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artemisia
Joined: 04 Nov 2008
Posts: 875
Location: the world
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 Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 7:10 am Post subject: |
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Reine Lierre:
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... You're putting words in my mouth when you think that I'm assuming that the students would be inanimate, or that their memories would be compromised.
The assessments are simply there to see whether the MAs make teachers more popular with students by giving teachers more confidence in their abilities. I suspect this is part of the reason why so many teachers here love their MAs. |
It�s you putting words in my mouth � not the other way round. I simply pointed out the problems with your testing proposal which is .....to assess if having an MA makes teachers �more popular�?
I'm not sure if this is the case, but you come across as resenting teachers with high qualifications.
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| I'm more concerned for those of us who aren't lucky enough to be at Unis -- and their students. It's hard to like a subject that you have to take, but isn't respected. Look at my Chinese students. |
I frequently have large classes of Chinese students who have very fixed ideas of education and of what �proper� language teaching is. They do not respect a focus on communication and production of language and are fixated on grammar. I see it as part of my job to create as many �natural� situations as possible to enable them to put that knowledge into practical use. They may not wish to study the language but they often do become more motivated when they can see real results. However, as I often have high level students with a very good grammatical basis but poor speaking skills, they can become frustrated at their lack of ease in speaking despite recognising improvement. I try and convey to such students that their development is ongoing. That is; the skills they have learnt and expanded upon cannot be fully realised and tested by the end of their course however much they may want that. My own language learning attests to this although not everyone learns in the same way. I could not have been fully assessed by my teachers at the end of one of the intensive courses I did. I experienced a transition in speaking skills that took place a couple of months (I think) after one had ended, but I later attributed that transition to the teaching I had received.
One�s language acquisition is not the sum total of the immediate skills learned and tested in the here and now whether taught by a teacher with a Masters or not. But it would be difficult to convey this concept to students if teachers believe they should be instantly quantifiable. I don�t think many do. Further education develops your teaching subject knowledge and also makes you more employable. There are many ways to improve yourself as a teacher but the first step has to be that you want this and recognise that teaching skills can and should develop.
I would want that of my language teachers. |
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Mr. Kalgukshi
Mod Team
Joined: 18 Jan 2003
Posts: 6613
Location: Need to know basis only.
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| Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 8:03 am Post subject: |
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| Addressing the messenger rather than the message is a good way to get a thread locked or deleted. Combining it with ceaseless contentious bickering makes a lock or deletion an absolute certainty as we are now witnessing in the case of this thread. |
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