Member-only story
Background: Yulin earned a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University. This article was part of the requirements for a TESOL teaching practicum course toward her degree.
I was very moved in my first class teaching at the Community English Program where I invited my students to write on a large poster about what they think the classroom should look like. The first student who came up put two words down in bold,
“To respect.”
I asked: “Can you elaborate on this?”
This student responded with something that I had never expected to bring up myself: “to respect each other’s accent.”
I grew up learning English with the Audiolingual Method and the Reading Approach, and I welcome my students to explore these two strategies in the classroom. For example, by listening to native-like materials in English including television conversations, news, teacher’s instructions, and by practicing the structures through repetition and scaffolding, the students will be primed to use these sentences on their own. Input and output are both involved in this process. This approach has a lot to do with how I started learning English: my father introduced me to a large amount of native English content from various American television series. There were two things he did that I later proudly attribute to my progress in English learning: he’d play a line from a television show or an audio article, and I’d have to repeat it without dropping a word. It would usually require more than five attempts. There was no explicit teaching of grammar. However, to my surprise, after the repetitions I did, (despite the complexity and long-length of those sentences,) the sentence structure, the beats and the clauses would just reveal themselves. I also experienced the same feeling when I took theatre courses in college, where I was able to practice the same line over and over again and find verbs to describe the objective of each line.
The Reading approach also helped me build vocabulary as well as the habit of reading. I have been reading extensively throughout my English learning and collecting new vocabulary along the way. I managed to look up the words’ definitions in English rather than my native language, and I always attached sample sentences to provide a context. In the in-class reading tasks, I would ask my students to underline unfamiliar vocabulary items that they couldn’t figure out from the context. Before I reveal the…
