3547. How Practical a Teacher Are You?

Every teacher in principle wants his or her students would learn, right? Yep, it’s so, I would say. 

Sometimes in the classroom or on remote teaching we teachers might be focusing on our teaching, but up to what extent do we track our students are actually learning? I know most of you operate that way and are concerned about your students’ learning. 

Okay, in my career as a teacher I have encountered mainly two scholars who have made nice emphasis on learning strategies, applied to learning a language. Those writers are H. D. Brown and Rebecca Oxford. 

We teachers should learn about learning strategies, thus we could help our students more fully. 

Learning strategies are operations employed by the learner to aid the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information. ... They are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations. Those words appear on page 8 on Rebecca Oxford’s book – a must-read one – Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know (originally published in1990, by Newbury House). 

If that helps you, something I sometimes do with my adult students is giving them some learning strategies at the beginning of each lesson, as a warmer to that lesson. Plus I try they should think of it in a fuller way. 

I insist on purpose: That scholar, Rebecca Oxford, refers to LANGUAGE learning but you, if you teach another subject, could turn to her writing to learn from her. 

You know what? We teachers can be hectic at teaching a syllabus or program, but if possible, we could dedicate some sessions or classes to teach how to study and how to learn – it’s worth the effort, and I know of some schools which have devoted a period of time to teaching and practicing some learning strategies. It’s great, let me tell you. 

One example now, from me. When a learner of a given language has read massively and intensely in that language, and enjoyed reading, he has tried to learn pretty many new words, and subsequently that person has trained his memory and is capable of gaining a big lexis, which will help him communicate in that language. 

As well that learner, after having read a few pages of the book each time, can go back over the pages he has read in order to focus on certain words he can learn and take kind of a mental photo of. I do it that way and it's extremely useful for learning words and phrases. Have a nice week.

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