„In the classroom, students are involved in making decisions about what to learn, how to learn and how to be assessed“
(Nunan, 2015, p.19).
Наистина, за съжаление, в нашите традиционни класни стаи учителите са авторитетните страни на процеса на преподаване; повечето от учебните материали за целевия език са избрани, проектирани и включени в учебната програма, без да се вземат предвид нуждите и интересите на обучаемите.
Second, adapt the lessons, including the materials used, to the students' needs and proficiency level. Consideration needs to be given to how students want to learn these materials. Students' learning or cognitive styles are different. We will recognize the multiple intelligences of our students. For example, Cristison identified visual/spatial intelligence (as cited in Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011, p.240). These "students are better visual learners than auditory learners" (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011, p.239) and will face difficulties learning a new language in a lecture format. For this reason, our Academy will accommodate students' learning style preferences and adapt materials. However, the use of materials should be only when absolutely necessary. That is, lessons should be “material-illuminated,” which is one of the core tenets of Dogme (Thornbury & Meddings, 2009; Thornbury, 2010).
To realize these beliefs, the Academy intends to use various techniques (link to mtcenel methods and approaches). Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and its variants, content-based learning and task-based language teaching, offer the best practices for our teaching philosophy to increase our students' communicative competence – “knowing when and how to say what to whom” (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011, p.152). We believe that the communicative aspect of language needs more attention and we value it because if one develops good oral communication skills, one can transfer this to writing and other areas of language. In addition, the learner has a greater opportunity to learn and practice the target language culture in CLT, because culture is integrated with language, and if one wants to learn a foreign language, one must also learn about the culture. Our team accepts that here again we need to emphasize the role of teachers because they are the ones who can create the real-life situations for the students. In our classes, content will be student-generated and conversation-based; this is also one of the tenets of the Dogme approach to ELT mentioned above. As English is, in the words of Scott Thornberry, a 'formulaic language' (Thornberry, 2016), our teachers will use the techniques of the direct method, total physical response (with younger learners) and principles of the audio-lingual method to memorization of chunks and phrases most often used in real-life situations.
In conclusion, I must include and consider learners as stakeholders in the learning process and design the teaching process according to their needs and preferred learning styles. By motivating learners and creating real-life situations, Academy will effectively respond to our three beliefs. Most of our teachers are native speakers, and since many of us will be non-native English teachers, these approaches to language teaching are the most challenging for us. People, both our students and their parents, will have more confidence in us and our philosophy. We also understand that we will be teaching in real-life situations that may lead to certain adjustments in our approaches, techniques and our philosophy. Academy is ready to accept this challenge as well and consider all stakeholders.
