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Teaching Philosophy
Approaches to language teaching have gone through several radical changes in thinking
over the past few centuries, but over that time there has been a kind of repetitive pendulum
pattern to the field, swinging back and forth between some version of grammar-translation and
some kind of more communicative approach, the latter being the more generally accepted
approach these days (Celce-Murcia, 2014, pp. 4-8). Successful teaching should include some
measure of both ends of the spectrum, and the right mix will depend on the needs of the student.
A student whose goal is to be a tour guide for English-speaking tourists will need a more
communicative approach, with emphasis on speaking and listening; a student who plans on
translating documents will need a communicative approach that focuses on reading and writing;
and a student of philology may be looking at several languages at the same time and may have an
interest only in the grammar and vocabulary of the languages as they relate to each other.
Course content should be made relevant to the students situations. Doing so can achieve
a circular domino effect of learning: a subject that is relevant might keep a student interested,
interest on the part of the student can serve as motivation to learn, and success at learning allows
the language to move from being an abstract subject to being a useful tool that increases its own
relevance to the student (Anderson, 1994, p. 191). Relevance will be different for different
situations, e.g. adult students learning English to function in the United States might need lessons
that are arranged around frequent or occasional activities, such as paying bills, asking for
directions, or getting a drivers license. Students in a public school overseas could be doubly
helped if their language studies incorporate content from their other classes, such as science or
social studies, supporting their learning in both subjects.
All four of the basic language skills, i.e. listening, reading, talking, and writing, need to
be addressed in lesson planning in order to develop fluency in English, and each of the basic
skills supports and benefits from the others. With respect to listening, students should be exposed

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to a great deal of spoken English to allow them to become familiar with English speech patterns
and to practice strategies for listening, such as listening for basic meaning and anticipating what
someone is about to say (Goh, 2008, p. 191).
Following on the heels of listening is speaking. The issues in getting students to speak lie
not so much in its greater inherent difficulty, but in the internal obstacles that students must
overcome in order to speak up in a language class. Part of getting students to speak in class
involves trying to reduce their feelings of anxiety, their fear of being put on the spot, as well as
allowing them enough time to understand a prompt and to formulate a response (Mak, 2011, p.
211; Larsen-Freeman, 2000, pp. 107-108).
Students should also be given plenty of opportunities to read authentic material in
English, selected based on the relevance of the material. Students should practice reading for
fluency, and they should practice reading for comprehension (Anderson, 1994, pp. 185). The
materials should introduce new structures and new vocabulary, but buried in familiar material so
that students will not feel overwhelmed. They should be able to use knowledge acquired earlier
in the class to help them to understand the new information. Along with time spent reading,
students should be encouraged to take what they have read and apply it to writing (Ediger, 2014,
p. 164), both for themselves, e.g. by keeping a journal, and for others, e.g. by writing emails and
messages and by writing narratives to share with the class. For longer writing tasks, students
should be taught how to use brainstorming, which allows them to gather their thoughts and
organize their ideas prior to writing (Shafiee, 2015, p. 175).
Some theorists have posited that, with repeated exposure, students will naturally acquire
the grammar of a language without explicit instruction (Larsen-Freeman, 2014, p. 262), but
unfortunately that would probably require more exposure than is possible in a classroom setting.
Larsen-Freeman (2014, pp. 258-259) outlines a three-dimensional framework for teaching

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grammar based on form (structure), meaning (semantics) and use (pragmatics). This framework
lends itself to creating lesson plans, i.e. structuring lessons to include lots of practice based on
instruction in form and meaning, with the goal being to have students who can actually use the
language for their own purposes.
Language learning involves taking explicit instruction and working with the students to
turn it into implicit knowledge (Ellis, 2014, p. 36). Prior lessons are not simply one and done.
Every new lesson should also incorporate previous material, related both to grammar and to
vocabulary (Larsen-Freeman, 2010, p. 30). This should be done at regular intervals, so that the
students are exposed to the same concepts over and over, often in new contexts, in order to give
the students time to internalize the information.
Whatever theories and approaches might prevail at one time or another, the main question
that is always relevant is What does this student need in order to succeed? For me, the
teachers job is to get to know their students as people, to understand the students needs, to learn
how to make the subject relevant to the students, and to figure out which approach works best for
those students. One group of students may have different needs from the next group of students,
and the keyword for the teacher is flexibility; we have to be flexible and be prepared to change
our approach as soon as we see that something else would serve the students needs better. Its all
about the students.

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References
Anderson, N. (1994). Developing Active Readers: A Pedagogical Framework for the Second
Language Reading Class. System, 22, pp. 177-194.
Mak, B. (2011). An exploration of speaking-in-class anxiety with Chinese ESL learners. System,
39, pp. 201-214 doi:10.1016/j.system.2011.04.002
Celce-Murcia, M. (2014). An Overview of Language Teaching Methods and Approaches. In M.
Celce-Murcia, D. M. Brinton, M. A. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or
Foreign Language (pp. 2-14). Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning.
Goh, C. (2008). Metacognitive Instruction for Second Language Listening Development: Theory,
Practice and Research Implications. Regional Language Centre Journal, 39, (2), pp. 188213.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2014). Teaching Grammar. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. M. Brinton, M. A.
Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (pp. 256-270). Boston,
MA: National Geographic Learning.
Larsen-Freeman, D., DeCarrico, J. (2010). Grammar. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), An Introduction to
Applied Linguistics (pp. 18-33). London, UK: Hodder Education.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000). Techniques and principles in language teaching (2nd edition).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shafiee, S., Koosha, M., Afghari, A. (2015). CALL, Prewriting Strategies, and EFL Writing
Quantity. English Language Teaching, 8, (2), pp. 170-177.