Help with my teacher questionnaire

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isisyuli
Member
Posts: 1
Joined: 28 Jul 2009, 16:40
Status: Teacher

Help with my teacher questionnaire

Unread post by isisyuli »

Hello guys. I'm Isis Camargo, an English teacher from Brazil.
I'm working hard on my final paper about Student Centered Approach and I need your help. Could you please answer the following questionnaire (on forum or to isis.yuli@gmail.com)?!

Thanks in advance.

1) How do you define “teaching”?
2) How do you define “learning”?
3) Does the book or school you work for worry about the students’ needs and expectation? If it doesn´t how do you fill this gap?
4) How responsible are you for the learning process?
5) How responsible is the student for the learning process?
6) Do you like group tasks? Why?
7) Is it possible for you to customize content to meet individual learner needs? Why?
8) How do you deal with students’ different learning styles?
9) Have you ever heard/read about learning strategies? Do you work with it? How?
10) How involved are your students during classes?
11) How different are you as a teacher from your teacher?
12) How autonomous are your students?
13) In your opinion what is role of the teacher in the process of teaching and learning a foreign language
14) Do you have feedback from your students? How often? If so, how do you use this information?
15) How do you usually evaluate your students? Do you use self assessment?

This post has been slightly edited by Admin
fatima
Member
Posts: 2
Joined: 30 Nov 2009, 06:49
Status: New Teacher

Re: Help with my teacher questionnaire

Unread post by fatima »

Dear isisyuli,
the questions you posd are indeed very deep ones regarding the practice of teaching and learning.Hope I can help you with your project.
Generally speaking, as an M.A student of TEFL who knows alot about the theories of teaching and learning, and as a new comer to the coterie of EFL teachers, I've found teaching nothing more than facilitating the process of learning.I do believe teaching is not transfering a prepacked body of knowlegde to students since if this were the case all the students should have been able to get it wholly. Unfortunately, the theoretical part of our field are of little help to us as they are dettached from the reality of classrooms. I think the first problem we have is how to know our students and how to have an effective relationship with them. what works for one students may have a disasterous result for another. defining teaching is really difficult as we are concerned with human beings each of whom have their own unique characteristics and problems and hence for each of whom we need a different practices. I think teaching is just creating a spark in the learners for further learning and making them aware of their talents, lacks, strategies and as a whole aware of the way they learn.
unfortunately, in the context in which I teach, there is vary little concern for students' needs and expectation. every thing is defined by top policy makers and is thus influenced by socio-political pressures and rarely is any need analysis done. the syllabus and the course book is stickly the same for all students all over the country. As a teacher of junior high school I've little freedom to impliment any modification on the syllabus as I have to finish the book by the end of the educational year. and unfortunately, most of the book is based on mechanical, audiolingual, inauthentic drills. All I could done for my poor students (!) during this three -month teaching exprience was to make the drills and the excerciese more communicative and accompany them with different tasks to make them more interesting to the students. in fact, my attempt was to use the book as the starting point and not as the sole core of practice in the clasroom. this way I was able to motivate some of my students to learn English and to view English not as an object of study which they memorize today and forget all tomorrow after examination but as something to use for communicating with other people. I've given my students extra-curricular activities like short stories, letter writing, making imaginary dialogues...
I've got alot to tell you and i'm really interested in sharing our experinces as i'm indeed in need of help from expreinced teachers.
I'll give you my answers to your other questions in the following replies.
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