teachingreflection（教学反思）

teachingreflection（教学反思）

Teaching reflection

Recently, I presented a few lectures to the students of **

College. What I have learnt from the practice of teaching is of

great variety. At this moment, after a lecture of English teaching,

I cannot help but to reflect on my experience. First of all, my

beloved students range from the first year students to junior

ones, from the specialty of statistics to English teaching. That is

to say, it is necessary for me to employ different teaching

methods in that the background information of them is of great

difference. It is rather challenging for me to appeal to the

interests of all the students. But, from my point of view, I have

already tried my best to mobilize them to be involved into the

progress of learning. Just as what the Silent Way holds, tell me

and I forget; teach me and I remember; involve me and I learn.

As for the students of statistics, I mainly use the traditional

grammar-translation approach to teach the college English,

partly because they are the freshmen and it is not a wise choice

to impel them to reason some

thought-provoking statements. Why is it not a wise choice?

One day, one guy asked me for the answers of the exercises at

the end of the unit. He reminded me that almost all of

them are still slaved by the exam-oriented education. The

English class in their mind is that the teacher should go through

the text and the exercises words by words, sentences by

sentences, translate the text, and show the answers to the

followed questions. In order to make them feel at home, I would

better explain the text in detail, but this is not what the higher

education aims at. The national new English curriculum stipulate that there are five objectives which are expected to achieved at

the end of the lesson, and language knowledge and language

skills are merely two of them, the rest of which are affection,

learning strategies, and cultural awareness. The rest three

components, however, is more vital than the first two, for the

students I am teaching are college students, rather than middle

school student, whose major job is to lay a solid foundation for

the future development. Therefore, I used some open-questions,

hoping to change their attitude towards the college English class,

which no longer focuses on the language contents and skills

alone, but on some other more significant stuff, for instance,

reasoning, arguing, debating, etc. I clearly remember the text

named “why do we believe that the earth is round?”, written

by George

Orwell, a well-known novelist and critic. In that article, the

author advanced that we are living in a gullible, credulous, and

superstitious age. The ideas we hold does not rest on reasoning

or experiment, but on authority. People take it for granted that

what have been proved to be true is true, they never question the

truth. What a thought-provoking words. As for the English majors,

I naively supposed that since they are English advanced learner it

would be easy for them to accept the task-based language

teaching model, in which I encouraged them to perform tasks,

show the fruit of their discussions, and, most importantly, explain

why they think in that way and argue with the rest of the

classmates if they share different ideas. Unfortunately, it turned

out that I was wrong. They don’t give it a shit! But, what are the

reasons behind this distressing matter? Here comes the second

problem.

Who is responsible for the status quo that the students have little interests in the college English class, the teachers, the

students or the schools? As a teacher, whose major task is to

cultivate the students, cannot escape from this responsibility. Of

course, the low motivation of the students and the contents of

the teaching materials may also result in

this phenomenon, but this is not the key point of this

reflection. Something might well go wrong in the teachers. Since

the beginning of education, how to stimulate the students’

interests and motive them to study has been a heated topic,

especially in modern education, in which a revolution has taken

place to cultivate the student’s communicative competences,

reasoning awareness, and cooperative spirit. Although I have

read a lot of literatures and books about how to get the students

motivated, it is still a tough nut to crack. And here comes the 3rd

problem, which is how to mobilize the students.

Socrates and Confucius are experts in utilizing heuristics to

induce their students to reason. When the students do not know

what to speak, how to start a task, it is always helpful to offer a

hint, but just a hint. Do not dominate the talk!