Question 1: Which of these approaches do you hope will have more influence on your teaching in future?
I hope I can simultaneously use the communicative language teaching and affective humanistic approaches. I was under the traditional teaching environment that teachers mainly focused on learners’ linguistic knowledge but lost the attentions on their individual varieties. But actually each learner has their own learning style and personal factors influenced on their learning consequence. I would stand a position of counselor and facilitator and help learners communicate and interact in the class in TL. Furthermore, the course would be student- centered and teacher would make students discuss in their group. I assume students can trough the authentic communications gain some confidence on self English learning. I would primarily focus on learners’ TL fluency and secondary on their accuracy. I consider that students can gradually self correct and watch out their own feeling on the process of learning.
Question 2: What strategies will you use to make your teaching more effective and meaningful?
I would use cognitive, CLT and task- based approach to facilitate my teaching. I would stress on students’ learning and thinling. Also I would see each student as a isolated individual that one should responsible for his or her own learning. My potential students would be the high school academic level, so I assume they have the ability of self correction and I wouldn’t mainly focus on their pronunciation. Instead, I would choose to emphasize on their whole language skill separately. L, R, W, and S should all be emphasized. However, I would apply task- based approach and make students communicate and learn from activities. Also through peer correction, students can reduce their anxiety about TL learning and gradually reach the goal of SLA.
Sometimes, it really gives the teachers headache that if they should emphasize students’ fluency or accuracy. In the CLT class, teachers may put more focus on students ‘ fluency; however, sometimes, we couldn’t stop oursleves to correct students’ mistakes, and this may interrupt students’ expression and communication.
To Oscarlen:
Thanks ur comments, and it really touches my a lot! Though we’ve read so many researches about CLT or other related materials suggesting teachers or teacher-in- training should more emphasize on fluency, it’s really hard for us who are borught under the traditional teaching environment to tolerate students repeatedly making errors in the class. Perhaps teachers still can use circumlocution and properly correct students’ error in the class, or we can evaluate students ‘ type of error(global or local) before our correction. Hope we all can be the moderate and professional teachers in future.