Rashni

My concept of teaching is based on life-long learning and Critical thinking as the learners should be given the knowledge, practice, space, and confidence to use the target language long term. For this, I incorporate student centered learning process while playing as a role of a facilitator and I believe that the teachers should provide a room for learners to explore and learn the language through trials and errors to adjust themselves not only in academic related work but also in day-to-day life as well. This philosophy is directly based on Social Constructivism by Vygotsky (1986) as learners build on personal experience and actively engaged in social and learning process. As I work with young adults of early twenties, the main purpose is to cater their academic writing, presentation, and communication skills along with general grammar concepts. The activities such as Individual Presentation, Group Presentation and e-portfolio improves the skills as creativity, decision making, presentation skills, problem solving and teamwork where the students can have a self-reflection and enjoy students’ autonomy while achieving the learning goals.

According to my teaching philosophy, it is very important for a teacher to understand the students’ needs. Therefore, my goal for students is to enhance their basic language skills, academic writing and communication skills as their main target is to make use of the language as a scaffolding for their academic and industry life. The activities I have created such as journal writing, process writing, describing objects, graphs, charts, letter writing, email writing, public speaking, individual and group presentations, and oral tests help the learners to improve their academic writing and communication skills.

A predominant concept I practice in my teaching philosophy is Collaborative learning. Therefore, I wholeheartedly endorse with Vygotsky’s (1986) Social Constructivism theory which is based on the cognitive functions which allow the learners to interact and learn by sharing ideas and opinions from one another. In my teaching context, I always incorporate group work and pair work while monitoring and guiding the students. As a teacher, I believe that collaborative learning process between the students and the teacher is both effective and beneficial in achieving the goal of personal and professional development. To illustrate, PowerPoint group presentation, project report and public speaking was done as a group activity (5 members) where the learners were given the freedom to work collaboratively in their own pace while sharing each other’s ideas. In this assignment, the introduction, slide transition, handing over the presentation to the next member, the conclusion, fluency, presentation skills and the use of technology in English language classroom were evaluated. The marking criteria of this group task is based on 5 marks for individual performance and 5 marks for group work and the whole group will get a same mark for working as a team.

I also incorporate the theory of TBLT (Task Based Language Teaching) as it gives me the chance to introduce authentic tasks to my students which will help them in real life situations. For example, the two lessons I discussed “Language of Discussion and Conversational Strategies” directly support the learners to enhance their day to day speaking ability which will make them easy to converse in their daily lives. Willis, D., & Willis, J. (2007) argue that one of the most valuable aims of TBLT is to give learners “the confidence and willingness to have a go, even if their language resources are limited” (p. 2). Therefore, I gave the students an assessment of Language discussion where they get into a group and prepare for the given topic which are related to real life situations prior to the assessment, and they were required to use the conversational strategies and language phrases we learnt in class for their language assessment.

I always try to be Creative and incorporate Technology (PowerPoint, Projectors, Padlet, Videos, Digital Story Telling, Zoom) for my language teaching classroom. I designed a task where the students were asked to prepare an e-portfolio where they are asked to include four major tasks such as “About me, my views on online learning, three journal entries, my experience as an undergraduate”. In this case the students were given the freedom to use the technology to make an e-portfolio in a creative and innovative way while enhancing their writing skill as well. As a result, I got very creative e -portfolios from the learners.

I also believe that a successful teacher needs to build up a good rapport with his or her student to understand the psychological state of mind and social background as it will directly affect the in class active participation, attendance, and overall performance of the learner. In that way only the student will interact with the teacher without any fear. For example, in the very first day of my class I have allocated an introductory session for the students to share their personal details with the fellow members and the teacher as a communicative task. To achieve this objective, I have designed an oral test for the first-year students which comprises three major sections where the students get a chance to introduce themselves, their interest, and their personal details in the first part.

Furthermore, as assessing and evaluating students are major parts of teaching and learning, I always assess the students through written and communicative activities as Oral presentations, public speaking activities, impromptu speeches, debates, to make sure that I cater the needs of the learners effectively by following Communicative Language Teaching where the students are encouraged to speak with prior practice and spontaneously as well. As stated by Barbosa & Beserra, (2015) “continuous” and “interactive” assessment, requiring active involvement of the learners. Therefore, I follow Communicative Language Teaching approach which reflect a communicative view of language and language learning and that can be used to support a wide variety of classroom procedures (Richards & Rodgers, 2001).

According to Glatthorn (1995) Learning should not be limited to acquire knowledge. It can be used for our professional growth which achieves as a result of gaining increased experiences and examine teaching systematically. Since I strongly believe in professional and self-growth, I started reading for Postgraduate Diploma in TESL at PGIE, Open University Sri Lanka to acquire new knowledge and experiences from the expertise in the field of TESL which will directly support to enhance my professional qualifications and teaching career. Apart from that I am working as an active member of the ITUM Toast Masters Club which supports me in enhancing my language skills as well as social circle.