Why I Teach English as a Second Language:

Language is my favorite topic. Since everyone is a user of language, everyone has something to say about it.
I love learning languages because each word learned brings a new way of knowing the world.
I love teaching English because I can learn so much from my students.

Teaching language is my primary interest in my professional life. My studies in second language acquisition and instructional technology are explicitly to support and inform my efforts in language teaching. The study of how language is acquired helps me to understand how language can be learned. Therefore, I endeavor to keep up with current field research concerning SLA, cognitive psychology and learning styles, as well as instructional technology trends, tools, and methods.

Teaching English brings great rewards through the students I meet and through the study of the English language.

What I want for my students:

For students of ESL, I strive for the highest measure of self-expression. For me, the bottom line is whether a speaker can convey their own true meaning. To this end, I consider myself a guide not only for language form, but also for language reception. The way that listeners perceive a speaker also depends on para-lingual aspects, such as slang, colloquialisms, and shared references. In addition to target structures and precise vocabulary, students also need to learn how their expressions might be perceived within specific social contexts.

Students of ESL are seldom sciolistic in their efforts to improve their English. Their motivations are strong and the rewards of their achievements often have immediate impact on their lives. This is an important factor in my view of ESL teaching and curriculum planning. For FL learners, my planning is often aimed at long term goals and distant rewards, while for ESL learners, I think about more immediate goals concerning their specific needs for things like legal matters, job demands, and social well-being. While I would always be glad to tailor course content to appeal to students’ interests, professions, or other fields of study, for an ESL learner, those interests may be more urgent, more specific, or more immediate, compared with the interests of FL learners.

How I Teach:

I use reflective practices to monitor and improve my teaching skills and effectiveness. I conduct action research into my own teaching and I apply the best practices gleaned from recent literature on SLA and foreign language pedagogy. I believe that the perfect teaching method can not exist, yet as an educator, it is my duty to discover it nonetheless.

I enjoy helping students with individual instruction, both as a means of getting to know them better, and as a way of assessing learner characteristics and appropriate strategies. I apply careful consideration to students' evaluation products and I feel that homework correction has great value: 1) I can address the individual’s deficits in a specific way, 2) It creates a dialogue that couldn’t take place in class, especially with students who are shy, and 3) student errors can show developmental patterns that provide insights to help plan approaches for addressing diverse learning styles.

I keep a very extensive library of literature and language materials from which I can learn and draw upon, and I create many original teaching materials from clipart and original drawings, illustrating principles and meanings of concepts through graphic organizers and animation. I keep current with research and theoretical movements in language pedagogy through listservs and Internet resources and through journal subscriptions of professional foreign language education associations (ACTFL, TESOL, MLA, AATG, CALICO) and I participate in interdisciplinary seminars in order to learn from developments in other fields.

I model and facilitate the use of the Internet for communication and resource gathering. I communicate with my students through private email and group distribution lists on a regular basis. Assignments are sent directly to students as well as being posted in traditional ways, and students are free to deliver materials electronically. I am always available to students through Skype or other channels of communication. This flexibility helps students to balance school demands with life-priorities, while providing organizational support.

I continually strive to improve my practice for the sake of my students, as well as for my personal sense of value.