As a teacher of adult second language learners and aspiring teacher practitioner, my philosophy is the culmination of concurrent practice and engagement with theoretical literature in the areas of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and education. From this dialectic relationship I engage with three primary concepts that underpin my style of pedagogy.

          The principle concept that drives my teaching philosophy is the understanding that each learner is an autonomous agent. This informs myriad points within my philosophy. Firstly, by conceptualizing learners as autonomous agents, I recognize that each student comes from a different background and is following a distinct developmental trajectory; this conceptualization allows me to better assist each student in their individualized goals and construction of their identities. In my courses, I also find it important for my students to be aware of themselves and their roles in the process of learning and to more clearly realize themselves as members of the their  target community (be it a language community or professional community); my hope is for them to understand this in the classroom, rather than at a later stage, e.g., following graduation or completion of the course. As such, my students are frequently assigned to self-reflect on their identities and the ways in which their identities are mirrored in their linguistic and pragmatic decisions. In service of this goal, I have employed such methods as voice recordings, journal entries, and student-teacher conferencing. Furthermore, in recognizing students as individuals, I more clearly understand that each student requires different degrees of mediation to be able to accomplish the goals put forth in the curriculum. Secondly, by seeing students as autonomous agents, I realize that I am but one pair part in the constructive dialogue and collective consciousness of my classroom. To this end, I use classroom discourse and assignments to gather feedback on the effectivity of my instruction and materials. While, I use traditional methods to do so, such as gathering anonymous student feedback at the mid-way and end points of the semester, I also gain feedback through the performance of my students, i.e., I assess my students’ ability to successfully respond to questions, to critically analyze target information, and to thoughtfully engage in classroom interactions. It is this type of feedback that ultimately steers my lessons and the trajectory of the course.

          As an educator of adults, my pedagogical materials and style of pedagogy are informed by such theories as Sociocultural Theory and the Declarative/Procedural Model. Briefly, such theories assert that adult learners possess a fully-formed cognition and, as a result, learn best through the use of explicit instruction. Indeed, explicit instruction, as my second teaching philosophy concept, undergirds my pedagogical materials, lessons, and thoughts during instruction—in the language classroom, my lessons are primarily organized around concept-based language instruction, which is an explicit style of instruction that draws to the fore concepts that underlie meaning and form in language (as well as identity). By drawing on concepts, I strive to make lesson topics (e.g., the use of present perfect vs. simple past in constructing a narrative) more comprehensible as well as more generalizable, and in so doing allow for students to have greater authorship in the types of meaning they wish to make. In order for students to truly gain mastery of such concepts, I guide them to first evaluate their choices and explicitly state what type of meaning it is they wished to have made; as noted above, in order to assure that this type of reflection occurs, I assign students to complete reflections (verbal or written) or engage with me in a student-teacher reflection. My purpose for doing so is to ensure that they have oriented their decisions around the pedagogical concept. Once I have observed that the student has made a conscious decision about their linguistic and pragmatic choices as oriented to the pedagogical concept, I begin to increase their degrees of freedom, i.e., they are decreasingly required to externalize their reasoning behind the linguistic and pragmatic choices they have made. As a result of this, I am able to witness a further development of authorship in their second language usage.

          The third concept that informs my style of pedagogy is authenticity: both the use of authentic texts and speech in service of target-form examples, as well as the creation of a space in which learners are able to organically produce language with myself and their classmates. In my classroom, I appreciate the value of a textbook for the purposes of mediating learners to the usage of target language forms. However, I additionally feel that the use of authentic materials in the language classroom serves to provide students with a greater challenge, a challenge that they will undoubtedly confront in myriad spheres outside of the classroom. By providing students with authentic materials, they are better able to evaluate the presented form and meaning under my guidance. In addition to fostering learning through use of authentic materials, one of my goals is to facilitate a space for learners to produce organic, spontaneous language in the language classroom. By providing a space for organic, spontaneous language production, I hope to prepare students for the real-world situations in which organic language production is expected. In order to provide such a space, I employ the Strategic Interaction model. In using this model, I separate students into groups and provide them with a real-world scenario that they are to discuss within their group. To be sure, each group receives the same scenario, however, they receive only the information to one role within the scenario and are not privy to the information held by the other party. In their groups, I ask students to imagine any interaction that might occur in the scenario with the other party and discuss what type of language they might use given the possible interactions. Following their discussion, I prompt the students to act out the scenario in front of the class. Typically, a conflict will occur between the parties which they must solve in their second language. Through the drama in the scenario I am able to evaluate the learners’ language production and decisions, as well as guide them as they do their best to make meaning and discover their ability and voice in the second language. As a very thoughtful, reflective, and  interactive style of classroom activity, I feel that this does well to both motivate the students and develop their communicative and pragmatic competence and identity in the second language.

          Following these three teaching concepts, I find great success in teaching second languages. Moreover, I feel that the lessons that I impart with my students help them develop beyond the walls of the classroom and into the living world. I continue to find great joy in realizing the potential of my teaching methods through the growth of my students and strive to further develop and grow in my career as a second language educator and aspiring teacher practitioner.