The three principles written underneath are the three most important principles to me and my teaching at the time being.
principle 2: Instruction needs to ensure that learners focus on meaning.
Principle 4: Instruction needs to be predominantly directed at developing implicit knowledge of the L2 while not neglecting explicit knowledge.
Principle 9: instructions need to take account of individual differences in learners.
For the students to learn a language or new content, it is in my opinion that they need to see and know the meaning behind it, and the content needs to have meaning. Motivation is a keyword when teaching. When the students understand why they are learning something and they get the meaning behind it, they will be more motivated to learn the language or the content. When students learn English, which they need in order to communicate online and when they travel or meet people from all over the world, there is a lot of ways to teach. To teach students content while learning English is, in my opinion, the best way to learn. Of course, you also have to have focus on form, but the meaning will help the students with their motivation. If they have the motivation to learn the language, it is easier, in my opinion, to teach them the "boring" material.
Implicit knowledge is the knowledge that is built into our system. Information we already have. As a teacher, it is important for me to expand my student's implicit knowledge. That way they will have more information when they are moving forward with new information, that hopefully will be new implicit information. Some information has to be explicit, we can not know everything. Some things have to be looked up or researched. Still, in my teaching, I am trying to expand the implicit information. To get implicit information, the students have to practice. They have to repeat the information in a way that the information gets implicit, but it should still be interesting.
In a classroom with 25 students, there are 25 individuals that learn in different ways. Your instructions and your teaching should reflect that. Not everyone takes information and instructions the same way. As a teacher, it is important to know your students in a way that you know how they learn and how they take instructions. Every student is different, as long as you take that into consideration, it will be much easier (and more difficult) to reach out to all of your students. Not just some of them, it is important for a teacher to make sure that every one of them is keeping up with the content.
I think it is very important that you have decided to discuss focus on meaning, implicit vs. explicit knowledge, and individual learner differences. A lot of these concepts are highly theoretical, so it may be helpful for you to consider some concrete examples. Perhaps next time you teach, try to note which of your activities focus on implicit and which on explicit knowledge. Also, how specifically do you attend to your students' individual differences in the classroom?
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