I had quite a bit of spare time today (don't say, "Lucky you", because I've got 12 lessons tomorrow!) and I was watching some of Jeremy Harmer's conference speeches to try and pick up some tips from the "TEFL master".
Surely, you have all come across him before at some point, at least through the standard text 'The Practice of English Language Teaching', among others.
His speech on ideas for working with (and controlling) very large EFL classes were not new for me, but it was good to get a reminder of them, seeing as I haven't taught such big classes for a long time.
The lecture on motivating English students also contained lots of common sense stuff, that was put across in a very entertaining way. Again, good for just brushing up on methodological ideas.
If you've got an hour or two for some infotainment, then Jezza's your man!
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
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....
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!
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
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!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
