Language is Developed through Effective Interaction: My Teaching Philosophy on SLA
My memories of those days learning English in Middle school are still fresh and clear. Recalling on those past experiences in English class, I still can feel an intense sense of joy and happiness. The English class in middle school gave me the best class experience throughout my school life before college. And Mrs.Xu, the English teacher of that class is the teacher that influenced me the most, and to some extent, she is the reason why I would like to become an English teacher, and her way of teaching also inspires me in my teaching. As a saying goes, teachers tend to teach the way they learn, based on my learning experience and combined with some philosophical theories, my teaching philosophy, during my student teacher period, is forming and developing.
There is one thing normally going on for most of the class time, interaction. Interaction happens between teacher and student, between student and student. In Mrs.Xu’s class, she took advantage of every minute interacting with her students, the class went on like a conversation among a group of good friends. The target content, such as vocabulary, sentences, and grammar naturally appeared in a flow of an enthusiastic and interactive conversation. According to Krashen, teacher talk can be simplified for the ease of learners’ comprehension, and provide learners with comprehensive input or “i+1” input, that is, learners’ current level plus one to the next level, can help learners acquire a language. Krashen’s input hypothesis was developed by Long who suggests that combing modified input with modified interaction can facilitate second language acquisition more efficiently than other alternatives. It is not only the input we need to emphasize, but also modified interaction. Moreover, interaction gives the learner opportunities to produce language output during the conversation. In class, I will try my best to provide students with noticing and corrective feedback and also create more opportunities for my students to negotiate meaning to encourage noticing. Information-gap activity, task-based language learning are activities I am prone to design.
Regarding the selection of learning content or activities, I also coincide with Vygotsky’s idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, which means "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). Therefore, I tend to be careful of what kind of tasks I want my students to complete and what difficulty level of content I want to choose for the activity and make sure my students can both be challenged but also be supported. I believe that scaffolding students can better initiate their motivation to study hard and reach the goal of learning.
In conclusion, I believe students can benefit from interactive teaching and scaffolding, appropriate activities are key to a successful class. Just as my middle school teacher says, be friends with your students, notice their needs and provide them with help, that is how effective learning happens.
Reference
[1]Krashen, S. (1980). The Input Hypothesis. London: Longman.
[2]Long, M. H. (1981). Input, interaction, and second-language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 379, 259–278. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1981.tb42014.x
[3]Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hi Xinyi!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that our best experiences and role models as learners inspire the ways that we want to teach our classroom. My inspiration was my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Hottenstein. He was a teacher who always wanted to make sure we got to experience as much of the world as possible. He provided us with diverse texts, projects based on the cultures of others, and helped us take our learning outside the classroom. We even helped him to write a small book about the water cycle that he later got published. In addition, he ran a club outside of the school day called the “Grub Club.” In this club, we learned how to take care of our environment and our school. We planted a garden, created proper recycling protocols around the school, and took hikes in the woods behind the school to learn about the wildlife around us so that we could learn to respect it. His classroom teaching helped form my love for teaching. It also inspired me to want to make as many different learning adventures for my students as possible. I based a lot of my classroom management and relationship building philosophies around how I saw him interact with his students. I also try to emulate his adventurous lessons and his diverse and super engaging topics.
As for your teaching philosophy, I absolutely agree that interaction is one of the key factors for language learning. I love that you said the grammar, vocabulary, and rules will appear naturally in the flow of conversation. I think that this really matches Krashen’s Acquisition Learning Hypothesis. Learners are going to pick up on language both consciously and subconsciously. They will consciously develop language knowledge through straightforward learning, or direct instruction of rules and grammar. However, students will subconsciously acquire language through interaction with the language. If they are able to have meaningful interaction, they will see the language in action and be able to subconsciously start to recognize the language patterns and utilize these patterns in their own output.
Thank you for sharing your wonderful philosophy!
DeleteHi, Jakie! Thank you for your replying! Your teacher Mr.Hottenstein is amazing. I wish I can be taught by teachers like him. I appreciate his devotion to his students so much, I barely met teachers who are willing to take students out of classroom and enrich their experience . I realize that I always limit my teaching within the classroom and never think about take advantage of resource and environment out of school. I think I am going to expand my ideas! Thank you for sharing! And in terms of interaction, I agree with you that students need both conscious and unconscious learning! How to balance and how to combine explicit teaching and implicit teaching is also a problem.
Hi, Xinyi, thanks for your sharing.
ReplyDeleteYour English teacher is really awesome. Interaction is really very important in the class. Because it can help students to focus on the class. Actually I have the same experience with you. In my junior high school, I had a English teacher called Mrs. Song. In her class, you would never feel boring.Because she would design a lot of activities to help us learn knowledge. For example, there was a class about weather. She asked me to draw some pictures of sun, cloud and rainbow on the blackboard. At the same time, before the class, she would talk with us for a moment about recent important news or festivals. Besides study, she cared about our life very much. If she found we were too tired to focus our attention on the class. She would ask us to sleep for a little while and go on to have the class. I really appreciated her because I become motivated on the study. So in the future I also want to be an English teacher like her.