Teach English in Nancun Zhen - Qingdao Shi

There are two types of student confidence that are important to consider in TEFL. The first is the confidence that is expressed in the moment of learning and producing language, which impacts on the student’s willingness to participate actively in the classroom. To a certain degree this kind of confidence varies naturally, according to personality: some people are more shy or diffident; some people are more vocal. Under the wrong circumstances, this will manifest itself in less speaking and less proactive production that may harm students’ learning, and in turn have a negative impact on their confidence levels (both types). The second type of confidence is that more long-term confidence that a student has in relation to their overall language level, improvement, and potential for further improvement. This is an important part of a student’s motivation: why wold someone study if they felt they had no ability to improve? Clearly the two types of confidence are related, though not always in the same way in every student. My TEFL experience comes from teaching monolingual classes of university students in China, but even in such apparently homogenous groups there is a huge amount of diversity. In some cases, the variation in confidence among students is a function of their background: poor (usually rural background) students and wealthy (usually urban background) students take the same majors and mix in the classrooms, and I have encountered many students whose confidence levels are “naturally” high because of their upbringing, which may have involved private language lessons from foreign teachers. Other students, from the minority-ethnic border areas of China have often not had such privileges, and appear to be less confident in the classroom, particularly in interacting with a foreign teacher. The teacher can make a huge difference by working hard on overall classroom atmosphere (friendliness in manner, smiling a lot, emphasising positive feedback over negative, showing no signs of favouritism, encouraging participation by having slogans like “Mistakes are good” or “The best thing you can do for a teacher is talk to them!”, etc) and by giving plenty of attention to the quieter students during whole class activities, not so as to put shy students on the spot, but even just in simple ways like eye contact with the less confident students. As the final unit of this course notes (p.4) there are plenty of practical ways to encourage students to speak. For example, frequent use of pair work (so that students are less intimidated by large numbers of people listening to them), controlled practice, and role play. Using these methods in a classroom that has a friendly, non-critical atmosphere (with the teacher paying particular attention to positive feedback, encouragement and frequent praise), will indirectly build the confidence of students and encourage them in the moment to use their productive language skills more freely. Building the second type of confidence (the longer-term) can be done by keeping a good record of what students have mastered (or improved) or produced over a series of classes. This enables them to look back and see what they have done, and proves that progress is possible. Confidence is not just an issue in terms of speaking, it also affects students’ writing speed and proficiency, and even their receptive skills — again, why bother to listen or read if you think you won’t understand? Particularly for the notoriously tricky listening exercises (which are unavoidable) that involve general comprehension, the teacher needs to be creative in encouraging students to guess intelligently and use clues and indirect ways of answering questions in those cases where they didn’t know certain words or apparently couldn’t hear the answers. This enables all students to build their confidence in the face of difficult materials, because they come to realise that they don’t have to rely solely on pure language ability to make progress. They will also discover, correspondingly, that building up their strengths in guesswork and reasoning feeds back positively into how they absorb and process the language they are learning. In the end, however, assuming that the teacher is at least competent and has well-chosen material, the most important thing is still the teacher’s way of relating to the students. Whether there is only one less confident student, or a whole roomful of students who lack confidence, how much the teacher cares about their progress and their development and about them as people (not merely objects of education) will have a huge influence. In my experience building student confidence takes time, but with humour and genuine relationships it is almost always successful.