Dialogue Journal 1

When I attended the first lesson of topics in English Education 1, the teacher just asked every student why we want to take the class. After thinking for a while, I thought that the main reason was that since I want to be a language teacher in the future, I consider learning something important from the basic theories and practical teaching experience in this course would very possibly help me to improve my own teaching. Actually, I had an experience of e-tutoring a junior high school student and came across some problems like lacking of efficiency and inability of holding student’s attention all the time during my teaching. Thus I supposed learning more relative teaching methodology might benefit me a lot while taking this course.

In the first lessen, the teacher also asked us to work in pairs and talked about the key principles of different teaching methods with comparison with another method. By discussing with my partner and listening to other groups’ report about these methods, I had more clear understanding about them. These methods all exist for different purposes for language teaching and it’s beneficial for teachers to adopt them in a suitable way. Grammar translation method focuses on form like vocabulary and grammar, while TPR emphasizes the understanding of meaning. So I would like to apply the first to teaching texts with difficult sentence structures or unfamiliar words and chose TPR to initiate beginning leaner’s motivation to learn. Additionally, some methods taught in the class suggest teachers to correct students’ errors right away while others not. And I think I would correct their global errors and ignore local errors right after they speak. Besides, some methods use native language while others not. Valuing learner’s needs is also important while chosing a method. And after comparing their differences, I came to realize that there is no standard or perfect teaching method. Teachers can even combine methods in teaching to get more advantages. Therefore, I thought I could use some of the principles in them to improve my teaching skill in my following teaching days or using some methods like TPR which seems really interesting and motivating to beginning learners.