Chapter 1 of Teaching by Principles was an enthusiastic introduction to the world of TESOL. Being very new to the field of TESOL, I thought that the text did a great job of portraying situations that may happen in the classroom. One quote that stood out was, "How do I plan a lesson?" A teacher must be expected to act appropriately to meet the needs of his/her students. Chapter 1 addresses this issue through an observation of an English teacher and fifteen students in Seoul, Korea.
The basis of the teacher's lesson was to teach the concept of would rather. She went about this by having the student list English movies and ultimately ask each other which movies they would rather see. While reading the observation, it seemed that the students were not truly learning the concept of "would rather", but rather the task of saying would rather. This was largely due to the teacher's formulaic approach to teaching her students. Rather than explain the grammatical backing of the phrase, she simply just told the students to repeat the phrase "would you rather see ___ or ___" and had the students plug in previously mentioned movie titles. This task seems relatively easy for a student, but only because of memorization. The student just inserts whatever movie he just named into the recently memorized would rather phrase. This may be temporarily efficient to a student who wants to learn the simple phrase, but due to the lack of grammatical instruction, any verbs associated with that phrase that are irregular will do the child a disservice. In my opinion, the students were not learning the most out of the particular phrase. Perhaps the teacher may have chose the wrong method of teaching this topic. This is now where chapter 2 comes into play.
Chapter two largely talks about the various methods of teaching. The book states that methods are, "overall plans for systematic presentation of language based upon a selected approach."(Brown, 14) The best part of this chapter was the large varieties of methods, along with their strengths and weaknesses. There was often differences of teacher involvement, Silent Way being a method with very little teacher interaction. I particularly related to Suggestopedia, because of my high school spanish classes. We assumed the roles (and names) as native speakers as the book mentioned. (Brown, 27)
Overall, I feel that adopting one particular method would be inadvisable. While reading about the various methods, I thought of my own language experience. Many of the methods listed, looked like they would be effective on my learning styles, while others seemed absolutely frustrating. I feel that it is important to keep that mindset when teaching students. All students have different needs, and there is no "one method fits all" solution. Perhaps it is recommended to try a variety of methods to see which one works with your students the best.
