One of the ideas that really stood out for me during the Foundations Course, is that the "focus on the learner, not the teacher". Most of the time we see language teaching from the point of view of the teacher - his beliefs, goals, attitude and approaches. However, as learning is the main goal of teaching, it can't be viewed as mirror image of teaching. Learners, too, bring to learning their own approach, thinking, judgement and beliefs.
So I have decided to make this the main part of my strategy - listening to what my students really need.
A lot of times I was wondering why my lesson plans didn't work and my students were not enjoying lesson activities ( which I thought were fun!) so much. I made different guesses - maybe they were too tired or maybe the activities I had chosen were boring for them. While I kept thinking that I, as a teacher know better, they kept missing classes and ignoring their homework.
Reflecting on some of my previous lessons, I understand what exactly wasn't not working for my students - I seldom took time to picture their real life and things they have to deal with every day.
I have already started teaching by this principle and would like to share one example. One of my students is a businessman from Moscow who is planning to take the IELTS test this winter. No matter how hard he tried to fluently talk about his occupation, it was never perfect. He had hard time remembering the vocabulary and some collocations. Last week I asked him how often he has to write business emails to his international partners ( I knew he has a lot) and his answer was "A lot!"
So I decided to try a different approach and asked him about the way he communicates with his business partners abroad. He said that he usually does it through emails and the hardest part for him was writing introductory letters explaining what he does and why he is interested in finding partners overseas. That was HIS need that I never asked about.
We worked together on composing that letter and I was amazed to see how much more confident he became when speaking about his business.
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