This intrinsic motivation to improve her pronunciation showed up in her work ethic and desire to learn as much as she could during the short period. We started with a diagnostic session to determine which areas needed the most help—this acted as a needs analysis in two major ways: Our learner was able to express what she wanted to work on while we determined which areas could help her accomplish her goal. We started with segmental features such as some lax and tense vowel work and then moved on to suprasegmental features such as word stress. We utilized the five-step communicative framework (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010) to include elements focused on isolated sounds as well as communicative tasks that applied the linguistically-focused work to her communication in English. This tutoring provided a different kind of experience teaching: working one-on-one (or two-on-one in this case) with a learner and focusing on more individualized content. Although it was brief, the learner’s comments still resonate with me; she felt she had gained a lot of helpful tips for practicing on her own after the sessions were over.