TESOL Standard 2: Respect And Fairness In The Classroom

TESOL Standard 2: Instructing As a teacher I am responsible to provide each of my students a supportive environment that engages each learner in a meaningful way while also promoting respect and fairness within the classroom. My goal in doing this is to ensure that my students feel no anxiety towards learning English. “Students who consider the learning of English as a positive and rewarding experience are less likely to suffer from foreign language anxiety. They usually have higher levels of motivation, willingness to participate, and high language performance” (Tsiplakides & Keramida, 2010). So, how can I meet my goal of ensuring an anxiety free learning experience?

What is most important? In order to help my students have a positive

I envision a classroom where the students are fully engaged in their activities, working together in a cooperative manner (higher levels students helping lower level students and lower level students learning from higher level students), and myself as the teacher roaming between the students offering support as needed. In order to do this it is my responsibility to provide productive communicative activities for my students’ that allow for both collaborative and individual work. After all, learning is an active process between all participants in the

I learned that while scaffolding is necessary and important to the success of a lesson, too much scaffolding can be just as detrimental to a lesson as no scaffolding. The knowledge became evident to me in my Orientation Level 2 Communications class while providing written language cues on the board for a speaking activity. I planned on having my students describe various job titles that were written on a set of cards. To help guide them with the use of descriptive language, I wrote cues on the board: “A ….works in a …. / A … has to be a very …. person / A … works early in the morning/at night / This is a good/bad job because …. .” What happened was, the students followed only what was written on the board and did not venture outside of this ‘safety zone’. I ended up erasing the cues from the board after one round of describing. This allowed the students to still use the written cues from memory but with slight variations instead of actually reading word for word what I had written on the