Teacher Reflection 1 - Communicative Curriculum

This class has made me reflect on my experiences taking Spanish courses in both high school and college.  Looking back has made me realize what strategies worked and what ones did not work for learning the language and why.  Having the experience of learning a second language will be beneficial for me in my future as an ESL teacher because I will be able to connect with my students and any troubles they might have during their experience learning English.  I know how frustrating it can be to learn another language so I will be there to encourage them along the way.

Keeping my Spanish learning experiences in mind, for this week’s reflection I wanted to expand on the reading guide question about communicative curriculum and which components will be important in my future teaching context.  I thought all five components of the communicative curriculum were imperative to foreign language learning, but the one that stood out the most to me was My Language is Me: Personal English Language Use.  A key focus of this component is the language learner’s attitude about learning and using the language and as a teacher I will have a great influence on my future students’ mindsets. 

One way to make sure the students all stay positive about their language learning experiences is to incorporate an array of activities so all the students can display their strengths and feel confident in different situations.  From my experience, I think Communicative Language Teaching is an effective style for teaching a language because it encourages interaction between students, but at the same time it can hurt students if there is not enough variety in the communicative activities.  In high school a lot of our communicative activities were skits or role-plays in large groups, which can be intimidating for shy students or students who are afraid of messing up in front of their peers.  To avoid these feelings in my classroom, I will make sure to include both large group and small group or pair activities.

To go along with influencing my students’ attitudes, another essential part of My Language is Me, is respecting the students as they learn to use English to express themselves and begin to understand the sociocultural aspect of the language.  My students need to feel comfortable in their classroom environment and know they are not being judged if they make mistakes as they learn.  My expectation for my future students is not that they will have perfect “native” English as some teachers expect.  My goal is that they are able to learn English well enough to effectively communicate in the different situations they face in the real world and have a basic understanding of social contexts for English.  They do not need to make English their “native” language, just feel comfortable interacting with it.  In the Savignon article when they discussed English users, I found it interesting that “so called “non-native” users of its many varieties overwhelmingly outnumber so-called “native speakers””.  In today’s world there are so many different dialects of English spoken all over the world so not one specific way of speaking English can be viewed as correct.