"9 "Fishes" for English Teachers"
In the past year, there have been a sudden increase in the number of teachers who have asked me for courseware, PPT, teaching design, unit exercises, test papers, audio and video and other teaching materials in various ways. !This makes me feel a little complicated.
We often talk about the principle of "teaching a man to fish is worse than teaching him to fish." Today, with increasingly abundant information resources, if teachers are accustomed to reaching out for "fish" without improving their own "fishing" abilities, what will our education and teaching look like in the future? At the risk of being misunderstood by some teachers, Let me talk to you about several practices for English teachers.
1
Teaching terms
Spend time to actually improve your ability to organize teaching in English. There are teachers who teach English classes except OK! Good! Great! Super girl! Yes or no? Read after me! Follow me! Classroom terms such as this are almost not used to organize teaching in English. Some teachers of seem to be teaching in "all English", but they make so many mistakes in one class that it is unbearable to hear. These are all manifestations of inadequate classroom teaching vocabulary.
Classroom teaching vocabulary is the most likely lifelong practice in the career of English teachers. Relevant information is available in the appendices of most teachings and , and it is easy to find online. In fact, the difficulty is not in finding the information, but in whether you can conscientiously study and practice it. Learn to use three or two sentences in each class, and you will basically master it after one semester. It is not difficult to say.
2
Pronunciation and intonation
Choose the correct pronunciation booklet of the dubbing video, follow it carefully and practice, work hard to correct your pronunciation, and effectively improve your pronunciation and intonation level.This is also the most conspicuous "facade" of English teachers, and it is worth practicing seriously. .
Some people may think that since there are so many audio and video resources now, it’s enough to just use courseware in class, and whether the teacher’s pronunciation is good or not is not that important. Whether a certain knowledge is explicitly taught to students and whether the teacher himself has the basic literacy in this area are two different things. Even if the teacher does not teach students to learn phonetic symbols, the teacher's own pronunciation and intonation must be passable; even if the teacher does not specifically teach grammar in class, the teacher's own grammatical literacy should also be passable.
In fact, although digital media resources are now very abundant, and multimedia can partially replace teachers’ demonstrations and readings, the most convenient and efficient classroom voice input is still inseparable from teachers’ good pronunciation literacy. The identification and reasonable feedback of students' pronunciation problems are difficult to replace with information technology.
3
Teaching Materials
Few teachers feel that they are not familiar with the teaching materials, but the facts do not always support the teachers’ personal feelings. Not every teacher can close the book and recall more than 80% of the main content. Moreover, you must not only be familiar with this volume of this semester, but also read the entire set of textbooks, and at least have a general understanding of the related volumes. What will be taught this semester and to what extent it will be taught, the unit goals and the goals of each lesson must be clear and clear about . If you feel unsure after reading the teaching materials yourself, refer to the supporting teacher's teaching books and teacher training manuals.
Never teach based on your feelings. If you teach vaguely, it will also delay students. In recent years, people have often repeated a sentence: "Teach not with textbooks, but with textbooks." There is a prerequisite for teaching with textbooks, which is that the textbooks must be very familiar. Some teachers are busy in expanding and integrating other resources without clarifying the teaching materials in class, which means neglecting the basics and pursuing the distant. Not only is the time and energy lost, but the teaching effect is often not ideal.
4
Curriculum Standards
Curriculum Standards is a direction. It allows you to understand why students need to learn foreign languages and what level of learning is considered to be basically qualified; it will also tell you the basic teaching principles and how to use textbooks. If you have read the course standards several times, or participated in training or even exams, but still feel that they are not used in teaching, then you will have to spend more time studying basic courses such as linguistics and foreign language pedagogy.
5
Students
Understanding students is the most important and most easily ignored practice. Don't take it for granted that you know your students. The actual situation is that more than 60% of teachers do not know 40% of their students. At the end of the day, you are not teaching English but students. Even if you are good at English and can speak it well, if your students don't learn, can't learn, or can't learn, teaching means that it hasn't happened. The psychology education courses you have studied are not only used for exams to obtain teacher qualification certificates, but also for practical use.
Many times it’s not that you don’t teach well, but that students don’t learn it. Whether you teach well or not, your self-perception is unreliable, and it doesn’t matter what the evaluation experts say. In the end, it is the students who have the final say. Therefore, I always say that teachers’ work requires “half-heartedness”. They must have childlike innocence, love and patience for children, and they must be sincere and creative about the subjects they teach and the work of educating people.
6
Watching the class
Demonstration class can let you know how other peers teach . I heard that there are teachers who have hundreds of gigabytes of demonstration lessons stored in their hard drives, but their teaching level is still at the same level. I guess I didn’t watch enough or didn’t know how to watch the class. When looking at demonstration classes, you should look at the design, links, interactions, courseware, etc., but be careful not to fall into formalism or technicalism; the most important thing when looking at a class is to look at the logical connotation behind it. Watching classes is enough. Don’t expect to get good lessons by watching a lot of demonstration classes. You may not be able to sing after listening to N concerts. You need to watch the class, but you still have to practice the basic skills on your own.
7
resources
The first is the ability to obtain information and conduct comprehensive analysis and processing of information . This aspect has been emphasized more and everyone is familiar with it. On the other hand, I think the more important thing is the ability of "information dieting" . People with overnutrition will become obese and even sick; people with too much information will also get sick in their thoughts and emotions. Nowadays, we are drowned in a huge amount of information of all kinds every day, and we often feel that we are even less capable of teaching than in the old days when there was little information. Therefore, some people say that "information is poisonous."
Facing the overwhelming and ubiquitous information, it is very necessary for us teachers to improve our ability to screen and filter information, and also improve our self-control in information "fasting" and "diet". In the past, most excellent teachers were those who could master more information. In the future, excellent teachers are likely to be those who are best at screening and filtering information and have developed the habit of information "diet". How can we develop this ability and habit? The simple and effective way is to read more classics and follow less hot topics.
8
Life-long learning
Even good teachers must continue to learn. Not only because there is no end to teaching, not only because “teaching teaches you each other.” "The music never leaves the mouth, and the punch never leaves the hands." If you don't continue to learn, first of all, your listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills and vocabulary may deteriorate. And social development and student needs are changing with each passing day, and one day you will be unable to do what you want.
Everyone has been talking about core competencies in the past two years, and many teachers are concerned about "how to implement core competencies in teaching." The logical starting point for thinking about this issue in should also start with teachers.First of all, teachers should learn to understand what language ability, cultural character, thinking quality and learning ability are in foreign language teaching, and then reflect and objectively evaluate their general level in the above four aspects. What is your own learning ability? Are you constantly learning new things every day? What is the quality of your thinking? Is it rigid and dogmatic? How is your cultural character? Is it open? If teachers' core competencies are "on the ground" in many aspects, there is no need to talk about "implementation" in teaching for the time being.
9
Meditation
Education is a job that the more anxious you are, the harder it is to do well. The faster society develops, the more teachers must practice calmness. Being famous, showing off, following fashion, showing off, etc. are all the enemies of true education. There are certainly not many teachers who don’t know the above eight practices, but there may be very few teachers who can do them. Maybe reading a good book seriously will greatly promote your teaching, but you just can't calm down and read it seriously. The most common reasons are busyness and blindness. Year after year, if the mind cannot be quiet, the practice will eventually become in vain.
Due to space limitations, I will first discuss these points on teachers’ self-cultivation. With these kinds of "fishing", teachers can easily get the "fish" they need, and they won't have to ask others for it in the future.
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Reprinted from | Primary School Teaching Design
Author | Chen Li: Doctor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, associate editor and reviewer of People's Education Press, and associate researcher of the Curriculum and Textbook Research Institute. Main research directions: applied linguistics, and foreign language teaching; preparation and evaluation of foreign language teaching materials; foreign language teaching methods.
