| a glimpse of... |
I grew up dreaming of being a teacher because I was born into a family that had worked in education. After experiencing great excitement in sharing and elevating the level of knowledge of my students, I realized that being a teacher is truly my passion. For nearly three years of teaching English to secondary and high school students in Indonesia, I learned that teachers must be adaptable, flexible, and highly motivated to conduct effective learning strategies tailored to the students' needs. In my first year of teaching elementary, I struggled to inspire them to study English, a foreign language with entirely different grammatical and phonological structures, because not all were fluent enough in Bahasa Indonesian (effect of continual mother tongue usage). To deal with this, I constantly strived to boost students’ motivation to create a supportive learning atmosphere in my classroom. As time passes, I think the key to successful language instruction is keeping the students motivated to learn.
I encourage student enthusiasm through practice and technologically integrated exercises to promote learning motivation. I am happy to implement the KWL strategy in the opening and closing activities. I typically pair this with the cooperative language learning (CLL) approach, which involves a variety of collaborative tasks in an effort to make students feel at ease learning alongside their peers. Starting the class with a smile or short motivating meditation is another starter I believed to have a certain magic to get the students engaged from the first place. As a non-native teacher, I experienced many difficulties learning English as a foreign language due to a lack of teacher and peer support. Learning became an intimidating competition instead of a cooperative process. I can't dispute that many Indonesian students today find it frightening as well. Hence, with my personal teaching style, I want the students to enjoy our learning activity.
First, using KWL allows me to present new topics to the class more logically. It can also be incorporated into multiple skills. In reading lessons, for example, phase K or knowing allows students to recall prior knowledge about the subjects covered in the reading. This can also make them able to connect things with the information in the reading. Students that are eager to learn would express their interests in phase W, want to learn. We can tell how excited they are about the lesson. The last stage, L, stands for learned. Students can openly share what they already know after reading. I can now comprehend how they capture and assimilate information. The engagement of my students during the activity can be a measure of their enthusiasm.
Additionally, as they interacted to discuss reading findings with their friends and me, they indirectly practiced strengthening their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. I believe that letting them learn from their peers cooperatively would be beneficial for them. This process signals that students are motivated to be well-engaged in my instruction.
Complementing each other, KWL and CLL are carried out sequentially. This lets my students participate in a range of creative and fun activities involving pairs and small groups of students in the classroom. Both are student-centered, so there are more opportunities for students to collaborate with their peers during group projects or conversations, which will help them build their communicative ability. My primary areas of emphasis in applying CLL would be critical thinking and speaking skills. I guide them through joint exercises, including role plays, inquiry-based groups, the jigsaw approach, and dialogue practice so they may get used to speaking English naturally. To optimize opportunities for student interactions outside of the classroom, I create and apply a technological-integrated activity called “perspective-sharing”. “Perspective-sharing” enables students to create two weekly videos (5 minutes each) talking about their self-evaluation after class and another collaborative video with peers responding to one popular topic of their choice, such as music, games, cartoons, or even robots and technology. These videos should be posted on their social media and in the Edmodo (the learning platform I use) to receive corrective feedback from viewers, other students, and teacher. “Perspective-sharing” leads them to be active and creative because they can come up with different ideas and preferences for issues around them. Students are allowed to discuss the narration and the design of the video they are working on. The results from this activity show that students are elated to study in my class and to create more and more “perspective-sharing” videos.
I know that the focus I am advocating in my instruction benefits both me and my students. I've observed encouraging outcomes in terms of motivation to increase speaking abilities. Students are inspired to constantly learn and interact with other students and me about their assignments and feedback from me or their peers. Other than that, it's helpful that students and technology go hand in hand. It's like hitting two birds with one stone when we help students enthusiastically develop useful content while also guiding them to strengthen their critical thinking and speaking skills. My students can achieve the learning objectives I set forth for linguistics. Furthermore, by looking at the student’s self-evaluation of the teaching activity from the "perspective-sharing" project, I can evaluate each student's needs and switch to the approach that would have addressed their issues. The most important thing, ultimately, is that I can create a friendly, encouraging, and pleasant learning environment in my classroom where my students feel at ease, highly motivated, and engaged in collaborating with peers during the courses.
Cheers | G.April
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