Holly Villines
Prof. Jennifer Smith
FL 436
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
This past semester, I have discovered the significance of language proficiency, and how context,
meaningfulness, and culture can be used in teaching the four skills in a foreign language. To be
proficient in a language, one must know enough grammar, vocabulary, sociolinguistic appropriateness,
cultural understanding and conventions of discourse to be able to use the language well enough to be
effective in real-world purposes. In the United States, proficiency is measured through the ACTFL
Proficiency Guidelines, in which test-takers are placed on a spectrum between novice-low and superior.
Proficiency means that language-learners must focus on a variety of subjects and nuances in the targetlanguage to be successful in various contexts. In order to be effective, it is very important for instructors
to teach language with proficiency-goals in mind. Otherwise, the information is not retained, because it
has not been placed in a practical, real-world context. A classroom environment in which opportunities
to become proficient are maximized is one where the language is always used in context, and exercises
are designed so that students need to understand the meaning being conveyed. Proficiency-oriented
classroom tests are designed to reflect proficiency goals by integrating specific features of the language
with a focus on communicative-language in context. In lieu of achievement tests, a proficiency-oriented
teacher may assess students by requiring portfolios, exposés, role-plays, or any other activity that
reflects a compilation of information gathered throughout the semester and demonstrates long-term
progress.
Contrary to common practice, listening activities should be used as early as possible to help
motivate learners and allow them to experience success. To teach listening with proficiency-goals in
mind, authentic materials and realia should always be utilized. Authentic materials should be presented
in their original form to allow students to use nonlinguistic cues. Authentic discourse can be made more
comprehensible to second-language learners by choosing discourses that are related to the learners’
experience. The teacher must use advance organizers, orientation activities, and schema-based prelistening techniques. When designing listening materials, teachers must keep in mind the natural
purposes for which someone might listen and gear this to the students’ level of competence.
At the lowest level of proficiency, listening materials must present very familiar/predictable
content. The content should be relevant to the students’ interests. Listening scripts must be provided at
least twice to benefit the students. At the lower levels of competence, students are generally able to
understand the gist of the listening exercise. They will extract more precise information as their
proficiency develops. When designing listening activities for Novice and Intermediate students, teachers
must provide pre-listening activities. Tasks that build listening proficiency include: listening for the gist,
listening with visuals, graphic fill-ins, matching descriptions to pictures, dictation and variations, clue
searching, distinguishing registers, physical response, recursive listening, inferential listening,
paraphrase in native language, completion of native language summary, comprehension checks and
remembering responses. For Advanced and Superior level listening tasks, teachers should concentrate
on trying to extract more precise information. Tasks may include: dictation and variations, completing
target language summary, paraphrasing in the target language, note taking/outlining, summarizing,
recursive listening, inferential listening, identifying sociolinguistic factors, style shifting, analysis
activities, and creative elaboration activities. For listening classroom activities, there should be a
response activity for all levels. This may include something as simple as follow-up questions. For all
levels, it is important to use “teacher talk” that comes as close to authentic language as possible.
Interactions with students should not be contrived but should provide the flavor of a real conversation.
Comprehension is an active process where students interact with the text, while using background
knowledge and linguistic features. For this reason, teachers should provide input that is organized and
easily relatable, especially for listening activities, which tend to produce anxiety from the student. By
contextualizing the material, the teacher eases the burden of comprehension.
Reading, like listening, is a highly complex process. There is, however, a large difference
between written text and the spoken word. Written text is normally organized in well-formed,
grammatical sentences, and the ideas are planned and flow logically from one person. Spoken dialogue
often has grammatical errors, reduced forms, dropped words, lapses of entire parts of the sentence, and
the topic can change at any time. With written assignments, the entirety of the text is there, but the
meaning cannot be negotiated directly. When teaching reading comprehension, teachers should
provide students with authentic written materials in their original form. These authentic sources can
include photographs, web-based materials, and realia drawn from brochures, newspapers, magazines.
menus, advertisements, etc. Due to top-down and bottom-up processes, the message of the text
interacts with the perceptions, knowledge background, and skills of the reader. Readers become more
efficient at gathering information from texts as their proficiency develops. Often the reader’s ability to
visualize the content of the passage and relate to it personally is the most important aspect of creating a
reading (or listening) activity that students will understand. To create an effective reading activity,
teachers need to think about the purposes for which students might be reading, as well as their skill
level, strategies, and processes involved. Teachers must assess whether the reading is extensive or
intensive. To design a reading comprehension activity, the activity must relate to both the content of the
passage and its organization. The questions or tasks should be designed to clarify the passage’s function,
organization, rhetorical structure, use of cohesive devices, and other general aspects of the reading. In
teaching reading skills, teachers should begin with the preparation stage. This helps develop skills in
anticipation and prediction of the text material. In the preparation stage, teachers can have students
brainstorm, look at visuals, headlines, titles, charts and other contextual aids, and predict what the text
is about based on the title or the first line of the text. In the skimming/scanning stage, teachers can ask
students for a gist of the material, to identify topic sentences and main ideas, to select the best
paraphrase from multiple-choice options, to match subtitles with paragraphs, to fill in charts or forms
with key concepts, to create titles or headlines, or to react to the reading passage. Students should first
skim and then scan the material.
For novice and intermediate level students, teachers can provide students with various reading
proficiency tasks: prediction activities, prereading activities, skimming, gisting, detecting functions of
texts, scanning, extracting specific information, contextual guessing, simple cloze, filling out forms,
comprehension checks, clue searching, making inferences, scrambled stories, passage completion,
identifying sociolinguistic features, identifying discourse structure, and identifying link words/or
references. For advanced or superior-level students, I can provide them with the following tasks:
skimming/scanning, comprehension checks, contextual guessing, making inferences, extracting specific
detail, paraphrasing in the target language, outlining, identifying sociolinguistic features, understanding
idioms, understanding discourse structure, understanding intentions, analysis and evaluative activities,
and creative elaboration. In the decoding reading stage, the teacher asks students to guess from the
context the meaning of unknown words or phrases. Teachers then make comprehension checks to
determine how much the students understood. In the final stage, teachers should help students develop
transferable skills by going beyond the specific passage to enhance their general reading skills and
strategies. These exercises can include contextual guessing, selective reading for main ideas, and
effective rereading to confirm hypotheses.
When developing speaking skills, teachers should provide a balance of practice with tasks drawn
from the whole continuum of styles to lead to more proficient performance in terms of accuracy and
fluency. It is important to provide the students with a safe, low-anxiety environment. Activities for the
novice level should be limited to familiar vocabulary and structures. The conversations should be more
structured, with simple questions and answers. These activities should lean toward identifying people,
places or everyday objects. This should still be contextualized and meaningful. At all levels, opportunities
must be provided for students to practice using the language in a range of contexts. Students should
also be given the opportunity to carry out a range of functions likely to be necessary when using the
target language. Teachers should test the student’s current level through the probe phase. As students
advance, oral proficiency exercises can become more abstract and use more obscure vocabulary, idioms,
vernacular terms, etc.
As instructors teach writing, they are also teaching thinking and planning skills. At the novice
level, writing is a support skill. For the novice level, students can practice vocabulary for objects in a
room, draw someone and describe him/her, do dictation activities, fill in the blanks for a menu, fill in a
form with personal information, and create simple poetry. At this level, students benefit from a taskoriented approach that emphasizes defined objectives and provides clear feedback and evaluative
criteria. For the intermediate level, teachers should provide bridge activities. These include slash
exercises, a report of an event, writing a “thank you” note, filling in the blanks, writing a composition
based on an image, and writing a 2-3 paragraph essay on familiar topics. Students can also create dialog
journals, and engage in synchronous conferencing, or through email. Journaling, which is less structured,
is good for the intermediate level and encourages students to be more independent and use their
creative skills. For advanced-level students, the emphasis is on improving grammatical accuracy, choice
of vocabulary and rhetorical skills. There should be a variety of structured practice activities in order to
refine control of language. Students should concentrate more on the composing process.
Teachers should not be afraid to teach culture. It is an essential aspect of learning a language.
Teachers should teach both formal or “highbrow” culture and everyday, “lowbrow” culture. Students
must learn to empathize with people in the target culture and to have cross-cultural awareness. Cultural
topics need to be taught in conjunction with related thematic units and should be closely related to
grammatical content. These techniques should involve all four skills as much as possible: listening,
reading, writing, speaking. This is a great opportunity to make use of realia. The students can describe
and make hypotheses about the realia. Teachers should make use of cultural information when teaching
vocabulary. When teaching culture, instructors can have students group up for discussions or to role
play. Teachers must avoid the “facts only” approach to teaching culture. As always, teachers must use
the target language whenever possible. The approach should vary according to level only in so far as
how culturally aware the students are and how complex the concept is to understand. More common,
contemporary and basic information should be provided to novice levels. The teacher should be able to
identify the level of the activity by the proficiency level of the accompanying text.
I believe all four skills should be equally developed in the classroom. Speaking can best be
practiced in the classroom. Because writing can be time-consuming and requires some reflection, that
skill should be developed outside of the classroom through assignments. The teacher can then provide
feedback in the classroom. Listening is a skill that is most easily developed in the classroom, although
the teacher can assign audio or video clips to listen to online. Reading is a skill that should be developed
both inside and outside of the classroom. Shorter readings can be done in the classroom, but longer,
perhaps more complicated readings, should be assigned outside of the classroom to allow time for
absorption and proper dictionary use.
There are various manners to correct for grammar, but I believe that grammar correction is an
essential part of language instruction to emphasize accuracy. I believe written errors should always be
corrected, and work should be revised by the student. Speaking errors should be handled more subtly
and not as frequently in order to keep a positive, low-anxiety atmosphere. Students should be told
what they did well, and then the teacher can go over the error as a common one with the class, after
everyone has spoken, so individuals do not feel that they are being “put on the spot.” As students get
more advanced in their proficiency level, teachers should spend more time on grammar correction.
Teachers should correct for what they have taught thus far; so the more students have learned, the
more that needs to be corrected. Grammar instruction is important, but it should always be placed in a
meaningful context. Lessons should always emphasize developing the four skills and introducing the
students to the target culture.
The L1 should be avoided as much as possible. Even grammar instruction can be taught in the
target language with the aid of cognates and word lists. However, if there is a great confusion that
cannot be resolved with the target language, the L1 can be used to avoid any errors being fossilized.
In order to create exams that both test material covered in class and encourage proficiency,
teachers can rely on the hybrid approach. This combines the concern for assessing specific features of
language with a focus on language-use in context. These tests can be constructed to integrate specific
lexical, grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse features so that they are assessed in a more natural
context. There should not be single-sentence items. Instead, there should be a blend of open-ended
activities or divergent responses with specific convergent items. Some sections can focus on discrete
points of grammar, vocabulary, discourse or pragmatic features (more structured activities), while
others should allow them to respond more freely.
In sum, this course has been extremely informative and practical. I just have to remember to
“Keep it in context, stupid.”