Teaching
My Teaching Philosophy (full version)
As a language learner and teacher, my teaching philosophy has always centered on interaction, activities, authenticity, and communication. For years, I assumed a good teacher stands at the center of the classroom and controls everything. Teaching in Iowa, and now in Texas, has really changed that belief, especially since I'm working with language learners. I now see my classroom as a place where learning happens through interaction, activities, and communication, and where technology extends that interaction beyond the classroom walls.
Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are my most preferred methods. I love these methods because they rest on a principle I strongly believe in: interaction is not just practice. Through negotiation of meaning, it forms the basis for language development (Long, 1996). Since I have been teaching, I design lessons around purposeful tasks, such as role-plays, discussions, information-gap activities, and group problem-solving, using technology, where students must use language to accomplish something real. I make my group work interactive by using technology to create the activity type, which allows learners to engage in language, use language to solve problems, and co-construct knowledge. Subsequently, my role also shifted from controller to facilitator. I set a clear purpose, monitor groups, give feedback, and debrief afterward, because feedback, not practice alone, drives development. Following Ellis (2005), I also pair meaning-focused tasks with brief, targeted attention to form, so that fluency and accuracy grow together. And because Kumaravadivelu (2006) reminds us that teaching must be context-specific, I try to redesign tasks as much as possible to fit the identities and languages my students already bring.
I use technology to support interaction, not for novelty. I use it because it creates opportunities for interaction, gives access to authentic language, and allows students to enact agency and identity (Brown & Lee, 2015). This fits my preferred methods because a task becomes more meaningful when students use real tools for real purposes, such as co-writing in a collaborative document, discussing in an online forum, or annotating a text together. These Web 2.0 tools turn students from viewers of content into creators of it, and this extends practice beyond class time. As I am interested in AI, I also see generative AI as a potential aid for brainstorming, provided students use it critically and transparently, in line with the TESOL technology standards. However, I worry that it can replace the thinking and negotiation of meaning that TBLT and CLT depend on. For every tool, I ask myself one question: Does it push learners to negotiate meaning with one another? In the end, I believe that interaction gives my students a reason to use language, and technology broadens the people they interact with. My goal is a classroom where learners take initiative, make choices, and leave as more confident communicators.
References
- Brown, H. D., & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (4th ed.). Pearson.
- Ellis, R. (2005). Principles of instructed language learning. System, 33(2), 209–224.
- Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006). Understanding language teaching: From method to postmethod. Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). Academic Press.