Education philosophy?

[DanielD]

What's your philosophy regarding education and ESL in particular?

[Alan]

Hi,

A huge question! I think I would need a more specific pointer before I attempted to comment.

Alan
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English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story Present Simple

[Jamie (K)]

My philosphy of education, as I tell all my classes at the beginning of each semester is this: (1) Ask a guy how fast he can run. (2) If he says he can run five miles an hour, hitch him to your rear bumper and drive six miles an hour but not seven. (3) In the end, he may love you for showing him what he was capable of achieving, or he may hate you for making him run that fast, but he will run that fast.

Another of my maxims: Anyone can learn to do anything, if you yell at him enough. (I don't use this method often.)

As far as my real philosophy of teaching ESL goes, I'm not able to implement it often, because I'm bound by curriculum restrictions, and some of the things I find beneficial to language learners are either older methods that are stigmatized by monolingual ESL professors who set program curricula, or they are understood mainly by people who have learned a foreign language in immersion (which doesn't include most native-speaking ESL instructors).

If I had my druthers, I'd teach my students with a combination of ancient grammar-translation methods, along with about an hour a week in a language laboratory from the 1960s wearing headphones and barking spoken grammar drills into a microphone. I would make them read comics and kiddie encyclopedia until they could read better stuff. I'd make them read a lot, and I'd make them talk. However, I don't think the "communicative method", with which today's ESL "professionals" are so enamored, can teach students to speak and write accurately enough that they will be able to function in society as intelligent-sounding people, as they want to. I think students still need a lot of active oral drill, and a huge amount of language input that contains massive numbers of common collocations.

Also, since language learning involves finding gaps in one's communicative ability, and then repairing them, students need to be forced into a lot of situations where they'll make mistakes and learn to recover from them. I don't believe in methods that set the student up to get the right answer as often as possible. That's not how things will be when they take the language out into real life.