i‑Learner Education Centre

Teacher Diaries

Teacher Diaries: Mr. Adam – Teaching Philosophy

Seeing students acquire language in a fun and engaging way is a huge pleasure for me, and I believe success in the classroom derives from three important factors.

The first is to have fun. When children have fun, they feel comfortable and are much more likely to learn effectively. Because of this, I make every effort to incorporate games and activities into the material I use, to ‘take learning off the page’, so to speak.

Secondly, it is important that teaching and learning methods are creative and effective. I am against the idea of slavishly working through question after question, and believe that efficient acquisition of English is best achieved through using a variety of methods, including video, music, drama, stories, and more. This also feeds into developing broader critical thinking skills in English, something which is difficult to accomplish if students only experience the language through monotonous exercises.

Lastly, having a goal is also crucial, because it is useful to understand where your studying is going, and what the purpose of your learning is. Students respond well when they understand not just what they are studying, but why they are studying English.

I have discovered a lot of what I bring to the classroom from my own personal language study of Japanese and Chinese. Spending a lot of my personal time learning languages has not only helped me to understand more about why Chinese speakers learn in the way they do, but it has also given me a chance to experiment on myself with what works, and what doesn’t work, particularly when working with languages that are very different from each other. This way I can be sure that what I bring to the classroom is something I have tried and used myself, and that every lesson is fun, engaging and effective.