TEFL Yeager Oklahoma

With anything in life, it is always more difficult to complete a task if you aren't experienced in the applications of that task. For example, it is difficult for a mechanic to properly fix a vehicle if they have never driven a car before. Likewise, it will be difficult for a teacher to effectively teach english as a foreign language to students if they themselves haven't experienced the rigors of learning a foreign language. Throughout my life I have had the pleasure to study three foreign languages: spanish for six years, Arabic for six months, and Korean for one year. These experiences have included good times as well as bad that I believe give me valuable insight into how to effectively teach english to my future students in Korea. My years learning language have given me time to study at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of language proficiency, and at different ages. One lesson I learned is that relevance is key to language learning. For example, when I took a class in Arabic language, it was extremely frustrating because we would have to learn a large amount of vocabulary I would never use. It is easy to become discouraged learning a language because even with an enormous amount of work it is inevitable you will make many mistakes. Therefore, to continually feel I was behind because I didn't know Arabic for ‘feather' or ‘watermelon'—words I almost never use in english let alone in Arabic—often made me feel frustrated. By keeping vocabulary terms relevant to both the student's needs and their interests, the teacher stands to engage the students more and increase their retention. Another lesson from my experience learning a foreign language is that pacing is extremely important to teaching a foreign language. Once again, this is one area my Arabic language class was deficient in. We spent roughly eight weeks learning Arabic letters and script at a relatively easy-going pace before suddenly being expected to memorize 250 vocabulary words per week and write and recite one page presentations. Needless to say, everyone in the class felt very unprepared for such a shift in difficulty and on a personal level I felt very discouraged by the sudden change in difficulty. Due to this experience, I feel it is necessary to keep classes running consistently, with the pace remaining realistic. Rather than expecting students to progress from the alphabet to presentations, I would likely keep students working on small examples to build confidence and focus on fluency. A third lesson I learned from studying a foreign language is a more personal one. My experiences learning Korean language gives me insight into how I will teach english to Korean students. After struggling through learning Korea, I can understand how students will have problems with english and anticipate their issues in advance so that I may better plan to overcome their roadblocks. For example, in Korean there is no strict ‘r' or ‘l' sound, but instead a letter that is roughly a middle-ground between the two. I know I certainly had issues learning how to recreate this song, and through this experience I know my Korean students will have problems with creating two separate sounds. Therefore, I will be able to begin addressing this issue earlier through the use of activities such as tongue twisters to help define the individual sounds. Clearly, foreign language learning experiences help a teacher understand how to better teach. By taking my own personal experiences, I have learned that I should focus on relevance, proper pacing, and anticipated language roadblocks so that my students are properly engaged and remain motivated to learn english properly and consistently. I believe that without my experiences learning other languages, I would be at a disadvantage because I would have never walked a mile in my students' shoes and I would therefore fail to properly empathize with them.