TEACHER: WHO ARE AND WHAT TASK?

TEACHER: WHO ARE AND WHAT TASK?

An Essay of a Reading Report

Submitted as the Requirement to Fulfill an Assignment of

English as Foreign Language Methodology Course

Under the Direction of Prof. Dr. Hj. Nenden Sri Lengkanawati, M. Pd

Written by:

Rezki Firdaus

1407335

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

INDONESIA UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

2015

Teacher: Who are and what task?

This written is a reading report of chapter Describing Teachers in The Practice of English Language Teaching book by Jeremy Harmer. It was written to fulfill the EFL Methodology assessment. In writing this reading report, the writer would explain about describing teachers in Harmer’s book: The concept of teaching, What to do in the classroom—roles and tasks, Rapport: Teacher-Students relationship, Teachers as media in the teaching and learning process, Native-speaker teacher and non-native-speaker teachers, critical analysis, and conclusion.

A.           A summary of the topic

A1.    The concept of teaching

In regards to the concept of teaching, it has been commonly known that teaching is not only about transferring knowledge to the students, but also guide them to know, act and apply their attitude, knowledge and skills to their daily life. According to (Lindberg & Olofsson, 2010) who state that teaching should supplemanted by blended learning. Teaching has also given them a clear focus and makes them feel secure. Because, they need suggestion and direction. Teachers must be a democratic and autocratic leadership. Democratic leadership is letting students participate in decision-making takes more effort and organization than controlling the class. Guide the students become autonomous learners. But the other view both teachers and students (society in general) may feel more comfortable with a more autocratic leadership style. So, the teachers play many different roles in a language learning classroom. The important role students play in learning and suggest that when students preserve a well-manage a classroom, they will be more involved (Pettigrew et al., 2013). Whether or not the teachers are more autocratic or democratic as teachers.

A2.    What to do in the classroom—roles and tasks

In the classroom the teacher role is making the way we dress, the stance we adopt and our attitude to make the class become an immediate impression on students. The teacher is a as facilitator to describe a particular kind of teacher, a person who makes learner autonomy through the use of group work and pair work by knowledge. The teachers play many different roles in a language learning classroom. Harmer (2007a) measured out teachers act as controllers, prompter, participant, resource, and tutor.

Controller, teachers are in charge of the class and of the activity taking place and are often leading from the front. Controllers take the register, tell students thing, organized drills, teacher-fronted classroom etc. Moments when acting as a controller make sense: made an announcement, order has to be restored, give an explanation and questions-answer session. As a controller, controllers have give some drawbacks such as; denies students access to their own experiential learning by focusing everything on the teacher cuts down on opportunities for students to speak lack of variety in activities and classroom atmosphere and denies teachers and students many other possibilities and modes of learning. So, this involves teacher providing support and advice on e.g. language and performance problem. No direct evidence of this role, but its possible teacher may need to take on this role at any time in the lesson.

Prompter, teachers need to do it sensitively and encouragingly with discretion. Sometimes when a teacher is involved in a role-play activity, they may still have the thread, but be unable to proceed productively for lack of vocabulary. To make it clear hold back and let them work things out for themselves or, instead, “nudge” them forward in a discreet and supportive way. If the teachers are too adamant, we risk taking the initiative away from the students.

The teacher as a participant during students’ discussions, role-plays or group decision-making activities, giving feed back and correct a mistake. They sometimes participated in class activities, especially those that involved group work, but during activities socialized with one another rather than performing assigned tasks (Pettigrew et al., 2013). The teacher may want to join in an activity not as a teacher, but as participants in their own right. Furthermore, (Pettigrew et al., 2013) state that students participated highly or the teacher performed at their peak. For the teacher, participating in an activity is more enjoyable than acting as a resource. Students will enjoy having the teacher with them. For a drawbacks teacher can easily dominate the proceedings.

Teachers are resources and tutor which control and organize teaching and learning activities. As a resource, a teacher should be helpful and available. No teacher knows everything about the language. The teacher can be one of the most important resources students have when: ask how to say or writing something, want to know what a word or phrase means, and want to know information in the middle of an activity about that activity or where to look for something. As a tutor, teacher working with individuals and small groups. Pointing students in the direction they have not yet thought of taking. The term implies a more intimate relationship than the controller. One thing that to be remembered that as a tutor not to intrude too much or become unhelpful.

The teacher as performer, at this point every teacher performs differently. Each teacher has many different performance styles depending on the situation. Besides, we should describe how teachers should play their roles:

Activity	How the teacher should perform
Team game	Energetically, encouragingly, clearly, fairly
Role-play	Clearly, encouragingly, retairingly, supportively
Teacher reading aloud	Commandingly, dramatically, interestingly
Whole-class listening	Efficiently, clearly, supportively

            Teachers are provided personalized coaching based on observations of their teaching performance (for reviews, sees Danielson et al. 2007; Kratochwill et al. 2007; Pianta and Hamre 2009 in Pettigrew et al., 2013).

A3.    Rapport: Teacher-Students relationship

Teacher–student relationships and shared control of the class by teachers and students (Freiberg and Lamb 2009 in Pettigrew et al., 2013)—tends to encourage and facilitate discussions (Ennett et al. 2011; Freiberg and Lamb 2009 in Pettigrew et al., 2013). In order to optimize the function of teacher’s roles to employ their tasks at class, the rapport established between teacher and students is essential. We need to spend time making sure that teacher-student rapport is positive and useful. Rapport here means, in essence, the relationship that the students have with the teacher and vice versa. There are four characteristics in order to be successful in doing interaction with students;

C Recognizing student

C Listening to the students

C Respecting students

C Being even-handed

Recognizing students: students want their teachers to know who they are. They would like their teachers to know their names, of course, but they also appreciate it when teachers have some understanding of their character. Listening to students: students respond very well to teacher who listen to them. As (Brodie, 2008) state that listen to learner will develop their reasoning as we interacted with them. Although there are many calls on our time, nevertheless we need to make ourselves as available as we can to listen to individual students’ opinion and concerns, often outside the lessons themselves. Respecting students: correcting students are always a delicate event. If we are too critical, we risk demotivating them, yet if we are constantly praising them, we risk turning them into ‘praise junkies’, who begin to need approval all the time. (Brodie, 2008) believe that when the teacher maintains the contribution in the public realm for further consideration. She can repeat the idea, ask others for comment, or merely indicate that the learner should continue talking. Being even-handed: most teachers have some students that they warm to more than others. Treating all students equally not only helps to establish and maintain rapport, but it also a mark of professionalism.

A4.    The teacher as teaching aid (Teachers as media in the teaching and learning process)

Concerning with professionalism, it has been a teacher’s responsibility to guarantee the successful learning process. Often this success is supported by the existence of media, even the sophisticated one. In a language class, however, teachers also can be the effective media for learning. Furthermore, (Hendriyani, Hollander, d’Haenens, & Beentjes, 2014) state that as parents are responsible for children’s education, and that includes supervising their children’s media use in most effective way, we aim at exploring parents’ concerns, both in general and in relation to media. Students can get models of language from textbooks, reading materials of all sorts and from audio and video tapes. But teachers can also model language ourselves. It is true that some teachers talk too much and that is not necessarily advantageous for their students. As a teacher, we are ideally placed to provide appropriate input since we know the students in front of us and can react appropriately to them in a way that a coursebook or a an audio track. In a language classroom, there are specific ways in which we can help our students both hear and understand language.

Mime and gesture; the ability of using our body to convey meaning and atmosphere. They work best when they are exaggerated, since this makes their meaning explicit. One gesture which is widely used, but which teachers should employ with care, is the act of pointing to students to ask them to participate in a drill or give some other form of response. Body language will give a student more time to reflect and think before responding (Molin, Sorbring, & Lofgren-Martenson, 2015). Language model; reading passages aloud can capture the imagination and mood like nothing else. One way in which we can model dialogue in front of each of them when required to speak their lines. For such activities we should make sure that we can be heard and we should animate enthusiasm as is appropriate for the conversation we are modeling. Provide of comprehensible input; language students understand the meaning of, slightly above their own production level. Modeling and scaffolding is a combination of STT (Student Talking Time) and TTT (Teacher Talking Time). Almost training process a distinction is made between students talking time (STT) and teacher talking time (TTT). The whole we want to see more STT and TTT since, as trainer frequently points out to their student teachers.

A5.    Native-speaker teachers and non-native-speaker teachers

Aside from the roles and tasks of language teacher in teaching, there is a debate about the preference of having native or non-native speaker as the teacher. According to Harmer (2007a), some people argue that a native speaker would be a better language teacher since they know better about the culture and the linguistic knowledge about their language and that reason often makes those native speaker teachers feel more confident to teach and that students are usually more enthusiastic to learn with them. Quite the reverse, some other people also argue that nowadays knowledge belongs to the whole world. Everybody can have the same access to learn the language which then creates the assumption that teaching the language is not all about owning the language, but about owning the knowledge of the language and the skills to teach the language of the target learners effectively. Following up to the assumption, this day, non-native-speaker teachers with great qualification have been continually given the respective place in teaching English equal to the one given to native-speaker teachers.

Native speaker is first-language speaker: a speaker of a language learned in infancy. Davies (1991) cites Bloomfield in (Ghanem, 2014) as the first to offer a definition of an native speaker is ‘the first language a human being learns to speak is his native language; he is a native speaker of this language’. Native speaker teacher also possess the means to use the language reatively (Stren, 1983 in Ghanem, 2014), identifying with a language community (Johnson & Johnson, 1998; Kramsch, 1997 cites in Ghanem, 2014), and having the ability ‘to interpret and translate into the L1 (Davies, 2003, p. 210 cites in Ghanem, 2014). Native speakers have the advantage of a linguistics confidence about their language in the classroom which non-native speaker teachers.

Non-native speaker is the people who learn about another language as their second or foreign language. (Ghanem, 2014) state that:

NNSs’ ability to teach language learning strategies, because they employed these strategies themselves when learning English. Further, NNSs have a high level of metalinguistic awareness of the L2 structure, which they can transmit to their students. NNSs are also aware of the grammar rules of the L2 and understand how these rules function, in contrast to NSs who rely too often on their intuition and may not be able to explain the rules to the learners.

But non-native speakers’ teachers have many advantages that their “native” speaker do not. Because they have often had the same experience of learning English as their students are now having, and this gives them an instant understanding of what their students are going through.

B.            Critical analysis

The teacher apparently doesn’t rush the students, even when there is a push for time. It was interesting that the students would tune into the fact that students had more to say and do but was sensitive to the students’ needs. Students like teachers that are patient and kind. They also like it when humor is used in teaching. Provide for activity changes, perhaps something not on the lesson plan; for example, scrabble, hangman, pictionary, etc. Be somewhat unpredictable, students will not know what comes next. Keep students in some suspense. Variety in teaching, the variety provides for renewed interest in the subject matter. Use variety in how you have students work together. Do not always pair the same ones together. Provide for a variety of learning activities. Some suggestions are: Assignments, brainstorming, general discussion, panel discussion, problem-solving discussion, pair/group discussion, music, instructional games, questioning and quizzes, reports and talks, role plays, worksheets, demonstrations, dramas, storytelling, general chalkboard use, chalkboard illustrations, charts and maps, flashcards, videos, lcd projections using powerpoint, internet access, pictures, posters, tape recordings.

Instant Involvement, create a variety of instant involvement techniques that can be used to capture students’ attention to what will be presented. Give eye-to-eye contact. Change teaching style to give variety. Pace, a change of pace is refreshing and helps students re-enter the learning process. Change of setting, at appropriate times, it is stimulating and interesting to meet in a different location or setting for a specific learning task.

C.           Conclusion

Consistency in classroom environments when teachers taught the curriculum in different classrooms of students. Across different classes of students and across lessons, teachers tended to exhibit the same level of control, seemed to omit or adapt the same curriculum components, and generally taught in a similar fashion. Additionally, each unique grouping of students, although slightly different in terms of class “personality,” generally responded similarly to the constraints of the classroom set up by the teachers.

Tasks are broadly the same for teachers and include; teaching all areas of the primary curriculum. Taking responsibility for the progress of a class of primary-age pupils; Organising the classroom and learning resources and creating displays to encourage a positive learning environment; Planning, preparing and presenting lessons that cater for the needs of the whole ability range within their class; Motivating pupils with enthusiastic, imaginative presentation; Maintaining discipline; Preparing and marking work to facilitate positive pupil development; Meeting requirements for the assessment and recording of pupils' development; Providing feedback to parents and carers on a pupil's progress at parents' evenings and other meetings; Coordinating activities and resources within a specific area of the curriculum, and supporting colleagues in the delivery of this specialist area; Working with others to plan and coordinate work; Keeping up to date with changes and developments in the structure of the curriculum; Organising and taking part in school events, outings and activities which may take place at weekends or in the evening.

D.           References

Brodie, K. (2008). Describing teacher change: Interactions between teacher moves and learner contributions. In Proceedings of the fifth international mathematics education and society conference (MES5) (pp. 31–50). Retrieved from http://nonio.fc.ul.pt/atms/learn/produtos/publicacoes/pdf/MES_5_part_1.pdf#page=39

Ghanem, C. (2014). Teaching in the foreign language classroom: How being a native or non-native speaker of German influences culture teaching. Language Teaching Research, 1362168814541751.

Harmer, Jeremy. (2007a). The Practice of English Language Teaching. Malaysia: Pearson Education Limited.

Harmer, Jeremy. (2007b). How to Teach English. China: Pearson Education Limited.

Hendriyani, Hollander, E., d’Haenens, L., & Beentjes, J. (2014). Views on children’s media use in Indonesia: Parents, children, and teachers. International Communication Gazette, 76(4-5), 322–339. http://doi.org/10.1177/1748048514523527

Lindberg, J. O., & Olofsson, A. D. (2010). Online learning communities and teacher professional development methods for improved education delivery. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=272470

Molin, M., Sorbring, E., & Lofgren-Martenson, L. (2015). Teachers’ and parents’ views on the Internet and social media usage by pupils with intellectual disabilities. Journal of Intellectual Disabilities, 19(1), 22–33. http://doi.org/10.1177/1744629514563558

Pettigrew, J., Miller-Day, M., Shin, Y. J., Hecht, M. L., Krieger, J. L., & Graham, J. W. (2013). Describing Teacher–Student Interactions: A Qualitative Assessment of Teacher Implementation of the 7th Grade keepin’ it REAL Substance Use Intervention. American Journal of Community Psychology, 51(0), 43–56. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-012-9539-1

CHAPTER REPORT PRESENTATION

EFL Methodology

Presenter’s Name        : Rezki Firdaus

Student’s ID               : 1407335

Topic                           : Teacher: Who are and what task?

Date                             : September, 29^th, 2015

Aspects	Criterion Score and Description	Comments	Rater’s Score
Content	9 The inclusion of other resources as well as research findings or illustration   (9) Without enrichment (7)
Media	5 Readability of the media Not too wordy Effectiveness of using it
Language: Grammar	4 Limited mistakes/errors. (4) Several mistakes (3) Many mistakes (2) Too many mistakes (1)
Pronunciation	4 Several mistakes in pronouncing words.
Encoding	6 The concept was easily understood by the floor. The presenter show his/her knowledge about the topic discussed.
Decoding	6 The presenter can cope with the questions from the floor.
Presentation Technique	6 During the presentation, the presenter make use of the media as her/his guidelines without reading the transparencies.
Total Score	40:10 = 4.0 (A)