Fifth Task - Beliefs

Beliefs about English

I have always believed that learning a new language will provide people with many opportunities to grow in their field of interest. Indeed, I can say that learning and teaching English have given me the chance to travel and get a job while doing something I find rather appealing which is teaching. That is what I think English can also offer/provide to my students a wider perspective of the world. With that, I am not saying that they should forget about their cultures and customs but o be also open-minded and tolerant of other cultures that we can learn a lot about. 

Another belief that I used to hold was that I should reach a native-like accent, but after taking the course of language learning acquisition I have a different conception about that. I admit that having good pronunciation and good command of the language is important, but as well as that the way we care about the students and foster reflection when talking about cultures is also quite relevant.

Beliefs about learning

When I was in primary school I had my first encounter with a foreign language. A teacher that was in charge of ethics and religion, one day started teaching us the subject of English. At that moment, I started to find quite interesting as I was seeing new words and sounds I have never heard or seen in life. It was all about curiosity at that point, but as I was growing up I started to be more aware and devoted more time thinking about the way of learning English. Although I had not had a good start what I consider that was kept me focused on my learning process was my intrinsic motivation, which I consider a relevant factor when learning about something as well as the extrinsic motivation type. In the beginning, I used mostly the audio-lingual method, as I only listened and did translation activities to find out what were the lyrics of my favorite songs about. 

At some point, I decided to start studying English at the University's language program at the undergraduate level. in that way, I was able to learn from watching others, listening to them, and more importantly by reading about theories related to language acquisition. It is also relevant to mention, that learning for me is constant and reciprocal, we learn from people and students every day and that on-going process stays along through our lives.


Beliefs about teaching


My beliefs about teaching started first to be shaped at the undergraduate program. I learn how to teach by watching what my teachers were doing at that moment. Another decisive moment came when I started the teaching practicum, I began facing a lot of difficulties with my students. I received feedback from teachers and keep modeling my teaching strategies. Based on the feedback I received, I started to make some changes such as to include activities related to the students' needs and interests. I really wanted my classes to be fun and not having students bored or complaining about many things. That is why , I finally decided to and inclined towards including game-like activities in each one of my classes which has somehow given me good results. 

With regard to other teaching beliefs, I used to think that grammar must be the main element of teaching as we were taught in that way. Fortunately, there are so many resources we can resort to in order to present classes in a dynamic way including implicitly the grammar part which is crucial but no the axis of teaching and learning.