Thinking About Theory

I am very excited to start my journey through the U of W ESL Teacher Certificate Program. It happened so that my point of departure is Course#2 “Understanding the Language Skills: An Introduction to Second Language Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening”. As far as the course title contains ‘#2’ I can’t just skip the '#1'. So due to my academic curiosity and common sense I decided to run through the key points of Thinking About Theory: A Framework for EAL Instruction. But I ended up reading lots of materials related to the history of teaching languages and the evolution of teaching methods and approaches, to principles of adult learning and factors affecting second language acquisition. I could not stop asking myself ‘Who are EAL learners?’, ‘What are their needs?’, ‘How can I, as a language instructor, contribute to the achievement of their goals and how can I motivate them?’. And of course I reflected on the ways of applying communicative approach in the EAL classroom and achieving communicative competence. Well, it seems impossible to summarize the whole course in one paragraph, but I will give it a try. 

The course touches upon theoretical aspects of EAL instruction and it actually reveals the components of successful EAL instruction formula. At first sight the formula seems quite simple: within one classroom we have a number of learners, open to language acquisition, and a teacher, applying various teaching methods to help learners achieve their goals. But in reality this formula contains lots of variables. First of all, we deal with adult people with their views on life, their practical goals, motivating them to study, and their problems, constantly distracting them. Secondly, when we talk about teaching methods we realize that throughout the history of language instruction quite a number of methods have been developed: from the grammar translation method, mainly focused on grammar rules application, scientists and language instructors, having discovered the importance of speaking, moved to the direct method. Inspired by behaviorism theory, they switched to audio-lingual approach, according to which learners acquire language as a habit by repeating various language patterns. Later they moved to humanistic approaches, underlining learners’ innate abilities (suggestopedia, total physical response, silent way). And, finally, when we shifted the focus from a linguistic competence to obtaining a communicative competence we’ve got the communicative approach to language learning with its authentic materials, meaningful activities and the real life language.

Well, here it is! We are all teachers here, thus we have to be able to do impossible things.

P.S. My favorite saying is "It's impossible. But doable" (Sean Connery in Entrapment, 1999). I keep saying that when I face any difficulties. Try that and you’ll see that it really works!