TEACHERS’ROLE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

TEACHERS’ROLE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Teachers and students are two parts in language teaching. While students are the main body, teachers play a  predominant role, because of students’ ages, character, psychology and lack of English knowledge．The latest Course Standards for middle school English teaching stipulate that teachers’ work is to motivate students’ interest in English, cultivate students’ sense of success, guide students to form good learning habit, enable them to communicate smoothly and develop sound value towards learning and living. Teachers’ guidance is the basis and premise for students to realize the goal．In English language teaching，teachers should work hard to guide students, so as to get them to be involved into learning process，learn to probe, be interested in studies, and learn to learn on their own, and at last turn the still knowledge from books into dynamic ability．Teachers play multiple roles in  English language teaching: They are knowledge conveyers, supplying students language knowledge and skills;  they are helpers, helping students get English information and analyze it, and helping students to learn, and solve problems; They are companions，staying by students’ side; they are organizers，organizing activities for students; And they are controllers, making sure students are disciplined in the classroom……

I’ve been a teacher of English with Wuxi Foreign Language School, which is characterized with unique language teaching approach. I’ve been able to take advantage to successfully guide students to not only cope with tests, but also use English skillfully. The following are part of my thoughts on how to play teachers’ role.

I．Giving Students Guidance

Teaching starts with guiding. Only under scientific and effective guidance, can students be organized effectively to take part into their learning process. Guidance is to be carried on in three steps:

A．Guiding

Ever since students are enrolled into schools, students are trained in learning methods and habits. In this way, they will switch from the passive position to the initiative position, so as to lay a solid foundation for further studies. Learning to use dictionaries is one of the most basic skills in English studies. Teachers should guide students to learn to look up new words in the dictionary. Different dictionaries are designed with different purposes. Students are guided to choose the suitable ones. Out of dictionaries，students can learn pure English, because lots of language items are from original books, newspapers of magazines. Students need guidance on how to preview new lessons. The purpose to preview is to get to know new words, language items and the content preliminarily with the help of dictionaries and reference books. Students may feel it too difficult or not be used to it at the very beginning, but day after day, if they insist on using the method, they will enjoy the happiness of previewing new lessons. This is one way to probe. Based on their own preliminary preview, they are able to study with problems and to raise higher rank questions in class. So teachers can organize lessons at a higher level. At the stage of introducing new lessons, teachers should try every means to arouse students’ interest, motivate their desire to take part in the study process. During this procedure, teachers design situations for teaching of either a language item or a sentence pattern, present tasks, make students realize their lack of knowledge, students’ motivation to learn will be generated in this way, so they will be eager to get involved into the learning process. Teachers’ guiding role is necessary for English new learners. At the stage of guiding, teachers work as guiders, guiding students to from good learning habits; as a promoter, promoting students to love learning English.

B．Inducing

Teachers can by no means neglect students’ interest in probing when cultivating their probe spirit. Inducing is a state in which teachers guide students naturally to study and think, is a harmonious and democratic relationship between teachers and students. English is difficult for beginners and different form the mother language, because there’re a great many language phenomena, such as number (singular and plural), aux.verbs, tenses, gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and so on. Students are not above mistakes in their English studies. As teachers of English, we should tolerate them for making mistakes, as making mistakes is part of learning process, or we can say that students are growing up with mistakes. The point is teachers try to guide them to overcome mistakes and induce them to be aware 0f language rules by themselves through practice. The theory of inter-language can help US face students’ mistakes. For example, when learning verbs, students may write “John study harder than the other students in his class”. John is the third person, the verb “study’’ should take the form “studies”. Students may also write “John must study hard to catch up with his classmates”. Here “must” is an aux. verb; “studies” should take its original form. It’s not strange to meet such kind of mistake. In the process to change from mother tongue to the target language, there exists an intermediate language. Through further practice, students will reach the target language. During the teaching of tenses of verbs, I’ve been trying to induce students to realize the relating rules with real life situations. For example, when teaching the past continuous tense, I present a picture of a family of three, in which the father is reading a newspaper, the mother is doing some cooking and the child is working on his homework. Suppose it was last Sunday, what were the family doing?  Students can conclude automatically that the father was reading, the mother was cooking and the child was doing his homework, the whole families were having a good time at home. On the teaching of the past perfect tense, I give students a situation. After a day’s study and work, the students have had different classes, have played happily, some of them have just cleaned up the classroom and the head teacher has checked to make everything is ok before they leave school. Suppose this happened three days before, it won’t be difficult for students themselves to and out the rule of the past perfect tense.

Mistakes can be served as a resource in English teaching and learning. Teachers should face students’ mistakes correctly and induce students to correct their mistakes so as to learn English smoothly.

C．Leading

In everyday teaching, teachers should make sure students learn to solve problems by themselves. It’s teacher's job to lead them to do so instead of taking students’ place. For example, when asking students to do translation, they are required to translate both correctly and gracefully. When students write compositions, they are able to not only write they are asked to, but convey their thoughts and feelings. Led to practice like this, students can form the habit of pursuing perfect. For years, I’ve been leading my students to translate sentences in as many different ways as students can. When translating sentence“我爸爸已经入党五年了’’, students can come up with the following English translations:

1．My father joined the Party five years ago.

2．My father has been in the Party for five years.

3．My father has been in the Party since five years ago.

4．My father has been a Party member for five years since five years ago.

5．Five years has passed since my father joined the Party.

6．It’s been five years since my father joined the Party.

Difficulty index increases as students’ vocabulary enlarges. As a result, their writing ability improves greatly. The same is true of the training of listening, speaking and reading. I’ve been training their language skills from different angles. Students improve their listening through listening to the tape attached to the text, listening to English songs, watching English movies. For speaking, I’ve tried to encourage students to speak to native English speakers they meet anywhere, to foreign English teachers in our school, and to be confident to speak English in English classes. When assigning homework, I ask students to record what they have learned in English classes, and I find out it’s an effective way to consolidate their language knowledge as well as speaking ability, because students feel freer to speak to the recorder the to people. In the training of reading, I’ve led students to read frequently and extensively. Text books, English newspapers, magazines which are suitable for middle school students are all rich materials, what’s more, these materials are in different styles. At this stage, teachers serve as leaders, leading students to develop their language skills，so as to lay a solid foundation for further communications in English.

    Giving students guidance is the basic condition for students to foster language ability, is also a necessary means in English teaching.

II．Mutual Aid and Classroom Interaction

The purpose of learning English is mainly to communicate in English，to obtain, process and convey information of science and technology, to experience different cultures. Students can reach the level of all-round communications through helping each other in classroom interaction.

Small class is a trend for English teaching; this mode has brought about beneficial condition for communicating between and among students. Communication happens at any time in small English classes. Our school has the advantage to teach English in small classes with only about 24 students in each class. In order to tap the students’ potential of communication, I’ve built up mutual aid teams. It works like this; the class is divided into two big teams with 12 students in each team, and a leader to hold responsibility. Every big team is then divided into two groups, with 6 members and one of them is chosen as the leader for each group. So an English class contains a representative on behalf of the teacher, two team leaders and another two group leaders, each responsible for either a team or a group respectively. The structure is just like a “pyramid”. For daily tasks, such as recitation, retelling texts, students fulfill them in the “pyramid”, individual student facing the group leader, the group leader facing the team leader, the team leader facing the representative and finally the latter facing delivering a report to the teacher. Usual problems are also solved within students themselves within the structure. So, on one hand, students develop their initiative through helping each other and on the other hand, teachers are able to have more time doing research work. Small classes can also help a lot for classroom interaction. Pair-work and group work are popular forms for classroom interaction, which offer students opportunities to practice sentence patterns, to exchange ideas face to face. Doing pair-work, students can use English freely and independently. With exchange of information, students can get-feedback immediately from their partners, so as to correct mistakes in time. Students’ interest in learning English increases through pair-work. This interaction is designated for acting out dialogues between two, for simple ask-answer questions and sentence patter practice. For higher rank of interaction, such as playing games, role play etc．Group-work functions better. For JEFC Book IB Unit19 ‘‘Food and Drink", I used to teach new words of food and drink with game playing. Students worked in group of six to speak out the items in turn. The class assessed which group worked out the most and chose the best group as the winner. Usually role-play is arranged in group-work, for which, teachers need to analyze each character 0f the role students arc going to play. The purpose is to consolidate students’ ability to use those language points and language skills to communicate, expressing their ideas and exchanging thoughts. It’s possible that students make some mistakes during communication, either grammar or logic ones It’s not wise to correct their mistakes too often. If teachers always focus on these mistakes, students will be likely shut their mouths，afraid to use English. At this time, teachers should walk around to help those in trouble. When needed, teachers may join students to play a role, students are happy about teachers’ involvement, and this will greatly increase students’ enthusiasm.

The structure of small English classes is very useful for students to form an atmosphere to help each Other and for interaction between teachers and students, and among students themselves.

III．Creating Situations and organizing Activities

The English language should be learned in real life situations. The meaning and charm of English are presented in situations. Students should be made to understand this point during learning. Situation teaching mainly focuses on meaningful practice. Teachers’ job is to take time and imagination to create relating real life situations, through task-based English teaching mode, offering students a language environment. With necessary activities, students enjoy using English, so that their English knowledge can be internalized.

Situation teaching often goes with tasks for students. For JEFC Book IB Unit 17 “Could you help me?’’ I used it give my students a lesson as the following:

Tasks: offering and requesting help

Aims: train students to ask help when meeting difficulty, and give help to those in trouble; develop their spirit to corporate with others.

Language points: words relating the topic

Language skills: listening and speaking

Form of activity: pair-work

Language tips： Let me help you／Could you help me, please?／Certainly.

Procedures: I design some situation happening inside or outside the school, such as borrowing or lending school things from or to Others, offering help to teachers, giving help to the Old or the crippled in a bus, asking the way  to somewhere etc．Students work with their partners in pairs, and I pick some pairs to perform in the front of the class. For JEFC Book3 Unit 4“Travel”, I designed a debate task for my students about the good and bad points of traveling. Students worked in group of six, coming up with these good points: increasing knowledge, tasting different food, enjoying beautiful scenery and meeting people; Bad points included: wasting time and money, doing badly to the nature, making people tired and so on.

Real life situations motivate students’ desire to learn and use English. They are so immersed into these situations that they often forget the existence of themselves. All the interest is to communicate in the target language. Their listening, speaking reading and writing ability are for sure to be improved. But teachers should still keep one thing on mind. While adopting communicative language approach, on one hand, we should encourage students to communicate in English bravely, on the other hand, we shouldn’t overlook their mistakes．Without accuracy, communication doesn’t make too mach sense. So we should keep an eye on their mistakes, paying attention to their intonation, stress, and grammar mistakes. Meanwhile, without fluency, however good your intonation and grammar are, yon can’t effective communication. It’s important to keep a balance between accuracy and fluency.

For situation teaching, teachers play roles as a designer, designing real life situations for students to internct, as a conductor, conducting students like performing an orchestra. Through activities in situations, students have realized a knowledge shift from books to real practical ability.

IV．Classroom Management

    Classroom management is another important factor to achieve desirable teaching effect besides teaching skills. Without effective management, all teachers and students’ efforts won’t pay off. Classroom management is about the relationships between teachers and students, and among students, as well as students’ discipline. Teachers play the role of a controller to ensure all the activities `are under control.

A．Relationships in the Classroom

A classroom is regarded as a society with students and teachers as its citizens. A harmonious learning atmosphere enables students to learn and live inside the classroom happily and healthily. First, there’re three kinds of relationships between students and teacher: One is Superior-inferior relationship, in which teachers dominate the class, while students appear passive, only listening to teachers; Another is totally equal relationship, in which teachers are not authorized, and students don’t need to listen to teachers, so that teaching effect can’t be guaranteed; The third is corporative relationship, in which the atmosphere is democratic, active and dynamic. In English classes, teachers should take the third mode, guiding students to corporate with teachers and the other students. It is also a goal for middle school English teaching. Then comes the relationship among students. The first is students help and learn from each other, sharing good learning materials or methods with the others，as a result，the whole class makes progress simultaneously; The second is competitive relationship, in which students compete with each other, trying to catch up with others. Teachers should guide students to compete in the right directions; the third is some students take preserved attitude, not willing sharing good experiences with others, so it’s harmful for long-run development.

Teachers should encourage healthy relationship and overcome passive relationship in the classroom.

B．Students’ Discipline

Discipline has been proved a guarantee for successful teaching effect. Troubled students exist in the classroom. How to educate them is indeed a tough task for teachers, English teachers are no exceptional. Troubled students make noise, take loud, or disturb others to interrupt teaching. There are some ways to deal with these circumstances. Teachers just stare at the trouble students for seconds, or walk towards them; they may stop their wrong doing. It’s also a good way to have private talks after class. We can educate them together with their families and the school leaders. Teachers don’t necessarily need to stop to reason with them. It takes time, skills and patience to turn these troubled students into the right track.

The above is part of my thoughts about teachers’ role in language teaching. Whatever role teachers play, we should respect students, treat students kindly and equally, coordinate relationships in the classroom, and try to build up harmonious environment for students to study and live. Students are the main party of the classroom, but they also need teachers’ guidance. It’s teachers’ duty to lead them to learn English in practicing develop their language ability and tap their synthetic potential.