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Teach English in Wudu Zhen - Hanzhong Shi

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As we learned in the course, teachers adopt a variety of roles at given times, which include those described as instructor, facilitator, mentor, psychologist, counsellor, and policeman. Among them, the responsibilities in classroom as instructor, facilitator, and policeman can be easily imagined, as teachers are expected to guide students through clear instructions and effective feedbacks while ensuring the conditions and environment suitable for learning. While accomplishing these basic roles itself can be a challenge, what I find the most difficult is related to the role of teacher that can be described as “psychologist” or “counselor”. While business English students can be under work-related stress and pressure, general adult students may have to deal with different types of restrictions associated with their family and/or work. Young leaners may show up in class while struggling with issues related to their family or school conditions. Thus, even though all students in classroom are there to learn English, all individuals have different lives outside and this fact itself presents a significant variable influencing individuals’ performance and efficiency of learning. Here, what I find difficult is to figure out how much an EFL teacher could or should get involved in such personal matters. For example, with young learners, I believe how to interact with their parents can be an additional, important theme for teachers. I have dealt with a group of fifth-grade, male students continuously expressing frustrations with their parents and school teachers being pushy, and claiming a degree of freedom and autonomy with their choice of learning. Interestingly, I repeatedly got requests from their mothers on the other side, asking me to provide monthly written reports describing what their children “studied” in the class and to give them much more homework. When I asked the mothers why they had not talked to their children and asked what they had learned instead, they responded that they would never get satisfying reactions from their children, or simply they would never have time to deal with them. I felt there were apparent issues with the communication between the mothers and children, and while it seemed to be important for me to respond to the parents’ request, I first had to address the underlying issues to maintain the integrity of my principle and teaching style. Moreover, I strongly felt it was more important to respect my students’ autonomy and I had no doubt with their capability to do so. Nevertheless, I had difficulty determining what would be the extent of my role and involvement allowed being a private English teacher. Obviously, there will never be a clear answer to this question, but my ground rule is to be sincere and to maintain close communications with students and with their family members in case of children. I believe it is my responsibility to ensure a comfortable, relaxing, and stimulating environment when students are in my classroom. Additionally, I learned from the case mentioned above that, in cases of young learners, it is important to try to increase opportunities for parents to “see” (ideally through direct communication and personal interactions) how well and happily their children are spending time in my classroom, in hope that I could play a role as a liaison, thereby indirectly facilitating their communication. Above all, we should all strive to fulfill the role as “mentor” for our students. Just as fans of charismatic singers and movie stars wish to imitate their styles, students may get motivated if they meet and learn with teachers they can admire. The initial motive could be as simply as, “I just want to be fluent like him/her.” or “I want to work on my pronunciation because I want to be talk like him/her.” More simply, students can look forward to the next class if the teacher’s talk is inspiring. This seems like such a simple trick, but I think it could be the most reliable, powerful driving force for students. That is why we should do our best to be positive role model students who wish to continue to learn and better ourselves. It is my sincere hope that someday my students can look back and say, “I was lucky that I met her.”


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