Follow these guidelines to set your students up for success in their language learning. New teachers will learn the most important, evidence-based factors for facilitating learning and more experienced teachers will get a refresher that condenses teaching and learning to its most essential elements, including the creation of communities of learners for language learning within the classroom.
Set high expectations
Set high expectations in your classroom from the outset. Students live up or down to expectations, so show and tell them clearly how you expect them to behave and participate.
Create clear classroom routines
Create clear classroom routines so that students know what to expect. This creates a safe and supportive learning environment and by providing structure, predictability and consistency this helps to free up students’ working memory to then focus on the learning. Furthermore it helps to reduce anxiety which is highly important in a language learning environment.
Cultivate positive relationships
The brilliant Russian psychologist and educator Vygotsky, and many others after him, have shown us how learning is a social activity. The relationships that you form with your students therefore are of primary importance in the teaching and learning process. This means that attention must be given to these relationships and ‘work’ done on them so that this aspect of teaching is not merely left to chance. Research shows that students often need the teacher to value and care about them before they care about school, so cultivating positive relationships is important with every learner.
Effectively and efficiently manage the classroom
Research has clearly shown that a well-managed classroom has a positive effect on students’ social and academic achievement. Use the least disruptive method to reorient students back to their work if they get off track but remember that you must at all times use management techniques that respect students’ human dignity.
If there was one key to classroom management, it would be engagement. If students are interested and challenged by the classwork they are given often there is very little need for any management techniques at all!
Develop and maintain strong content knowledge
An eclectic approach is the best method for teaching language. Gone are the days where only grammar translation was used, as are the days where a communicative approach was prized above all else. Now we know that what works best is mixing it up, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The latest research also confirms that using students’ other languages in the classroom as resources for learning can be immensely beneficial.
Keep up-to-date with what is new in your field by reading articles or subscribing to academic journals and make friends and chat with other teachers as discussions with other professionals can be highly rewarding.
Cultivate a ‘community of learners’
This means creating a classroom where everybody in it feels like they belong and that everyone there together forms a community. A code-of-conduct drawn up with your students is a good way to agree collectively on what is and what is not acceptable behaviour and to make clear that respect and kindness is expected.
Forming this sense of the class as a ‘community of learners’ is especially important in language learning classrooms because many factors (affective or emotional factors, and sociocultural or attitudinal factors) can have a great influence on language learning.
Affective factors which influence second language acquisition
These include self-esteem, self-efficacy (belief in oneself), willingness to communicate, absence of feelings of inhibition, risk-taking, anxiety, empathy, extroversion and motivation.
Sociocultural Factors (teacher’s views and students’ views)
These include culture or way of life/collective identity, attitudes and stereotypes.
All of these factors are activated and enhanced when the students in the class feel a sense of belonging, that all members are valuable and that making mistakes is ok.
The environment of the classroom should help students feel good about themselves, confident that they can be successful in learning another language and brave to take risks even if they get things wrong. This orientation should facilitate and cultivation a shared understanding and empathy between the teacher and the students and between the students themselves.
Finally be a life-long learner
Never stop learning, from your students, from your colleagues and from the wider language learning community. The world, the people within it along with their languages and cultures will continue to change and develop and so too will language teaching and learning. This makes it an interesting profession to be involved in and a fascinating thing to be continually trying to understand. Enjoy doing so, enjoy the process and enjoy your students, and this will make you a great language teacher.
