Job Discussion Forums

[SimonM]

A very dear friend of mine is in her last year of training to become a high-school English teacher. One of her assignments she must complete this semester is to write a paper on the subject of "developing professional competence as a languages teacher". She is greatly interested in gathering the opinions of current ESL teachers on this subject as part of her research. She has already quizzed me on the subject and has asked me if I could in turn solicit any musings on the subject from my pals at Dave's as she is temporarily without Internet access. So if anyone has any thoughts about how one becomes competent as a languages teacher please feel free to share and I will relate your thoughts to her.

Thanks!

[Roger]

It may help if you master other languages yourself before you teach yours to speakers of other mother tongues. I am not saying this to revive the debate on affective filters and sympathy for students - far from it. I think it helps because those who have had to learn the ropes of another language consciously know first hand through experience how easy it is for a student to mislead themselves about how far their own foreign language skills carry them.
When your Chinese students reply "yes, I understand" it may be that they are victims of some illusion: maybe they know how to say the same message in their Chinese vernacular, but that's not understanding the original message at all, and this approach is far from ideal.

[SimonM]

Thanks man.

[Super Mario]

A look at methodologies currently in favor [eg, communicative language teaching] and the theoretical work [eg Krashen] underpinning them may be a good start. I'm sure you could do some searches to help her out.
Many Chinese English teachers know there's something wrong with the way they're taught to go about things, such as grammar/translation and audio-lingual methodology, but are intimidated by the inertia that is education in China.

[SimonM]

Again with the thanks man!