Learning Contexts!

Something I found appealing from Describing learning contexts was schools and class size. I personally relate one to each other. I have not had the experience of teaching in a public school.  Public school tend to have really large classes where focusing on the needs of the students is practically impossible. 

In our society, public schools have lack of resources such as good chairs, new facilities, cutting edge technology resources and so on.  On this particular environment, from my point of view, teaching becomes a real challenge.  On the other hand comes the background of students and it is not secret that most of them come from hearths where social problems are an everyday matter. When having a class of 30 or even 50 students coming from many different social strata is hard to keep the interest on the class extremely difficult. 

On my personal opinion the teacher is not only the teacher but also the friend, the guide, even the psychologist because one must be prepared for any kind of situation that arises in the classroom.  The teacher has not only one but several roles on this particular case.   

Classes like this big demands a lot from the teacher. A teacher in this situation must have a great number of techniques to maintain order and the flow of the class in its right course.

Harmer presents a list of key elements to take into account when teaching large classes and my favorites are maximize group/pair work and use students for example as monitors of the groups. In this way the teaching and instructing is minimized and teachers become more guides rather than the person always in front of the students giving a “boring” lecture.

Learners everywhere!

Learners!

A belief of mine that was confirmed is that English teachers at languages institutes (including me) have to face different types of learners every month and there are different facts that affect the language teaching environment. Age, for example, is one of those.  Usually (and I personally think it is a bad conception) people who are starting his/her teaching career are given young children as their very first students.  Young children and also adolescents are in my personal opinion the most difficult groups one can face in an English language teaching career.  Young children demand a lot from the teacher and their peers.   They are like little sponges that you have to maintain moist in order to keep the class flow with no difficulty at all.  The variety of activities that one must prepare is endless. Time controlling, classroom management are not easy things to achieve in a classroom of 15 or 20 children between 9 and 11 years old.  Adolescents on the other hand, are groups I find difficult to manage due to all those changes they face through this stage.  Finding the right social group, the right style, the appropriate trend in fashion are issues that interfere on the classroom.  Nowadays, teenagers are more worried about who they follow on twitter, what to post on Facebook, etc.  Because of all this things teachers must think on motivation and needs of students.  What makes them feel good and what one as a teacher can find to try to trigger all those capacities they have and use them at full range.

I want to talk specifically of one concept Harmer names on the reading.  The Motivation Angel.  On the motivation angel Harmer describes key concepts that I want to summarize in only two:  Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  On the intrinsic part we find the affect and the attitude. How you feel and what position you have towards learning affects primarily the learning process. 

On the other hand extrinsic motivation deals with the goals students can achieve and the kind of activities used to reach those goals.  With the correct internal and external motivation the learning process can be successful and both parts (students and teachers) will benefit from it.