Students! You are the teacher!

I have just listened to an interesting podcast (you don't have to download, sign up to anything etc, you can just listen without any commitment or passwords!) from Steve Kaufmann who is the king of LingQ.com (an excellent language learning site btw).

The subject is "What I would do if I were a teacher". He freely admits that he has never been a teacher and doesn't know how to teach, but he is giving his opinion merely as a language learner who has had lots of experience from the receiving end of L2 teaching.

It's interesting to get student feedback in this way, as perhaps teachers do not put themselves in the shoes of the learner often enough.

To paraphrase the podcast, he says that if he were a teacher he would outline to Ss in the first lesson that the onus of L2 learning responsibility lies completely on their shoulders. This is what he would say....

• My job is to make myself unnecessary.
• You (the Ss) must be independent of me.
• You should not expect ME to teach YOU the language.
• My job is to give you the habits and attitude for YOU to learn the language yourself.
• You cannot learn the L2 only in the classroom and I cannot teach it to you only in class

He also highlights the huge importance of reading when outside the classroom and dedicating the time needed.

I think that this is not only good advice, but would make all language teachers' jobs much more interesting (than they already are, of course). Imagine having a class of rabidly motivated students, that bring the lesson to you, in terms of new vocab, phrases, idioms etc etc.

My in-company business students could do with a little bit more of this student ideology!