AS a guiding principle for myself in teaching applied linguistics, I try always to remember that essentially language teachers are practitioners. As a practitioner myself, I believe that there is a useful daily technique that allows us to monitor and develop our practice. I refer to reflection. I want to explain what I mean by reflection in this sense.
When I teach courses in language teaching methodology, I insist that my students write one page (of about 300 words) after every class they attend. I ask them to note down what they thought are the most important ideas raised in the class, whether they had experienced any of the practices, either as teachers or learners, how they felt about using these in the future, and why. I also encourage them to write about any other issue that are bothering them, or that they want to think more about.
Generally my students are very resistant to this discipline. Naturally so, since we are all resistant to any new forms of discipline unless we can see them working for us. Nevertheless, I am utterly insistent (they are required to hand these reflections in to me, so that I can see that they have done them). After a few weeks, to everyone’s surprise, this seems to be the part of the course that they like and consider to be the most valuable. I don’t grade their reflections. I do, on the other hand, read them with great care, and write comments where I have something I feel I need to say. Students get credit for doing the reflection, rather than for what they write.
Throughout the course I stress the importance of reflecting on what one is learning in the context of one’s previous experience and future possibilities. Additionally, I try to persuade my students of the benefits of reflecting on any class they teach, and noting down what worked and what didn’t, and why they think it turned out that way. As a teacher myself, this is something I do automatically whatever I teach. As I travel home from class, I think about how I feel: what went right, what went wrong; why some risks worked and others failed horribly. I think about who was in the class, how they reacted to various parts of the class; how I felt about what I was teaching; how I felt the students in the class; how I could have done it differently; how I could have done it better. Without doing this reflective activity, my practice would become stale, boring and repetitive. This way, I keep it alive.
