After
reading chapter 1 in Teaching by
Principles, it really shows how many decisions teachers make within one
lesson. The chapter went through a sample lesson plan of teaching a language to
speakers of a different language. I liked all of the different questions
challenging why a teacher would make some of those decisions. I know when I
read it one of my questions was “Is it really beneficial for her to translate
into the mother language at the end of the lesson?” I think when you are
teaching a language class, knowing when to translate is a very important
decision to make.
After
reading chapter 2 in Teaching by Principles,
it shows all of the many different ways of teaching a language. The chapter
went through the history of teaching another language and the different
methods. The chapter was really interesting and I can’t believe all of the
different ways of learning a language. Some of them seemed really radical and
others seemed very old fashioned. It shows that today it is kind of a mixture
of all of the previous methods and I feel like we took a lot of the pros from
multiple strategies.
The two
chapters were related because after you read the second one you could see some
of the different methods used in the sample lesson plan in chapter one. The
teacher did not focus on just one method, but used different ones throughout
the lesson. Some questions that this raises are what is the best method to use?
Are there certain methods that rely more on quality over quantity and vice
versa? Should we allow teachers to choose their own method? What if that method
does not work for a student? Should we try to find the best method and make all
teachers teach that way? Is the best way to be immersed in the language by
going to the place that speaks it? How can we recreate that environment in a
classroom that only meets for a limited time? These are just a few of the many
questions that language teachers need to ask and that the book brought up.
