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![The are two kinds of reason
for pursuing an activity:
internal and external.
(I’m getting these terms from
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue [1984].)
---------->](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/eslteachingphilosophy-110519165436-phpapp02/75/Why-Learn-A-Short-Talk-about-E-S-L-Teaching-Philosophy-31-2048.jpg)
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Why Learn? - A Short Talk about E.S.L. "Teaching Philosophy"
- 1. Why Learn? An illustratedtalk about E.S.L. teaching practice for İstanbul Şehir University S.E.P.P. Program Kevin Bush May 18, 2010
- 2. This is myclass.
- 3. If I’ve learnedone cardinal rule in my many years teaching English, it is....
- 5.
- 6. Actually, it’s Don’t BeBoring.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9. If not actuallythis.
- 13. When what youwant is this.
- 14.
- 15. In sunny southFlorida....
- 16. I worked forStanley Kaplan Test Prep., the first, largest and best known company in its field.
- 17.
- 18. Taught and tutored theSAT, ACT and GRE tests.
- 19. As well asthe TOEFL.
- 20. And was a KaplanStudent Assistant.
- 21. (Which means asecretary.)
- 22. I started workingfor Kaplan around the same time as my friend Ray.
- 23.
- 24. Ray was aphenomenally good teacher, much better than me.
- 25. The SAT, themain college entrance exam, is scored on a scale of 400–1600.
- 26. Ray was ableto get his students’ scores to raise by 200 points, or 300 points.... A 400-point increase was not unheard of. He won awards for best teacher in our region.
- 27. And eventually gotso many tutoring students he opened his own business. Why was Ray so good?
- 28. As you mightexpect, I asked him this question more than once.
- 29. He claimed thesecret was having a personal relationship with his students.
- 30. Essentially, Ray befriendedeach of his students, and they studied harder to please him.
- 31. The are twokinds of reason for pursuing an activity: internal and external. (I’m getting these terms from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue [1984].) ---------->
- 32. Studying to pleaseyour friend is an especially good external motivation.
- 33. Why are studentsstudying English in the S.E.P.P. program?
- 34. The motivations areall external. This is for two reasons.
- 35. (i) They needto pass in order to attend your university.
- 36. (ii) The motivefor learning a new language in an academic context is always external.
- 37. A language classin olden days?
- 38. We can study Ph i l o s o p h y M e d i c i n e Jurisprudence or Theology because we love the subject.
- 39. But who canlove a language he does not yet understand?
- 40. The question, therefore,of how to get students to do well learning a new language, in important respects amounts to finding the right motivation.
- 41. Ideally, we mightlearn out of necessity, for instance if we live abroad.
- 42. Or marry theteacher.
- 43. Learning in these contexts is immersive: the motivation is necessity. (or love.)
- 44. But your studentslive in İstanbul.
- 45. Not London. Or NewYork.
- 46. And you can’tfind them American husbands and wives!
- 47. However, at upperlevels, we can supply other motives, like....
- 48.
- 49. Talking to friends in English.
- 50. Or reading a goodbook.
- 51. Even if it’sjust a comic book.
- 52. But compounding theproblem, these things are not fully accessible to beginner and intermediate students.
- 53. Learning elementary Englishin primary school is fun and easy.
- 54. Fun, because simplegrammar & everyday words pair naturally with the world of childhood.
- 55. Easy, because people acquirelanguages much faster before puberty.
- 56. To be honest,I do not have a ready-made solution to defuse these challenges for university-aged, beginning E.S.L. students. But I do have some ideas....
- 57. A. Don’t beboring. Play games and show pictures as much as possible.
- 58. B. Guide studentsstep by step. An appropriate early writing task might be to write a short letter, or make a grocery list.
- 59. An appropriate speakingtask might be to describe your daily routine.
- 60. Part of myjob is to find what motivates each student, given proficiency level, age and personality.
- 61. Examples of otherclassroom activities I’ve used, grouped by language skill and proficiency level:
- 62. READING: • Listing particularitems or information. • Arranging illustrations / paragraphs in order. • Titling subsections. • Mapping the plot. • Paraphrasing / acting out the text.
- 63. LISTENING: • Choosing thecorrect picture. • Transcribing details (phone number, address, messages) • ‘Jigsaw’ tasks, e.g. listening to different accounts of a crime. • Transcribing a difficult recording as a group. • A guest speaker (students typically ask more questions).
- 64. SPEAKING: • Speaking followinga formula written on the board. • Giving Instructions and directions. • Completing others’ sentences in a silly way. • Structured discussion based on illustrations. • Pyramid discussion based on a problem or mystery. • Role-Play based on cards. • Slide-Show Presentations. • Formal Debate.
- 65. WRITING: • Copying fromthe board. • Writing a shopping list / postcard. • Describing a good friend / keepsake object. • Relating a (happy, scary, etc.) childhood memory. • Writing jokes. • Writing / acting a dialogue. • Reviewing a favorite book / film / restaurant. • Arguing both for and against a viewpoint. • Writing a persuasive essay.
- 66. To summarize sofar:
- 67. Students will studyand learn if well-motivated.
- 68. Teaching must begradual.
- 69. The goal mightbe to play piano like Sviatoslav Richter.
- 70. But we allbegin by practicing scales.
- 71. Finally, a word about content. What is most important to learn?
- 72. Acquiring new languageis usually divided into three parts: Lexis, Grammar & Phonology. (For example, French.)
- 73. Of these, withoutany question, the most important is vocabulary.
- 74. Without words, studentscannot understand or communicate.
- 75. On the otherhand, with enough words, grammar is (of course) needed to sound like a natural speaker, but is not strictly necessary. (Above: enough words to survive in America.)
- 76. One reason I’min Turkey is to live with my fiancé before we get married.
- 77. Here is myfiancé, Merry. As you can see, she’s Filipina.
- 78. She also spokehardly any English when we met 4 years ago. Essentially, she taught herself.
- 79. Her vocabulary isexcellent. (Partly because English is an official language in the Philippines.)
- 80. But her grammaris awful. Most of our tenses simply don’t exist in Tagalog!
- 81. (Tagalog verbs conjugatefor aspect and thematic role, not for time.)
- 82. How important, really, isthe future perfect or the past continuous?
- 83. She doesn’t knoweither, yet very rarely is there a serious breakdown in communication.
- 84. Of course I’mnot claiming we should do without grammar in the classroom! However....
- 85. In my (limited)experience, Turkish students are too nervous about grammar.
- 86. It gets drilledinto them every day at school.
- 87. (Although actually, thiscan be pretty helpful.)
- 88. Many are afraidto speak out of a needless fear that somebody will care if they break a grammatical rule.
- 89. On the firstday teaching, it should be clear I do not care at all how many times or how badly they “mess up.”
- 90. I care whetherthey can understand and communicate.
- 91. Students need alot of practice speaking, so they must feel comfortable saying the wrong thing.
- 92. Here are sometasks conducive to learning vocabulary:
- 93. 1. MEMORIZATION. Students should make a set of vocab flash cards, and add to it every week.
- 94. (2) Speaking. Studentsshould speak / write / IM / text in English as often as possible, with whoever will listen to them.
- 95. (3) Reading. After a certain minimum proficiency is gained, students should jump into reading, dictionary in hand. Preferably original texts, preferably slightly above their level, preferably enjoyable.
- 96. (4) Word roots. Knowing the most common roots and affixes helps both to recall meanings and (vaguely) understand words not encountered before.
- 97. The literary criticand education theorist E.D. Hirsch famously championed a core curriculum because, among other reasons, students learn better when they have more prior knowledge to ‘peg’ new information to.
- 98. In other words,part of learning is building a thick mental context. I believe something similar applies at the higher levels of E.S.L.
- 99. At upper levels,we should not teach content in isolation, as if English were a language invented by machines.
- 100. Students should beintroduced to the connotations of lexis & grammatical structures, and the cultures from which they come.
- 101. If nothing else,it makes the class more interesting for all concerned. Learning should be as engaging as possible. Illustration of a student not being as engaged as possible. ---------->
- 102. Let me endwith a quote from Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry.
- 103. Sidney is discussingwhy poetry is practically superior to moral philosophy, but it applies to any good teacher:
- 104. “For he dothnot only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass further.”
- 105. A good dealof teaching is finding the right motive.
- 106. Thanks for yourtime & consideration!
- 107. This slide showwas created as a short talk for İstanbul Şehir University, as part of a job interview. I’m putting it on the web so friends and family can see, but perhaps you’ve stumbled onto it. If we don’t know each other, and you want to contact me, please write [email protected]. (The color theme, by the way, is the school’s colors.)