November 7

Different year, different teacher, different methods

Hmmm…Another of my goals for this year was to be much more pro-active with my use of phonetics in the classroom.  In the past I’ve had a bit of a phobia of phonetics and I think that as a native speaker, I often worry that my students know more about phonetics than I do.

I think this can sometimes be true with adult students, but YLs often aren’t familiar with the phonetic alphabet.  More on how I’ve been introducing it to them in a future post.  The theme for today’s post is more, what’s the point?

 

This is not necessarily a pessimistic outlook, as I have no doubt that my nine-year-olds would benefit greatly from a year of phonetics; my concern is more related to the future – next year would they have a teacher who would continue in the same vein?

 

That got me to thinking about some of the negative aspects of our profession.  Whilst on the one hand there are HUGE benefits to having a different teacher each year (accent, methods, activities, etc), I do sometimes wonder whether some of the hard work we do gets undone from one year to the next – whether it’s the activities that we do, our teaching methods or the relationships we build with our students.


Posted November 7, 2012 by Teresa Bestwick in category My thoughts

2 thoughts on “Different year, different teacher, different methods

  1. Higor

    Hi T,

    Higor here, your Diploma ‘classmate’! =)

    This was one of my resolutions for 2012, actually, to work more with phonology, namely phonemic symbols, in the class. Along with ‘losing weight’, I can’t say I’ve been very successful in that particular resolution.

    For some reason, it is much easier to me to work with phonemic symbols with B2/C1 learners, and I just can’t bring myself to try it with A1/A2 students. I hope the diploma will help us there.

    As for the second point you raised, I’ve thought a lot about that as well, but also the other way around: Is the hard work previous teachers have done – dealing with pronunciation, for instance – being undone… by me?

    Loved your blog!

    Reply
    1. Teresa Bestwick (Post author)

      Thanks for stopping by, Higor! I was thinking about phonology with adults and I’m not sure whether it’s perhaps easier with lower levels – certainly to set up some good foundations for pronunciation. Whilst higher level learners are often more familiar with the chart, they can also have more ingrained pronunciation errors which are harder to put straight.
      Also, I completely agree with your second point and it crossed my mind when I was writing the post, but I didn’t include it. We had an incredibly creative teacher working with us last year and I don’t doubt that some of his students are really missing him and his amazing, energized teaching style.

      Reply

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