My Journey Of Language Learning As A Teacher

As a teacher, I should completely understand how to really teach my students well without any prejudices or stereotypes whatsoever and encourage them to keep learning despite the hardships they can possibly face related to either how hard they might think of the learning material is or how influential their extrinsic problems are. It is in order to make sure that they can acquire something useful from my classroom successfully. That so-called notion of teaching becomes more obvious after I encountered several affecting moments in my life. Reflecting on those experiences, therefore, I would like to share the significant occurrences in my life related to injustice and discrimination, which later on contributing to the way I learnt one particular

When I was a freshman in a public high school, I was lucky to have a very qualified English teacher. She had been very helpful. First, I managed to reduce the linguistic confusion of gender specific words. After she taught me, I never came up with the sentences like, "Last night I was talking to my father and she got a bit angry" or "Check out that boy. She is crying" anymore. Second, as the Indonesian language has no separate markers for tenses, I also used to forget to apply appropriate tenses to my sentences, saying things like “yesterday I go to the market”. However, during high school education, I learned the proper syntactic restrictions. I also used to make mistakes related to singular/plural confusion. When I spoke English, I used to say things like “That person own two book” or “They have enough player to make four team”, because it made perfect sense in my own language. The high school English teacher, then, drilled us the use of plural marker in the words making me understand the concept. There are other severe mistakes I had made that she patiently showed to me and corrected accordingly including the pronunciation mistakes of the sound /ʃ/, for instance, and many other mistakes that I used to make constantly before I

On the contrary, that never stopped me from digging more into culture, social interaction and underlying meanings in which I encountered a lot through a lot of tools which promote the receptive skills such as watching movies, listening to certain passages and/or reading books. I have been building up my vocabularies since then as I felt that my cravings are still not quenched yet.

In college, fortunately, I definitely got more knowledge about English language. I gained more insights of English pedagogy as I tried to earn my Bachelor’ Degree. Moreover, coming from different cultural background, I loved the course of Cross-Cultural Understanding. Therefore, I also taught English using the goal of the sociolinguistic competences, which students need to obtain. Teaching the students by asking them to rote memorize some tenses formula was never in my