Sophia Quattrocchi

Dr. Cho

C&T 491

1 July 2019

Teaching Philosophy

Prior to this program I was unsure of what I wanted to pursue as a future career.

However, during my time on this TESOL excursion I have gained skills essential to EFL

teaching and am seriously considering teaching as a future career. At Kyunghwa I have learned

from both Greg, the native-speaking English teacher, and the students about running a successful

classroom. Observing Greg’s class, I have learned that having energy and enthusiasm is essential

to the classroom environment. When a teacher is energized and enthusiastic, the students are

excited to be in the classroom and learn. I made sure to be outgoing and tried to incorporate

Greg’s energy while teaching. When the teacher and students are excited to be in the classroom

it's a much more positive environment, and the students are more engaged.

With this program I have learned that student engagement is key to a successful

classroom. No matter how well written or informative a lesson is, if the class is not engaged, no

information will be retained by the students. While planning our first lesson, we made sure to get

the students attention at the beginning of the lesson. We included content that related to the

students interests. We began class with pop culture references and various YouTube clips to get

them interested in the content. We then related the videos to our lesson and talked about why the

lesson material is important to English language learning. Including an attention-grabbing warm

up in a lesson helps the students get excited to learn. This is then followed by an explanation of

why the lesson is important so the students understand why it is beneficial to learn the given
material. It is essential to have balance in a lesson by having it be both educational and fun for

the students. Since our second lesson took place the week prior to finals week, the students were

exhausted from long hours of studying, and it was harder to get them engaged in the lesson. We

decided to do a more actively engaging lesson and had them up and dancing while working on

their listening. This was very successful on getting them actively listening and engaged during

our lesson.

While lesson planning and teaching, we tried to focus on speaking and descriptive

grammar, rather than prescriptive grammar. In most Korean language classes, students must

memorize vocabulary and prescriptive grammar rules which are not as helpful in verbal

communication. “KSAT does not include speaking and writing components, thus leading to very

little, if any, teaching of speaking and writing at high school” (Choi 41). Therefore, we focused

on speaking and listening, skills essential when communicating to other English speakers. When

working on the students’ listening skills we focused on maximizing the comprehensible input for

the students during class. We played several YouTube clips and music in order to provide several

examples of native English speakers. We also made sure to maximize the students’ elicit output

by having them be creative when writing skits and speaking in front of the class. In the students’

other English classes they have less opportunity to be creative. Activities such as skits were

successful because they allowed creativity while focusing on speaking and creative writing

skills, skills less focused on in their other English classes. Additionally, throughout the class we

had the students repeat after us in order to work on pronunciation. Overall we focused on skills

essential to verbal communication, skills less focused on in their other Korean English classes.

References

Choi, I. (2008). The impact of EFL testing on EFL education in Korea. Language
Testing,25(1), 39-62.