1. David Hill My Teaching Philosophy
As I have worked in business for many years, where management is a pragmatic exercise, I
have a very utilitarian view of language education. Language to me, both verbal and non-verbal,
is used for communicating, building rapport and accomplishing specific tasks. Thus, the goal of
instruction is to help learners gain linguistic control and ‘communicative competence’, (Hymes,
1974), in the target language.
Teaching styles and pedagogy vary depending upon the audience and the venue. There is no
single best method, best approach nor best technique. What works in a classroom with adults will
not work with children. And an initial failure demonstrated that what worked well with small
groups of one-to-five students in corporate settings, using the Direct Method, did not work in
groups of fifteen or more students in a university’s Intensive English Program. Nor did a task-
based-language-teaching style, with student pair work in a mixed gender class of students from
the Middle Eastern Gulf States, have the same success as in a mixed gender class of students
drawn from several geographic regions.
But although teaching pedagogy varies, the language acquiring and learning principles used
in creating an engaging, research based instruction remain the same. To paraphrase McGrath
(McGrath, 2002), four keys are needed for developing a facility in a new language:
- Exposure (to comprehensible input)
- Practice (opportunities for using the language oral or written skills in real situations)
- Motivation (a real learner need)
- Feedback (interloctor negotiations and teacher corrections)
My responsibility is to turn a class into a “learning event” by stimulating that ‘ah-ha moment”
in students by focusing on creating student engagement and participation in a friendly
environment. I can assist students advance their own inner language by creating and using a
diversity of materials (text, video clips, audio files, cartoons, newspaper advice columns) and
techniques with a communicative focus, by designing multiple different, clearly defined
activities and goal oriented tasks which engage, challenge and stimulate student interactions in
the target language. Whether in large college or small adult classes, I work to foster an
instructional approach which is research supported, student-centered, task-based and language
goal oriented with a communicative emphasis. I also believe the teacher should be a language
trainer, assisting students to become autonomous in acquiring and self-correcting through the
introduction of tools and strategies and by identifying resources in the immediate environment
which can help students develop outside the classroom.
References
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundationsin Socialinguistics:An Ethnographic Approach.Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
McGrath, I. (2002). Using the real. In I. McGrath (Ed.)., Materials Evaluation And Design For Language Teaching
(pp. 103-138). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.