Saturday, September 15, 2012
Language Teaching
I believe that a good language teacher is comprised up of many different elements. These elements include the knowledge and competence of the target language, effective classroom management, and the ability to have fun and teach lessons that really get the students involved. If a teacher just does a grammar lesson with no activities for the students they will most likely forget it come the next day. I also believe that teachers in foreign language have an advantage over many other types of teachers because in foreign language you are not only teaching grammar and vocab you are teaching culture and life of a foreign country. In order to augment language learning teachers should include games, songs, and other multi media devices to really get the students involved. I do not believe the the target language should be spoken 100% of the time because if the teacher in an introductory course is speaking about a topic that the students have not learned yet then they will be lost and fall behind. If the classroom topic is well understood and all the students can have a basic conversation using what they have learned then the target language should be spoken.
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ReplyDeleteEstoy de acuerdo, I agree, a good language teacher should possess all those different elements. I think it could be easy for a language teacher to focus too much on grammar and vocab, and lose sight of the other aspects of language learning that may be more important or just as important as learning the structure and words of a language. Teaching students about the culture and giving them a basic idea of how daily life in a foreign country is, can make the students more interested in learning the language. Also, grammar and vocab can become tedious, so language learning needs to be augmented with thought-provoking activities that make students use the target language when possible.
ReplyDeleteI like that you added the importance of activities in the lessons. I agree that if no exercise of the lesson is done after it is taught, then it is very likely that students will forget most of what they just learned. This translates into more time wasted the next day, reteaching an entire lesson. These games also play an important role in helping students actually learn the information instead of memorizing. Frequently we would learn songs or rhymes that helped me remember material for a test or quiz.
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