Breaking Frontiers: Promoting the Use of English in EFL Classroom—Constructivist and Communicative Approach

This is a chunk of the article I wrote last year for my school. However, this may sound vague since I cut some important parts from the original text. The original article is now an intellectual property of my institution. Nevertheless, the objective is to give educators an overview about my experience in doing lesson studies and the significance of carrying-out anecdotal records.


 Introduction

This article renders the drastic shifts towards my principles, experiences, theoretical and practical acuity as an ESL teacher over the years - bracketing my educational roots and practices in the Philippines and in Thailand. Moreover, this paper predominantly focuses on the EFL teaching methods and turns that have been materializing in the context that I am presently working in, which is, an EFL milieu here in Thailand, which is in Plearnpattana School.

1. Theoretical/Conceptual Keystones: Augmenting Your

Performance as an Educator through Classroom Study

1.1 Questioning Oneself/ Identifying One's Improvement 

To be an effective and continuously dynamic educator, you must always be open to the probability of improvement. In order to identify how you can improve, you must visit each room of your practice and approach to check-out if you are still satisfied with what you offer to your students and if there’s anything wrong throughout your praxis. Once you found rooms filled with enquiries like, “Am I doing my best?” or “Why ‘this’ and ‘that’ don’t work out?”, you will be able to highlight the factors that you can disentangle. 

Based on my personal experiences, I have encountered great deal of enquiries like these. As a result, I realized that these are the sum of my dissatisfactions and disappointments on my pedagogical routine. Therefore I was skeptical and eager to find answers for my dissatisfactions. Dewey (1993) noted that learning your dissatisfaction and reflecting to the possibility of improvement is a positive aspect of (teachers’) professionalism, as could open-mindedness—a core value for improving practice and intellectual curiosity is at the root of enquiry.

Following this, identifying your rooms for improvement can brush-off your grey areas as an educator, as well as you will be able to see clear-cut pathways towards the vital archetypes that you may utilize in influencing and improving students’ learning environment and their learning outcomes. 

As educators, we have our own values when it comes to our teaching principles and practices. Correspondingly, there’s always a bed of notions where we can pick any views that we want to help outline our educational values. According to Roche (2012), teachers have innate and unnamed values with regards to education which are also based their on epistemological and ontological stances. Now, we might have encountered these “epistemological” and “ontological” constructs before from our books back in our college days. We might know what these theories are by definition; however, the question is, how do we look at its nature and application? It is good that we are packed and embedded with strong theoretical understanding with regards to our craft. On the other hand, knowing and understanding the educational theories and applying them into practice are both different stories. None of us want to sound so ideological, right?

For teachers to develop as professionals, there must be ‘a process of reshaping teachers’ existing knowledge, beliefs, and practices rather than simply imposing new theories, methods, or materials on teachers’ (Johnson and Golombek, 2002). Through constant monitoring one’s improvement, we are able to update our skills and strategies in teaching. Also, we will be able to avoid monotonous or repetitive activities and routines in the classroom.

 

2 The Process to a More Autonomous Teaching Experience

2.1 Recuperating my epistemological standpoint

 

Having identified the rooms of my improvement, as a teaching professional who sought for contemporary underpinnings for my practice, I decided to venture out to a most autonomous teaching and learning setting: abroad, which happens to be here in Thailand.

2.2 Cultural-induced working environment:

    The Rise of New Challenges 

As educators, in order to make sure that we are bringing success to students’ learning, we must also be sure that we are seeking professional development. Today, professional development runs the gamut from one-shot workshops to more intensive job-embedded professional development, which has teachers learn in the day-to-day environment in which they work rather than getting pulled out to attend an outside training (Zarrow, 2016). I had attended many seminars and three-day workshops on how to improve my teaching strategies. Sure, they work out for quite some time in my classes; however, I still ran out of ideas, whenever the strategies I got from these workshops become dull.

Landing an ESL teaching job in Thailand, which is an EFL speaking country in context, I realized that I should be tougher and be more hard-wearing. There are so many things to consider when you are teaching students who don’t speak your language and who have a hard time to speak the language you teach.

Cramming to see successful outcomes in a short period of time will only produce half-baked products or disappointments. Real Life English (2013) noted that teaching English let student make as many mistakes as they can--- mistakes aren’t bad: in fact the more mistakes the students make, the more teachers can correct them and the more students can analyze which area they’re wrong. Teachers shouldn’t be there to “teach” you the language. They should be there to increase your passion for it and to help you learn it.

 

During the course of my teaching, it was given that language could be one of the major struggles in classroom communication, but the biggest thing that I encountered was teaching the plans that I made according to how it should be taught. Planning the lessons was tough since we (together with my buddy and coordinators) joined our ideas altogether just to produce communicative and constructive plans; I was expecting that everything would go smoothly. However, I realized that not all good plans produce good learning results in the classroom. It really depends on how you teach the plans and how students react and acquire them. 

It is recommended that we need to focus more on situational problem and its application and lessen the time for input. At first it sounded so arduous, but it turned out to be the best decision that we made. 

2.3 The Constructive and Communicative Approach

 

We might have heard constructivism as a learning paradigm in the area of educational 

psychology, whereas, communication can always be found in Linguistics subjects. These constructs can be easily acquired by our executive function; however, it is imperative that as teachers, we know how to utilize these constructs inside our classrooms.

In order to make successful lessons plans, it is necessary to adjust each part according to the children’s learning phase. Although it might sound tiring and another pile of work on your desk, trust me, after you get the right formula, all you have to do is to chill and see good outcomes. I once mentioned about the tight plans I did. These plans had lots of games during the inspiration and input stage. As a result, I didn’t have time to carry out the situational and problem-solving parts of my plan--- which are the most important parts. So, the dilemma was solved when I tried to minimize the time I allot in inspiration and input parts. 

Let’s try to define again the terms communicative and constructive. If you hear the word constructive or constructivism, the proponents that come into our minds are Vygotski, Piaget, Dewey, and Bruner. These authorities noted that constructivism, in general, is how individuals gain knowledge and learn. According to Learning-Theories’ website, “constructivism as a paradigm or worldview posits that learning is an active, constructive process. The learner is an information constructor. People actively construct or create their own subjective representations of objective reality. New information is linked to to prior knowledge, thus mental representations are subjective.   

Meanwhile, Wikipedia defines communication as the act of conveying meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic rules. Likewise, communication is always used in a vast area of specializations including teaching. Communicative approach as its variant jargon in education, is based on the idea that learning language successfully comes through having to communicate real meaning. When learners are involved in real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be used, and this will allow them to learn to use the language (Teaching English UK, 2018).

During the course of adjusting the plans I made, to make them more communicative and constructive, students should be able to utilize their natural strategies for language acquisition which would allow them to use English as their medium of communication. Also, students should be able to construct knowledge from their schema and from what the teacher had taught during the input process. 

In my plans, these approaches are mostly present in step 3: situational problem and step 4: problem solving. 

Here is a concrete example from my plan:

 

Here, students are learning about the weather and the proper attires to be worn. The students need to think which attire suits for the given weather. Then, students need to say what their members are wearing using the sentence pattern subject+be verb+main verb – ing, without realizing that they’re being prepared for the next topic to be discussed next meeting which is the present continuous or progressive tense of the verb. This will serve as their schema for the next topic.