My Teaching Profile

My Teaching Profile by Renate Rødsdalen

This teaching profile will focus on how I; as an L2 English teacher, teach English to my students. The text will focus on my motivation for teaching English, and how I work with my goals and methods to teach English to L2 learners. My focus as an English teacher is to make sure that my students gets new knowledge and skills in every class. That their vocabulary and communicative skills are improved, so that they can communicate well with each other and people with English as their L1. It is important to remember that every student is different. “Any class of students is made up of individuals who differ in a variety of ways…" (Ellis & Shintani, 2014, p. 283). Students learn differently, and it is important to remember that when making a strategy for each class. 

My motivation for teaching English

My motivation for teaching English is based on how I learned English at school, and how I have experienced English in my practice. Both I and some of the schools I have been to, have learned English in the same way. By using grammar-focus drills, repeating after the teacher or to work with assignments to achieve new knowledge and skills. That is not my strategy when teaching English. My focus is on CLT. “Communicative language teaching. An approach to teaching aimed at fostering communicative competence in a language.” (Ellis & Shintani, 2014. p. 335). My motivation is to give the students motivation, knowledge and skills in English, in a way that will make them want to learn more. By using this approach, I believe that the student will receive more of the input they are given, than by using grammar-focus drills. They will acquire new knowledge, and they will have fun while learning. I believe that the most important thing for L2 learners, is that they first of all learn to communicate. To speak and interact with other people in the new language they are learning. Then comes writing, one should try to combine the two, to give the teaching more meaning. 

The teaching methods I believe is best

I believe that communicative practice is the best method for teaching and learning English. When the teacher gives the students communicative tasks, it is important to give them some new input. “Input can be oral or written. Oral input is provided in comprehension-based language instruction, in task-based language teaching, and, more generally, in the classroom talk that arises no matter what the teaching approach. Written input is provided in textbook practice materials and through reading.” (Ellis & Shintani, 2014, p. 163). That way they will be given new knowledge, that they can use in the communicative practice. A task one can use is; Identifying differences. The students should each be given a picture, with written input, which should be words they do not already know. They have to interact with each other to find the differences in the picture. They also have to describe known objects in new ways. That way they interact with one another and get new knowledge and input. A different task that combines communication and writing is Dear Abby. The students will be given a question from a person, who is about their own age. They have to interact with each other to answer that person, they also have to write down the answer they come up with together.

My teaching goals and methods, and how my teaching is consistent with my goals.

One of my most important teaching goals is to get my students to communicate more by using English and improve their vocabulary. To get the students to interact with each other, they will learn from each other and find answers together. “In its most basic form, the Incidental Learning Hypothesis claims that learners can learn new linguistic features without any intention of doing so.” (Ellis & Shintani, 2014, p. 174). This method is used when teaching CLT in the classroom. They will receive input, that they have to transfer into output. “Output requires “bottom-up processing” and thus is likely to make learners aware of gaps in their competence.” (Ellis & Shintani, 2014, p. 209). It is the teacher’s job to make sure that the gaps in the student’s competence and knowledge is filled with the right input. That means that in that class or the next, the students have to get new input, that will fill these gaps. That way the output will be better from class to class. The student will then get more knowledge and skills for every class. Earlier this semester I had practice with ninth grade. As a warm-up activity we had a word-auction. The students were divided into groups and given paper money, so they could buy words. Their only task was to interact with each other, buy words and make a grammatically correct sentence. They were only allowed to use English to interact with each other and the teacher. They had to negotiate with each other and use their knowledge and skills to make a grammatically correct sentence. Accuracy is important in this task. They have to make sure that the sentence is accurate before they share it with the class.

My personal goals as an English teacher and conclusion.

My personal goal is to make sure that my students have implicit L2 knowledge. “… these theories have addressed how learners develop implicit L2 knowledge as this is the type of knowledge that is considered primary, in the sense that it is required to become a fluent, competent user of an L2.” (Ellis & Shintani, 2014, p. 11-12.). If the students get more implicit knowledge, they will eventually become a fluent English user. My students are not the only ones who need to get more input. I always have to learn new content and ways of teaching. That way I will always have the best foundation to teach my students. 

Literature:

Ellis, R. & Shintani, N. (2014). Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research. London, New York: Routledge.