Comments on: Teaching a foreign language | Whose responsibility to learn anyway?

By: Burl

Burl — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:33:02 +0000

I have been teaching Spanish for about 13 years now and find that when I do my best to keep my class exciting and engaging, my students do much better. If I simply present the material because I am sick or tired, my lack of enthusiasm seems to directly affect the amount that the students can absorb and then use in context. While I agree that students ultimately are responsible for their own learning, we as teachers are not without responsibility for making sure that our classes are not boring. We have more tools at our disposal now than ever before in history, and many of them are free or very cheap. makingstudents.blogspot.com Is my own blog on teaching languages if you want to check it out.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:01:02 +0000

I think that this brings up some excellent points and it is a pretty good attitude for the student to have but not the teacher. If this is true, what do we pay teachers for? If all that is truly necessary is to present information to the students, give them assignments and grade those assignments then why do we not simply use computers for all teaching? It would be cheaper in the long run. Are language teachers truly free of ALL accountability if their students fail to learn?

By: markbiernat

markbiernat — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:48:55 +0000

One exception is with children, if you have a friendly teacher you will learn, if you have a hard teacher that makes you scared you will not learn the language as you will be afraid to speak and stress will block the learning process.