Teaching Philosophy
Alignment against of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and National Board for Professional Teaching (NBPTS) standards, I form and revise my curriculum. This ensures that I provide my students with essential learning, and skills that will enable them to be linguistically and culturally ready to communicate successfully in the American Chinese Society and any Mandarin speaking nations. Furthermore, my students will be able to understand their learning (Chinese language and culture) in relation to their own diverse backgrounds and cultures.
I also have a very different teaching style from the traditional foreign language educational approach. Instead of starting my students in a learned language format, where language is taught in discrete bits and pieces though repetitive drills, I take real-life communication tasks as my curriculum’s starting point. Using questions and answers in games, songs and stories, my students gain understanding of vocabulary, grammar and cultural information, not in isolation but in context. Though this type of acquisition learning method, my students learn to comprehend, speak, use, analyze, read and write Mandarin.
As all educators know, no two students are alike or learn in the same way. Even, an enriched environment for one student is not necessarily enriched for another. Thus, I differentiate my instruction and on-going assessments. As a learning coach, I also plan my lessons according to my students’ growth, readiness, efficiency, learning profile, engagement and interests. Furthermore, students are also given opportunities to work individually or in groups to rethink, use and extend what they’ve learned.
To kindle and maintain my students’ love for Mandarin, I integrate culture into my language curriculum. Without this, a student would find the study of the targeted language seemingly meaningless. The student would know nothing about the people who speak the language or the country in which the language is spoken. From my experience, integrating culture into language classes provides students many reasons to continue their study. It arouses curiosity and interest. It also possesses humanizing and motivating effects upon any second language learner. Study of culture helps students to observe similarities and differences among various cultural groups. It also plays a useful role in general education like geography and history.
The growth of technology has brought about many changes in our lives. As the pace of technology adoption ever increases, this is perhaps most easily noticed in our students, who readily jump on the latest and greatest of almost everything. Today, it is hard not to find a student not plugged into some form technical devices such as an iPod, a cell phone, an iPad, or laptop, etc. According to Tomlinson, (2001) Learning takes place most effectively in classrooms where knowledge is clearly and powerfully organized, where students are highly active in the learning process, assessments are rich and varied, and where students feel a sense of safety and connection. To engage these 21st century students, I feel there is a pressing need for me as a teacher, to use varied teaching strategies and resources that students are familiar with, such as eBooks, and web collaboration tools like Facebook, blogs, vblog, twitter, and many other web 2.0 tools.
Through the use of multimedia technology and differentiated instruction, students are able to demonstrate their learning in a form that best suits their particular learning styles and needs. I strongly believe that by continuing to differentiate my instruction using a wide variety teaching tools and technologies that are popular among students, learning success in my classroom will increase even further.
