Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in DuAnfen Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Jiangmen Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
This unit covered the characteristics of a good teacher in terms of personality and also relationship with the students as well as the roles teachers take in the course of their teaching, upon which I will reflect thoroughly in the following paragraph. It also outlined the characteristics of an active, motivated learner - willing to participate, experiment, ask questions and reflect, with a desire to learn - as well as the likely differences between adult and young learners, the most important of which I believe to be motivation deriving from personal choice in adults, language awareness and the pitfalls of trying to connect all concepts to existing language structures, as well as life experience and building rapport with different ages of students. The various levels of language acquisition from beginner to advanced, as also encapsulated in the Common European Framework, provides a clear classification of students according to ability based on their general levels of understanding and ability to express themselves, fluency and accuracy. Having many years of teaching experience, being able to match the roles that I enjoy taking in my teaching to the textbook terminology was interesting. It also opened my eyes to the roles that I tend to avoid and which I should pay more attention to in my teaching. I for instance very naturally take the managing/controlling position, because I find it easy to shift from this role to that of organizer, resource/facilitator, observer/monitor, tutor and assessor as necessary. I do not often act as participant and though I believe my position necessarily establishes me as a model, and prompting is definitely part of my normal teaching strategy, these are aspects that I have rarely considered and will endeavor to focus on more in future. Apart from the roles of the teacher, consideration of the different levels of language acquisition and differences in teaching adults versus young learners was enlightening and shed some light on some of the difficulties I have encountered in adapting to different class situations or individual students.
