Describing Learning and Teaching
Personal reflection on Harmer’s
(2007) Chapter 4
By Melissa Cortés-Ramírez
Pre-Service Teacher, School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Sunday, March 27, 2016
Post 242
The
fourth chapter of the book written by Harmer (2007) is about the description of
learning and teaching. Learning is a conscious process in which every person
makes the decision of studying, being in this case a new language. And teaching
is in charge of an instructor who can provide the learners with comprehensible
input so that they can learn the language correctly. Also, learning can be
developed with the application of different methods and elements.
The
main idea provided by Harmer (2007) is that learners have different reasons to
learn the language, and teachers have different ways of helping the students in
the language learning process. For example, students need to have a motivation
to study the language; they also need exposure to it, and they need to actually
use the language so that they can learn. On the other hand, teachers need to
provide the students with the right exposure and opportunities to use the
language so that they can practice and improve their knowledge.
In
these cases, both, students and teachers can have a lot of advantages. If
teachers use different methods of teaching like Grammar-translation,
audio-lingualism, PPP, CLT or TBL, they will have different tasks or activities
in their lessons and they can fulfill all of the student’s needs. Also, if teachers
perform lessons that will show students engagement and will activate their
knowledge; they are going to learn successfully and can be able to communicate.
Besides, if teachers use different lesson sequences, students will have variety
and experiment a more natural environment.
Some disadvantages
can also be that sometimes teachers are forced to use a textbook, and this
situation reduces the time for teachers who want to do different activities for
students. Another one can be that the motivation of the students depends only
on them; if they lose motivation it is going to be difficult for the teacher to
get the person to participate or to gain the motivation again. Also, the
constant changes of methods can benefit some students and make it hard to learn
the topics for some other students.
As a conclusion,
we can say that there are many reasons for studying a language. Every student
has a motivation and a reason to learn that is different from one student to
another one; and in order for them to learn they need a teacher who can help
them. It is the job of a teacher to maintain the motivation of students by
applying different methods of teaching and challenging them to learn and
practice more. By applying various methods and taking into account the elements
that are necessary to learn, we as teachers can guarantee that our students
will learn successfully.
Reference
Harmer, J. (2007). “Describing Learning and Teaching”
How to Teach English. Essex: Pearson.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
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