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Maddie MacMath

INTR 611: Methodology

Fall 2017

TESOL Teaching Philosophy

Possible Future Context: A non-formal English education program for adult refugees in

Frankfurt, Germany. Developing a program for students with beginning to intermediate levels of

proficiency. Students are from a variety of L1 backgrounds looking to learn English for

communication. Most likely ELF or ESP.

It was in my first TESOL class at Wheaton College where I discovered that I cared about

teaching; it was in a preliterate adult ESL class where I realized that I loved teaching. Several

months into the M.A. program, we had to write a brief reflection on our philosophy of teaching.

With the little I knew of TESOL at the time, I wrote the following:

Part of my overall teaching methodology is an emphasis on creating a learner-centered classroom.

Theres value in the experiences of each student. Teaching requires patience and repetition; there

should be space for students to both succeed and fail with increasing confidence in their English

proficiency. So much of success in a language is predicated on feelings of accomplishment and

autonomy in mastery. The goal is to have the students excited to come back to class the next day

and inspired to practice their newly acquired skills at home (Spring 2017, M.A. Reflection).

I labeled four parts of my approach to teaching as narrative, confidence, community, and

immersion, without any technical language about current trends in methodology. Almost a year

later, with classes, experience, and hundreds of hours of graduate work behind me, those four

commitments, though general and vague, still hold true. While my teaching ideology is not

limited to the following, these four words, narrative, confidence, community, and immersion,
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highlight deeper theories and principles which give an overview of my commitments as a

teacher, both in general and in relation to my current, intended setting.

My undergraduate work and personal experiences reinforced to me that we are, as

humans, inherently narrative-oriented creatures; it is why we love movies, books, and

commercials with a plot-line. What I hadnt realized at the time was that a commitment to

narrative teaching was an underlying tendency toward Tracy Terrell and Steven Krashens

natural approach. They proposed an integration of the four skills into comprehensible input,

following an i + 1 model, where instruction is given one step above a students or classrooms

current level of proficiency. Their emphasis on realia, comprehension before production,

fluency, visualizing, sensory learning, and story all coincide with my personality and the nuances

of working with refugees, especially in a community-based setting.

While there is a place in the classroom for explicit instruction, grammar drills, set

dialogues, and choral repetition, which the natural approach admittedly lacks, a less formal,

communicative setting, with people whose lives are oriented around their stories, lends itself

well to this methodology. While error correction does play a part in meaningful learning and

student growth, in a setting that is likely to be lingua franca English or third language acquisition

for use among non-native speakers an emphasis on comprehension, meaning, and fluency, to the

occasional detriment of grammatical perfection or accuracy, fits with a student and narrative-

centered approach.

Krashens teaching methodology also includes an emphasis on student motivation and

student emotions within the classroom atmosphere. My initial commitment to developing

confidence in the classroom alludes to this. His affective filter hypothesis proposes that the

lower a students affective filter, or the emotional grid through which they are responding to
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instruction, is, the more input they can take in. In classrooms with a high affective filter, where

students are sitting in high levels of stress and anxiety, their ability to process new input and

retain new information is lowered. Classrooms that are set-up to foster lower levels of anxiety

also tend to have higher levels of self-confidence and higher motivation. While a low affective

filter is not always ideal in EFL or ESP settings, for a context that would be driven primarily by

autonomy, where adult learners are actively choosing to learn English for communicative

purposes, high levels of motivation and an overarching feeling of safety in the classroom is key.

Wherever possible, I aspire to be a teacher who knows her students and cares about the things

that motivate them. This should be evident in teacher-student interactions, in planning, and in the

language I chose to use in class. Especially if students are going to share stories and use English

to create meaning, a classroom atmosphere of safety and welcome is an imperative starting point.

A central factor in establishing an exciting, vibrant, and safe classroom atmosphere is the

development of the classroom community itself. Charles Arthur Currans community language

learning approach highlights the significance of student-generated language, where interaction is

a vehicle for acquisition and the teacher is attentive to students emotions and frustrations in the

learning process. The teacher is able to take on a sort of counselor role, as they facilitate

meaningful collaboration among students. Not only does this approach translate well for

autonomous adults, it fits in a student-centered setting where they are engaging, through

meaningful language, in meaningful interactions.

The idea of community also extends beyond the classroom; students should be

connecting with the larger geographic and cultural communities that they are a part of. The

potential social settings where students will need to use English provide relevant content and

course direction for instruction, particularly in community-based programs that can tailor the
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material specifically to the communicative needs of the students. Additional teaching principles

are necessary to these ends, such as error correction for the prevention of unfavorable social

reactions of speakers outside the classroom and monitoring student interactions, as well as

activities that get students outside of the classroom.

In a setting where those interactions would likely not be primarily with native speakers,

immersion is not limited to English-only exposure. This commitment came out of my own

failures in language learning, where vocabulary and phonetic drilling did not translate into

comprehensive, communicative use. Teaching should give students authentic, real-world practice

with the language. Students should have the opportunity to engage in a variety of relevant

contexts, using their newly acquired skills creatively. Learning should be student-centered, based

on student needs. In program development, this is why conducting a comprehensive needs

analysis is critical: What do students want to and need to learn? What are their current levels?

Where will they be using English and what vocabulary, grammar, and tasks does that lend itself

to? How can we assess their progress?

This fits with communicative language teaching, an approach which uses in-class tasks to

motivate learning, develop confidence, build strategic competence, and provide assessment. This

methodology ties the best of my personal commitment to student-centered teaching together: it is

about knowing your students, their functional uses of the language, their creativity, their

emotional response, and consequently implementing meaningful and necessary grammar, need-

based instruction, community-oriented teaching, and purposeful, integrative tasks.

Teaching methodology is dynamic; while there are some objectively good and poor

ways of teaching English, the vast majority of how shifts within context. Value judgements on

methodology change based on institutional policies, cultural norms, and the expectations of the
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administration, student, or parents; it changes based on classroom dynamics, whether it is a

group of students that you will teach for years or in a week-long intensive, whether its a group

of fifteen or fifteen-hundred, males or females, children or adults. If the goal is passing the

TOEFL, an audio-lingual, grammar-translation approach is going to be intrinsically necessary,

probably at the expense of more natural, communicative based teaching. Even something as

foundational as being student-centered looks different if you have short-term class with over

fifty students, in a high-power distance context with strict curriculum.

Yet, this is exactly why identifying personal methodology it is necessary: knowing

underlying commitments and personal teaching tendencies allows a teacher to better adapt and

implement instruction in a way that is in line with who they are and that keeps with the best of

SLA methodology. This is not a prescription of a universal methodology; these are the

commitments that I tend towards as a teacher, understanding their malleability and relevance

change in any given situation. Teaching is both a science, with foundational principles and

functional basics, and an art, fluid and adaptable to the unique challenges of the context.

While I did not have the technical language to express my philosophy of teaching back in

the early months of this year, I had learned enough to develop a high value for learned-centered

teaching, for repetition and recycling, for gracious, patient, respectful teacher-language, and to

create a classroom atmosphere that is aware of a students motivation and the safety of their

interactions with one another. Narrative, immersion, confidence, and community does not look

as abstract or general as it did when I first wrote it; it is nuanced, complex, and the specificities

shift with each teaching situation that I find myself in. Yet, the underlying principles and their

connections to broader, time-tested TESOL methodologies hold true for who I am and who I

aspire to be as a teacher.