As a language teacher, I have made it my life-long mission to instill students’ passion and desire to learn the language, foster their awareness of others’ language and culture so they become better persons in embracing differences between themselves and others, assist in their acquisition of new learning skills, facilitate their ability to think independently and critically through problem-solving, and help them build self-confidence in achieving goals by gaining their foreign language competence. To fulfill my mission, I follow several principles that lead me to the teaching choices I make for my class.

First of all, enthusiasm and spirit is the key to effective teaching and learning of a foreign language.  A good teacher delivers passion as well as knowledge. The passion comes from her love for the taught subject and the students. Knowledge may appear boring for young hearts, but enthusiasm that the teacher creates inspires and enlightens them in such a way that receiving knowledge becomes more of an enjoyment than a task.

In my experience with teaching first- and second-year Chinese classes, boosting students’ enthusiasm comes hand in hand with motivating them. To some students, Chinese is to satisfy their long-time curiosity about an ancient language and culture; to others Chinese is a complete stranger that creates a sense of apprehension and uncertainty. I start by making friends with my students so language learning becomes a pleasant personal journey with me and fellow students rather than a necessary evil for college degrees. I develop rapport and gain trust from students by knowing them personally: their majors/minors, families, home cities, personal interests, favorite basketball teams, their likes or dislikes, etc. Then I incorporate the information into class activities such as pattern practice, role-plays and skits. I help elevate their spirit to keep up in class by passing enthusiastic responses and remarks.   One of the most gratifying rewards of teaching is to hear student comment, both on evaluation and in person, that I helped to build their confidence in Chinese, changed the way they feel about it and that is the reason why they’ve decided to continue beyond their course requirements with the study.

My determination to foster students’ enthusiasm and confidence in learning is the reason why I don’t have a fixed teaching style – an ideal style that would fit all the students. Rather, I study students’ individual needs and constantly adjust my teaching strategies to best satisfy them. I believe that an effective strategy is to take from various kinds of methodologies what works in the classroom, and to always build students’ confidence.  Effective teaching involves flexibility, resourcefulness, creativity, sensitivity, constant reflection and sound judgment about students’ and their learning.  Combining insights from practice and research with the flexibility to adapt to each learning situation allows me to meet the diverse needs and learning styles of students. For example, while casual conversation-style method allows students to practice and develop ability to use the language, clear explanations of the teaching contents provide students with a foundation to build their conversations on. I find if I present difficult concepts as clearly as possible, that’s when students feel most comfortable to speak up and rise up the challenges.

As for classroom activities, while as a teacher, we play an important role in delivering and reinforcing the knowledge, it is students who carry out the tasks throughout. The teaching of a foreign language should be student-centered. I strive to make all learning experience meaningful and real for students and to maximize the students’ opportunities for language use in the classroom. For language concepts, I design activities where students work together, in pair, team or group, towards achieving goals or solving problems. I also make sure team work doesn’t stop in the classroom. I create pre-study and post-study sheets where Work-with-Partner practice is assigned for each class taught or to be taught. Student-centeredness is also about making sure that students know before head what’s to be expected in the class to come. To achieve this, I list the preparation content on the pre-study sheet, on which a daily quiz is conducted. Having students pre-view not only allows ample time for language practice as the time for explanation has been reduced, but also strengthens students’ ability to think independently and critically as they are prone to ask questions when they’ve gained some pre-knowledge about the teaching content. I’ve found that in most of my classes, discussions resulting from students’ questions always lead to better understanding about the language and more effective language practice.

I have also found how important it is to understand the struggles students have to go through in learning by knowing their native language and culture. Learning is maximized when we know the source of the problem and address it. I like to study students’ mistakes, structural and functional, written and oral, and use my knowledge of English to try to understand how English gets in the way and creates interference with their learning of Chinese.  Students achieve better outcomes when they make conscious efforts to move away from the English influence and adopt Chinese.

Last but not least, the use of technology has proved to be an invaluable tool in my classroom. I utilize pedagogically appropriate technologies to stimulate learning as students’ ways of gaining knowledge vary from one to the other. While some are visual learners, some are audio. Multimedia (e.g. video, audio, PowerPoint) is used in my classroom to make sure all the students experience the learning in the way they feel most comfortable with.  Discussion boards and instant messenger are encouraged among my higher-level class students to enhance their learning outside of the classroom.

I find no other jobs more fulfilling and rewarding than teaching and being an inspiration to my students. By having students come and tell me how they’ve become a Chinese major  and how learning Chinese has helped them broaden their mind, build their confidence, become a better person and even land a decent job, I know that I have been playing a far more important part in their life than just a language teacher.  And that in turn fuels my passion for teaching, and will continue to.