Teach English in Daxu Zhen - Xuzhou Shi

The role of a teacher is very important in a learning environment. As an English teacher with experience of teaching young learners for three years, I learned that a good teacher needs to care, respect and guide children. Teachers play an important role in fostering the intellectual and social development of children during their formative years. It is critical that a teacher is capable to manage and set the rules for a classroom of students, especially for the younger learners. The teacher needs to have a strong sense of leadership. It is true the more teaching experience you have, the more knowledge you have in teaching and keeping a classroom under control. However, number of years of teaching experience may not make a good popular teacher, instead it is based on the teaching style and how a teacher can engage the students and motivate them to learn. From my personal experience as Children English teacher, I always love to have my kids feel inspired and motivated when they leave my class. I want them to come back again. I always challenge them and play with them to a whole new level with different games, fun activities of teaching vocabulary words. I like to have a little laughter in my classroom and making sure everyone in my classroom is having a fun time learning English. From my observation, I realized that teachers who like to talk with kids, be more entertaining, and know how to engage students tend have a more successful class. An example of a good teacher should be the following. A good teacher should be kind and patient. That is important to a teacher because a teacher needs to have patience when it comes to teaching, especially when our students are leaning a new language, which is very challenging. We need to be patient with them and give them a process in learning English language. Patience is very important among young learners especially with children under age six. A good teacher should be lively and entertaining with a sense of humor. A lively and entertaining teacher can make the students feel more relaxed and inspired to learn. A good teacher should be a good motivator. We could motivate the children to learn through various fun activities. Positive attitude, cheering tone and lots of praises could also motivate kids. Lastly a good teacher may also be a good friend of the children. We should develop a good relationship with our students, be able understand them, respect each individual and make them all get involved and helped. The role of a teacher is important in another aspect is that we need to be able to set a good example, led by example, and be willing to motivate our students. We should not just be their educators but also be their friends. We need to create a bonding relationship with students especially with children. From my personal experience with working with children, we could make the children feel comfortable so that they can trust you. Then they want to play with you and listen to you. Young children are the hardest age group to teach but they are the most rewarding to teach. Children possess an innate curiosity which itself is a motivating factor (Unit 19 pg. 6). They also have shorter attention spans which why we need to differentiate various activities to teach them, engage them, giving them something to constantly be curious about. From my personal experience working with children, we should be friends with them first, in front of the children we could make ourselves look silly to build bond with them. I personally love to teach younger learners because working with children is very rewarding and really fun. As an English teacher of working with younger learners, I learned that we not only need to create a good relationship with them but also to speak more slowly and clearly, have lots of repetition, patience and understanding. As an English teacher for little kids, we need to have good management and control of our classroom. We need to constantly find new activities and fun games to entertain the children. we also need to be involved as well. We need to be leaders, need to really explore each kid, and understand each kid individually. Sometimes we may start to follow the children’s way, because the children have their own imagination and different style of doing things, for example, one time a child may act like in the role of an airplane by spreading their wings, going up and down, then I started playing with the child and acting like an airplane too with my arms going up and down. A teacher needs to explore and observe the students individually, thus the teacher can grab a chance to praise them. A child imagination can inspire us. In summary, as a teacher, we have many different roles, some of the roles can be the leader, the organizer, the assessor, and the observer. These different roles all play a different part. The role of the leader is taking charge and being in control of the classroom and the activity. The role of the organizer is the most important one as the teachers are constantly finding themselves organizing students to do activities, and often involved in giving instructions. As the role of the assessor we are giving the students feedback, grading and correction. As the role of the observer which is just as important, we need to observe the classroom and the students, see how they are doing in class. Teachers need to make notes, monitor an activity, observe how each student is doing (Unit1 pg 3-4). These roles all play different factors when it comes to teaching English classroom. Upon learning from this course, and through my personal experience, I realize the role of a teacher is very important when it comes to teaching the English Language, because we are more than just playing the role of an educator but also a motivator and a friend. We are also a part of their English learning journey.