Critical incidents: My personal experience

Making changes in teaching daily practice

When I was attending my last year at Profesorado Superior de Lenguas Vivas, my former phonetics teacher offered me to be her assistant. I was going to give extra lessons to freshmen students. As goals were concerned, practice and review of theoretical units were to be covered. The class was going to consist of 25 students who had registered for the course. Timetable was every Saturday morning, and lasted for an hour and a half.

As soon as I accepted, I thought on how to teach the subject and how to make my new students achieve the objectives of the course. The best methodology, I thought, was a blend of theory and practice. Nonetheless, I was about to realize it was harder than I first considered. The first week was not an easy undertaking since great deal of theory needed to be discussed with students.

The following lesson, I devoted a long time to making students answer and ask questions as far as content was involved. Description of vowels, consonants, diphthongs were among the topics studied. The class did not participate on a frequent basis but listened to me lecturing on those topics. Fifteen minutes after theory was tackled, oral practice began as students repeated transcribed dialogues that had been written by the tutor.

The third Saturday, the number of students reduced. Furthermore, students sighed very frequently and were always looking at their watches or seemed absent-minded when asked something. What would be useful? How could I change this? Was the class working? The next step was to take a survey to know about students’ expectations from the class. Knowing students better may pay the way for improvements, I figured.

On account of how I had been modeled the lessons, the class did not meet students’ expectations. As the survey analysis showed, they wanted to utter sounds less artificially and more authentically. Likewise, they desired to gain theoretical knowledge meaningfully and use language. After a careful evaluation, I was about to bring bear to content as a vehicle for language integration.

Students were told in advance to reread units and come prepared to discuss them in class. Gap-information, jigsaws and pair work were designed to develop theory. After the class had completed activities, I assessed both pronunciation and articulation, if problems were present. Moreover, every class students were supposed to bring material from their language books, internet or newspapers to deal with.

As soon as this new system was brought about, students’ disposition to the class changed. There were more hands up ready to discus and share opinions. The atmosphere felt different, and time seemed to fly away. Furthermore, the tutor of the class commented upon students’ progress in lessons as she evaluated their production in performance tests and daily participation. Changes had worked on well, and I had learned on the way.

When a teacher is given the opportunity to start practicing, they are left wondering “how” they will manage to succeed. To teach is not an easy task which involves continuous inquiry on our side every single class. From this experience, I gained insight into academic teaching, but above all into praxis. I learned to be always ready to change, to reflect and to venture in this wonderful job.

v