Your Approach Indicator: An Informal Questionnaire

                The first point from the questionnaire that I will analyze is Point 1. I think that a language class should focus more on meaning than on grammar. In my case, my students are very young. They are in Kinder and they are just learning the basic words in English. So they are able to communicate and express their ideas, but they are not very accurate with regard to grammar. If I wanted them to speak English using a perfectly correct grammar, I would be correcting them all the time and that would be very discouraging for them. My main objective for my class is for them to speak English as much as they can and for that I have to encourage them to speak, no matter if they speak grammatically correctly or not.

                The second point to analyze is point 4, which I think is strongly related to point 5. Language learners need a long-term reward, which is what is going to get them to be intrinsically motivated. The long term reward should be that fact that they are learning and that they are becoming able to communicate in the target language. They should be motivated and think that their greatest reward is the fact that they are going to be able to speak another language. Therefore, as teachers we should always encourage intrinsic motivation. But, at least with smaller kids, to get to intrinsic motivation and to make them appreciate the value of long-term rewards, first you have to use immediate rewards and extrinsic motivation. So I think that one things leads to the other. Immediate rewards and extrinsic motivation come first and then come long-term rewards and intrinsic motivation.

                Point 6 is also one of the points that I want to analyze. I think that the teacher definitely needs to be gentle and empathetic with her students. This does not mean that she is not going to demand anything to the students. I think that being demanding with our students and asking them to achieve higher goals every time is a very important part of being a good and caring teacher. A good teacher needs to be demanding but in a gentle and empathetic way.

                The last point to analyze is the one about mistakes, point 12. I think that a good teacher should always take advantage of her students’ mistakes and turn them into a learning opportunity. Mistakes are informative for the students and for the teacher. Students can learn from their mistakes as long as the teacher makes them realize their mistakes in the correct way and not making them feel ridiculous for them. And the teacher can also learn from the students’ mistakes. Mistakes need to be seen by the teacher as a chance to redirect the teaching-learning process in order to take the best out of our students.