爱华网How to be a good Englishteacher?
Abstract: In this paper, first, we havedescribed some of the qualities which good teachers possess;Second, we have investigated the kind of language teacher use withstudents; Third, we have discussed which instructions is easy orsimple for students to understand; Fourth, we have discussed therelative merits of student talking time and teacher talking time;Fifth, we have talked about which kinds of lessons can be acceptedby students; Finally, we have concentracted on the teacher’sability to respond flexibly to what happens in class,even whileattempting to follow a pre-arranged plan.
Key words: character, entertainer,instruction, TTT, STT, boredom, flexible.
The character and pensonality of the teacher is a crucial issue inthe classroom. If you want to have a good achievement, teacher mustbe a good teacher. Next I’ll talk about some issues.
Ⅰ: What makes a good teacher?
In an attempt to find out what we all think aboutteachers and teaching. I recently asked a variety of people thequestion “what makes a good teacher?” the following answers arerepresentative of the many that were given.
1,They should make their lessons interesting so youdon’t fall asleep in them.
2,A teacher must love her job. If she really enjoysher job that’ll make the lessons more interesting.
Teachers who look fed up or unhappy with what theyare doing tend to have a negative effect on their students. Whenyou observe good teachers you will notice that, even if they arefeeling terrible, they put on a good ‘teacher’s face’when theyenter the classroom.
3,A good teacher is an entertainer and I mean thatin a positive sense, not a negative sense.
Students enjoy being entertained and amused.However, a balance has to be struck between entertainment andteaching. Sometimes, the former can overwhelm the latter.
4,A good teacher who has lots of knowledge, notonly of his subject.
The preoccupation with the teacher’s personality isreflected here too: teachers should not be afraid to bring theirown interests and lives into theclassroom.
Although, as we can see, the character andpersonality of the teacher is a crucial issue in the classroom, byfar the greatest number of responses to the question ‘What makes agood teacher?’ were not so much about teachers themselves, butrather about the relationship between the teacher and the students.This is borne out in the following responses.
1, A good teacher is somebody who has an affinitywith the students that they’re teaching.
Successful teachers are those people who canidentity with the hopes, aspirations and difficulties of theirstudents while they are teaching them.
2,A good teacher should try and draw out the quietones control the more talkative ones.
Experienced teachers can tell you of classes whichare dominated by bright, witty, loud, extrovert students. As thisEFL teacher implies, it’s easy to be captivated by such students.It takes more effort to ensure that the quiet, shyer students alsoget a chance. One of the secondary students I questioned said, ‘Agood teacher is …someone who asks the people who don’t always puttheir hands up.’
3, He shouldbe able to correct people without offending them.
Explaining to students that they have made amistake is one of the most perilous encounters in the classroom. Ithas to be done with tact. The teacher has to measure what isappropriate for a particular student in a particular situation.
4, A goodteacher is someone who helps rather than shouts.
Said by asecondary school student, this was one of the many comments aboutdiscipline. The people who resent bad behaviour most are notteachers, but other students who feel their time is being wasted.Learning how to manage students and how to control boisterousclasses is one of the fundamental skills of teaching.
5,A good teacher is someone who knows ournames.
Class management- the ability to control andinspire a class is one of the fundamental skills of teaching.Teachers find it much easier if their students bellieve that theyare genuinely interested in them and available for them.
The most obvious common feature of the differentteacher’s accounts was that in response to our question about theirteaching they almost always talked about what their pupils weredoing.
A simple answer to the question “ what makes a goodteacher” therefore, is that good teacher care more about theirstudent’s learning than they do about their own teaching.
Ⅱ: How should teachers talk tostudents?
The way thatteachers talk to students, the manner in which they interact withthem is one of the crucial teacher skills, but it does not demandtechnical expertise. It does, however, require teachers toempathise with the people they are talking to.
One group ofpeople who seem to find it fairly natural to adapt their languageto their audience are parents when they talk to their youngchildren. Studies show that they use more exaggerated tones ofvoice, and speak with less complex grammatical structures than theywould if they were talking to adults. Their vocabulary is generallymore restructed too and the attempt to make eye contact is greater.They generally do these things unconsciously.
Though teachers and students are not the same asparents and children, this subconscious ability to ‘rough-toue’ thelanguage is a skill they have in common. Rough-tuning is thatunconscious simplification which both parents and teachers make.Neither group sets out to get the level of language exactly correctfor their audience. They rely, instead, on a general perception ofwhat is being understood by the people listening to them. Theirempathy allows them to almost feel whether the level of languagethey are using is appropriate for the audience they areaddressing.
Experienced teachers rough-tune the way they speakto students as a matter of course. Newer teachers need toconcentrate their focus on their students’comprehension as theyardstick by which to measure their own speaking style in theclassroom.
Apart fromadapting their language, experienced teachers also use physicalmovement: gestures, expressions, mime. It becomes almost secondmature to show happiness and sadness movement and time sequences,concepts using these techniques. They become part of the landuageteachers use, especially with students at lower levels.
Ⅲ: How should teachers giveinstructions?
This issue ofhow to talk to students becomes crucial when teachers are givingtheir students instructions. The best activity in the world is awaste of time if the students don’t understand what it is they aresupposed to do.
There are twogeneral rules for giving instructions, they must be kept as simpleas possibe, and they must be logical. Before giving instructions,therefore, teachers must ask themselves the following questions:What is the important information I am trying to convey? What mustthe students know if they are to complete this acticitysuccessfully? Which information do they need first? Which shouldcome next?
When teachers give instrutions,it is important for them to check that the students have understoodwhat they are being asked to do. This can be achieved either byasking a student to explain the acticity after the teacher hasgiven the instructions or by getting someone to show the otherpeople in the class how the exercise works. Where students allshare the same mother tongue, a member of the class can be asked totranslate the instructions as a check that they have understoodthem.
Ⅳ:Who should talk in class?
There is a continuing debateabout the amount of time teachers should spend talking in class.Trainees’ classes are sometimes criticized because there is toomuch TTT. ( Teacher Talking Time) and not enough STT ( StudentTalking Time)
Students to speak—to use thelanguage they are learning is a vital part of a teacher’s job.Student are the people who need the practice; in other words, notthe teacher. In general a good teacher maximizes STT and minimizesTTT.
Good TTT may have beneficial qualities, however,if teachers knows how to talk to students, if they know how torough-tune her language to the students’ level, as we havedisscussed above then the students get a chance to hear languagewhich is certainly above their own productive level, but which theycan more or less understand. Such ‘comprehensible input’ wherestudents receive rough-tuned input in a relaxed and unthreateningway- is an important feature in language acquisiton. TTT works!
A classroom where the teacher’svoice droned on and on day after day and where you hardly ever hearthe students say anything is not one that most teachers andstudents would approve of, however. TTT can be terribly over- used.Conversely, a class where the teacher seems reluctant to speak isnot very attractive either.
The best lessons are ones whereSTT is maximized, but where at appropriate moments during thelesson, the teacher is not afraid to summarise what is happening,tell a story, enter into discussion etc. Good teachers use theircommon sense and experience to get the balance right.
Ⅴ: What are the best kinds oflesson?
One of thegreatest enemies of successful teaching is student boredom. This isoften caused by the deadening predictability of much classroomtime. Students frequently know what is going to happen in class andthey know this because it will be the same as what happened in thelast class and a whole string of classes before that. Something hasto be done to break the chain.
In hisminumental book, Breaking Rules, John Fanselow suggests that, bothfor the teacher’s sanity and the student’s continying involvement,teachers need to violate their own behaviour patterns. If a teachernormally teaches in casual clothes, he should turn up one daywearing a suit. If a teacher normally sits dowm, she should standup. If he or she is normally noisy and energetic as a teacher, heor she should spend a class behaving calmly and slowly. Each timeteachers break one of their own rules, in other words, they send ariple through the class. That ripple is a mixture of surprise andcuriosity and it is a perfect starting point for studentinvolvement.
The need forsurprise and variety within a forty-munute lesson is alsooverwhelming. If, for example, student spend all of that timewriting sentences, they will probably get bored. But if, in thatforty minutes, there are a number of different tasks with aselection of different topics, the students are much more likely toremain interested.
However,variety is not the same as anarchy. Despite what we have said,students tend to like a certain amount of predictability: theyappreciate a safe structure which they can rely on. And too muchchopping and changing- too much variety in a forty-minute lessoncan be destabilising. Good teachers find a balance betweenpredictable safety and unexpected variety.
Ⅵ: How important is it to follow apre-aranged plan?
It is onething to be able to plan lessons which will have variety. Onceagain, a balance has to be struck between teachers attempting toachieve what they set out to achieve on the one hand and respondingto what students are saying or doing on the other.
Suppose thatthe teacher has planned that the students should prepare a dialogueand then act it out, after which there is reading text and someexercises for them to get through. The teacher has allowed twentyminutes for dialogue preparation and acting out. But when thestudents start working on this activity, it is obvious that theyneed more time. The teacher then discovers that they would like tospend at least half the lesson on just the acting out phase whichthey are finding helpful and enjoyable. At that moment, he or shehas to decide whether to abandon the original plan and go alongwith the students’ wishes or whether it is better to press aheadregardless.
Anotherscenario is also possible: all the students are still working on adialogue preparation except for two pairs who have alreadyfinished. The teacher then has to decide whether to tell them toweit for the others to catch up or whether to stop the rest ofclass to prevent this. Then the other students might end up feelingfrustrated because they didn’t have a chance to finish.
There areother crises too: the tape recorder suddenly doesn’t work; theteacher has forgotten to bright the material they were relying on;the students look at the planned reading text and say ‘ We’ve donethat before’
Good teachersare flexible enough to cope with these situations. Because they arefocusing on the studentd and what they need, they are able to reactquickly to the unplanned event. Perhaps , in the case of the pairswho finish early, for example, they have a couple of quick usefultasks ‘up their sleeves’ which they can ask the pairs to do whilethey’re waiting. Good teachers recognise that their plans are onlyprototypes and they may have to abandon some or all them if thingsare going too fast or too slow. Good teachers are flexible.
In a word, agood teacher must have own personality, know how to talk tostudents, how to give instructions, how to maximizes STT, how tofind a balance between predictable safely and unexpected varietyand be flexible enough to deal with suddenly situations. If youmaster these points, you will be a good English instructor.
Bibliography:
1)Jeremy Harmer. How to Teach English? English edition©Addison WesleyLongman Limited 1998.
2)Burns, Gentry. Motivating students to engage in experientiallearning, Simulation and Gaming, 29-133-151.
