Teaching

I have taught English as an aid and friend to international students wanting to learn American English vernacular and phrases. I have worked as a tutor for adult English learners to improve their basic English communication skills and improve their English for a specific purpose. Most recently, I spent the last three years as an English teacher in Wajima, Ishikawa, teaching elementary and junior high schools while assisting Japanese teachers of English (JTEs), and evaluating my experiences teaching abroad with how I taught in the States. After taking this program, I feel as though I have not only grown as a teacher and language learner but have now recognized what I need to value in terms of how I would like to manage my classroom and solidify my teaching statements and ideals. I have the belief that lessons and activities should be engaging for language learners and that the resources can expand from traditional classrooms and further with other various genres, modes, and multiliteracies. That they are able to receive something after the end of the class and can improve what they learned at home. For language teaching, it should be vital that the instructor is passionate about what they are doing, and that they are a personal stakeholder of the language, rather than just the class. My belief is that in order to create a safe, comfortable learning environment, a teacher must be able to connect with their students and engage in ideas that are comfortable for the learner, and understand the rate of acquisition. I had a couple of years of teaching experience before the LTS program, where I began engaging in courses that involved teaching or discovering what qualifies as my teaching philosophy. This reflection explains how I can further understand what my exact roles are for teaching and what constitutes my beliefs for teaching.

In this reflection on teaching, I will be discussing my statement of beliefs on teaching from LT 548 and two reflection reports of my experiences in teaching, one from LT 537 and the other a personal reflective report on my teaching in Japan. The final reflection report on teaching will be based on my experience after finishing three years of teaching English as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT).

LT 548 was Curriculum and Materials Development, where we constructed and developed a curriculum based on the context of the language and our professional interests and professions. Continuing from previous artifacts from area 2 (Design), this artifact focuses on my philosophy on teaching and the implications for those beliefs. My artifact from LT 548 was a report on my “Statement of Beliefs” that we had to create for the context of the curriculum that we were designing. The course focused on designing and developing a language curriculum to teach based on a preferred context. My course was teaching advanced Japanese to adult learners at an American university through observing, analyzing, and reporting on Japanese films and their historical and cultural relevance. This artifact contained four beliefs that I felt were important to elaborate on when it came to teaching in my context of learning: encouraging students to use different modes and multiliteracies for engaging language learning, instructors should understand the language they are teaching, and have a personal stake with it, understanding that all students have a different rate of learning and acquisition, and the instructor should create a comfortable and engaging learning environment for the students. I chose this artifact as part of my reflection because I felt like these statements, after polishing and revising during the course, have provided me with a teaching philosophy that can work with any context of language teaching and will build on the foundation of how I would want to run a classroom. These statements represent a reflection on a part of my teaching philosophy by expanding on the simple idea that when teaching a language, it will take time for the students to understand the content and context that they are learning from. It is important that the students can enjoy themselves and comprehend the material as they are learning; otherwise, it will become difficult to retain new information if they are unable to find it relevant to themselves or are not enjoying it. Providing learning materials and resources that would catch the interests of learners who are unmotivated or unwilling to look through traditional textbooks will help their motivation toward language learning. Being invested in the language being taught works by connecting with the students and helps build a better and more comfortable learning environment through understanding the challenges of building fluency and comprehension in their targeted skills and helping foster new ideas for the students to present in the class. I love teaching and working with students in improving their communication skills and seeing their improvement happen gradually. Layered with my beliefs, I need to establish a classroom that allows for open communication between myself and my students.

LT 537 was Second Language Teaching Practice, where the artifact contains a transcription of one of the activities I taught in the course with a report on what I thought about that week of teaching. For the students of the course, primarily for the LTS cohorts, the class worked in favor of developing lesson plans and materials for students interested in taking an elective during their study abroad. The international students would get to interact and be taught by local UO students in English, and the cohorts would gain experience and feedback on their activities, how open we were, and what we could improve on. My artifact for the reflection report on my teaching experiences is from LT 537, where the artifact first depicts a dictation of myself speaking in front of the class as the leading instructor for that activity. The context of the activity was continuing the theme of travel (previously described in Area 3: Digitally-Mediated Language Learning (DMLL), with the task consisting of the students selecting 5 out of 20 objects they would put in a suitcase and creating an itinerary of where they would go and what they would do. I further discuss my thoughts on the video recording, the activities we did for that week, and what I reflected on from the class as a whole. In a casual context of teaching adult learners, I was able to reflect on the advice given to me by my cohort and instructors during that term, and my previous teaching experience helped improve how I would bring attention back to myself and how to simplify what needs to be said in a group with varying levels of English. It truly was a wonderful teaching experience, I was surrounded by cohorts who had the drive and desire for teaching languages. Having students that were willing to add an additional class to their already busy schedules and improve their English communication skills allowed us to work on teaching a second language to them. While either working in groups or floating in between classes, I was able to observe the various levels of English used by students, identify which ones were more outgoing vs. shy, and analyze positive and negative reactions in group work. I was able to work on slowing down and speaking clearly when teaching, and I need to simplify specific vocabulary and grammar based on the overall level of English.

My second reflection report is a recollection of my time with the Japanese Exchange Teaching (JET) Program and experiencing different teaching methods, classroom structure, and cultural differences. The first comment is that it was the greatest and most memorable experience of my life when it comes to teaching, as well as having to adapt to new teaching methods and English learning during COVID, before and after the administration of vaccines. I gained a new understanding of how Japanese schools are instructed and what some teachers had to do for their students, with myself being a helpful aid for those wanting assistance with reading and short explanations of words or needing my help with English speaking and writing for teachers who had little to no experience. I remember having to often prepare for lessons and activities the day before arriving at the classrooms, needing to go through the material and determine what level of English I need to use based on the students. I experienced cultural differences with students not being too creative with some of their work assignments, the observation being that it was often easier to work and use the prompt than it was to come up with their own material. I experienced joy and fulfillment during lessons where we would play games like Jeopardy, hangman, or karuta (a card-collecting game), often at times reacting in a fun and silly manner to make students curious about what I would do next and have them be engaged with the content. Since being in the program, my teaching style consisted of being creative and interactive with my students only to a certain degree. I had to contend with restrictions on what I could and couldn’t do as a foreign government employee, and that each school had its own methods of teaching. Now that I have studied language teaching more intensely, I have a better concept of how I would teach English in Japan, and how I would incorporate certain tasks and activities based on the level of English of my students.