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TEFL Cape St. Claire Maryland

Check out Tesolcourse.com about TEFL Cape St. Claire Maryland and apply today to be certified to teach English abroad.

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This is how our TEFL graduates feel they have gained from their course, and how they plan to put into action what they learned:

said:
In any class setting it can often feel forced and unnatural for a student to express himself or herself, especially when it comes to learning a new language. Language and culture can be very personal to any one person so students will tend to put up a wall of silence and guard their heart. They are guarding their personal voice; they want to keep it within the confines of what they like to talk about or what they believe in. They also may feel scared to open up especially if they can't speak in their mother tongue. This relates to culture and experiences as Haake speaks out in her essay Begin by Beginning Again. When she talks about language she says “I have found that pronouncing the virtues of language alone can be just another way of reinscribing silence for many students” (65). A student's personal experience in their own language and culture can reflect how they process themselves through speaking and writing. This takes me back to a time when I was in grade school. My mother had given me dried salted seaweed for snack and when the other kids kept asking me, what is that? Why did you bring that? I closed up like a clam. I felt I had no voice. They didn't understand me; shoot I didn't understand me, my culture. I don't remember talking much in class as a kid after that. This is why it's so hard to take any criticism, each of us are so different. So this is where unloading of safety comes into play in the classroom. In order for students to freely express themselves and feel comfortable, they must first be able to openly talk about things. In order to get them talking they must feel comfortable enough with themselves and without judgment from others. I think safety and creativity go together. First you build safety then you build creativity. When I decided to finish my BFA in theatre, I was in my late twenties and the students were so much younger than me, well not that much but it sure felt that way. Maybe my life experiences got in the way, so I felt dated. They oozed freshness, exuberance, excitement, and this freaked me out. I felt stale and out of the loop. I absolutely loved being creative and I wanted nothing more than to be accepted, but being creative meant I would have to take risks and that was scary. That is where I like using a technique called “talk time” in the classroom can help student's ability to open up to each other and be able to relate. This idea of talking to each other would be done before anything else started within the class. It would be like therapy for the classroom. Let's talk about all the things that made you angry today, or made you really happy, or made you really sad. I think that the teacher should undermine her authority and go first. teachers who can express themselves have made the students understand that he/she is just as human and the barrier to silence can be broken. I also think the use of in class activities can be useful whether it be making a collage, experimental drawing, open writing on daily topics like the news, social media, entertainment (just to name a few). Listening to the teacher as well as each other create a sense of bonding and connectivity. The muse, the passion, the inner drive to learn a new language can be sitting right next to you. This reflection on culture and the sensitivity it brings to the classroom can be broken so students feel the classroom to be a new culture, one can feel safe in and learn from. Works Cited: Haake, Katherine. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Pedagogy. phoenix, AZ: Premium Source Publishing, 2000. Print.


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