Stanley’s blogworld

Teaching as an ESL teacher has been an exciting to sometimes down-right scary experience. Even after more than three years of teaching English as a foreign language I still experience regular up and downs. This I mostly contribute to the human-element. At the end of the day both teachers and students are unique individuals that experience things differently, and have their own approaches to the challenges and problems they face.

What really makes a good teacher or student, apart from a good understanding of the fundamentals, is the abillity to adapt to, and attend to the classroom situations as they come up - here I refer to individuals’ behavior as well as the group dynamics. This and the application of proven methods - this would include the application of teaching theory and implementation of the classroom techniques. Of course here experience and practice helps a lot.

If you had to observe ten different teachers in a classroom situation you would most probably observe ten quite different classes. This would be because of the importance of not only individual teaching skills and techniques, but also because of the importance of good teacher student rapport. This is an important point that I would like to mention in order to emphasize the great contributing factor of personal dedication on both the teacher and the students’ side - a teacher can help students to study and improve, and students can help a teacher perform better and improve.

In the next couple of months I look forward to publishing some of my ideas on teaching as well as study tips. I hope that writing down these notes will help me on my quest to review and improve my own techniques and ideas on teaching and studying EFL.