Welcome to the Virtual Home of Abdul Hadi
'Promoting Quality English Language Education'
Teaching Philosophy
Having been working as an English teacher and teacher
educator for more than ten years, I go through a series of teaching and
learning experiences, which lead me to view teaching as a need for
self-actualization. In my view, teaching is about giving the best of our
potential for others to grow and succeed in their lives. Therefore, issues on
teacher education programs, student-teacher interaction, curriculum and
material development, teaching methodology, and classroom management always
become my primary concerns in my professional life as a teacher and teacher
educator. They are the essential ingredients for successful teaching, and I am
aware that significant amount of my time and energy has to be devoted to
catering those issues, because we can only give the best when we prepare
enough.
I believe that teacher education
is an ongoing program; it never ends. I did not believe in this until I
participated in a six-week training in Trends and Techniques in the Teaching of
English as a Foreign Language (TTTE). This is an English Language Teaching
(ELT) training that has significantly improved and completely changed my
understanding of how and with what resources a foreign language should be
taught. I gained very little about teaching from my undergraduate education as
the focus was a lot more on mastering English, though I was a actually a
teacher trainee student. The experience, knowledge, and motivation that I
obtained from TTTE, experiences in teaching English to high school and
university students, and problems faced by English teachers in Indonesia are so
influential that I decided to continuously develop my qualifications as a
teacher/teacher educator and encouraged all my teacher trainees to do the same
thing. It has not been an easy issue to address amidst the general view that a
teacher is a master of what he teaches and further learning or professional
development is seen as unnecessary. However, I managed to reflect my new
understanding of teacher education program in my syllabus design when I taught Seminar
in ELT to my teacher trainee students in the beginning of 2004. I exposed to
and discussed with my students the idea that both pre-service teacher education
and in-service teacher education programs are two inseparable parts, that
teachers' professional development does not end on the last day of their
pre-service teacher training program, and that "pre-service ELT
preparation is only half of the battle" (England, 1998). It is my
aspiration to see my self, my teacher trainee students, and other teachers or
educators to view and realize teacher education as a never-ending process.
Student-teacher interaction is one
other issue of high importance in my view as a teacher/teacher educator. It is
important because the process of transferring, sharing, or pursuing knowledge
and skills in the classrooms would not take place smoothly without a
harmonious, mutual, interactive but appreciative environment exists between
students and teachers. As a teacher, I have seen students today becoming
increasingly different from those in the past. Students today want to be
treated as partners in learning, not subordinates of bossy or overly
self-confident or authoritarian teachers. Although in some cultures this is not
really true but the increasingly globalized world has affected students to be
treated by their teachers differently. I have not seen anything wrong with this
model of teacher-student interaction; Conversely, I have seen that this kind of
interaction has resulted in better and accelerated learning not only by
students but also by teachers. As a young and newly assigned teacher a couple
of years ago, I ran into a dilemma whether to play a role of a teacher who
spoon-feeds knowledge to my students or a teacher who negotiates and involves
my students in the learning process. I, unintentionally, decided to take the
latter role in my teaching which I, later, realized benefits me a lot for my
professional development because I can recognize more of my students' learning
styles, and it is my responsibility to accommodate them whenever possible in my
teaching. The challenge of taking this kind of student-teacher interaction is
that a teacher has to put a lot of efforts preparing for activities that
stimulate students to participate and get involved in the learning process. I
have to acknowledge that I have not always succeeded in adopting this kind of
student-teacher interaction in my teaching. However, I will surely continue
adopting this type of interaction while continuously improving my interaction
skill because the benefit far exceeds the efforts.
Curriculum and material
development is also an important as well as inseparable part of the whole being
of what I view as teaching a foreign language. It requires hard work to help
students achieve a certain level of communicative skill especially because I
teach English in a country where language teaching curriculum is so
centralized. Realizing this situation, I attempted to adjust my teaching to the
local setting where my students live, study, and spend their leisure time. The
reason behind this decision is because I perceive that foreign language
learning has to be linked with students' real life so as to facilitate their
production of communicative utterances or expression in the foreign language. I
am also faced with a type of learning materials supposedly used by students,
which, in my view, has resulted in students' learning a foreign language for
passing exams rather than gaining a communicative competence. I believe that a
teacher should be given a space in the curriculum to creatively foster
students' effort in gaining communicative competence in the language they are
learning. With this belief in mind, I and few other colleague teachers
attempted our very first effort in incorporating the local setting of our
students' life into a textbook for their reference. Still, I found out that a
teacher needs to add, omit, reduce, or replace a part or more of the textbook
used by students in the real classroom practice. As a teacher educator, I tried
to expose my teacher trainee students to this perspective in my presentations
of learning materials to them. I want them to be aware of the responsibility
that a teacher has when he or she endorses a textbook to be used by his or her
students. In addition to writing or providing representative and communicative
textbooks for students, I also consider material development in the light of
teachers' keen attention on appropriate and proportional use of the textbook.
Therefore, addition, deletion, reduction, and substitution of some parts of
students' textbook are parts of what I perceive as material development.
The next ingredient of my concern
seems like a central issue in foreign language teaching: teaching methodology.
Two other related terms in this matter are teaching approach and teaching
procedure. Since the last five years of my career as a teacher and teacher
educator, I have strived very hard to apply and relate these three core
teaching principles to promote students' learning. I learned a lot from Marianne
Celce-Murcia's Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language in efforts to
improve the quality of my teaching. I think it is an obligation for every
language teacher to explore all approaches and methods proposed so that he or
she can apply a teaching procedure that benefits students optimally. In my
view, students' failure in language learning is significantly influenced by the
teaching procedure applied by teachers, which is closely related to their
ability and willingness in exploring, and then picking up parts of teaching
methods and approaches that promote students' learning and experiencing the
foreign language. I am a language teacher who believes that every approach and
method has its own pluses and minuses. Hence, as far as the goal of any part of
an approach or a method promotes students' communicative competence, I will
undoubtedly pick it up for my teaching.
However, teaching is also a matter
of management. One role that a teacher has to play in his or her career is the
role of a manager. A teacher is a manager of his or her class, and therefore is
responsible for making sure that everyone and everything is in the best
condition for successful teaching and learning. For me, teaching is like
running a business in which people of different backgrounds get together, and
different kinds of facilities and resources are used to achieve a common goal.
A teacher is a person responsible for good management of all resources
available at hand in order to achieve success. I have experienced and observed
that poor classroom management hampers students in their learning. On the other
hand, I have also experienced and noticed that a carefully and professionally
planned class puts students at ease as well as challenges to venture the
learning process. It is my understanding that classroom management does not
begin from the first minute of a teacher' presence in the classroom, but rather
begins on the first day he or she is assigned to teach a single course.
Classroom management is a crucial part of what we call 'teaching', and
therefore should never be ignored.
Finally, considering the hard works that a language teacher
actually has to do, I strongly agree with the idea of using computer technology
in language teaching. Computer technology puts teachers at ease in managing
their teaching responsibilities. Computer technology also helps teachers to
improve the quality of their teaching, provided that any technological
shortcomings can be overcome properly. I have only used very limited
technological resources for my teaching, but the training and experience that I
gained during my study at the University of Arizona have shown me how helpful
computer technology is for a dedicated teacher. I will surely take advantage of
these technological resources for my teaching in the future.
Professional Practice
I have taught English as a Foreign Language to a variety of
students in different settings, ranging from Elementary school students to
adult learners of English, from people's home to university. I started my
teaching career with a very minimum understanding of what 'teaching' really is.
However, these experiences, bad ones and good ones, have nurtured me to be
prepared and to love my job as a teacher. Followings are some of my experiences
in teaching English as a foreign language.
• Teaching English to high school students
During the period of 1996-2000, I taught English to first,
second, and third year high school students in my hometown. The textbook used
seemed to require both teacher and students to spend most of the class sessions
for reading comprehension activities. This was not a wonder because students'
final exams were mostly about reading comprehension. I often times applied what
I called "reading-based classroom activities" in order to provide
students with opportunities to experience speaking, listening to, and writing
in English.
Teaching high school students requires some psychological
competence to accommodate their teenage emotional state. For this purpose, I
often created games of my own or modified ones that are already published in
building the students interest to the lesson as well as their English
proficiency. Following is one of them:
Hang Man
This is a game in which I drew picture of a bad looking-man
hung on a tree or pole on the whiteboard for a group of students who made the
most mistakes in doing their assignment. Sometimes I asked students from the
other group to draw a bad looking-person for the looser. It was simple but
could motivate students to do their best as there was an atmosphere of
competition. Students like to compete when we provide an enjoyable atmosphere
for them. I always take advantage of this atmosphere for my teaching.
• Teaching English at private institutions
A t LIA English School and LP3I (Institute for Career
Development and Education of Indonesia), two nation-wide private institutions,
I taught English to students of different levels of proficiency. I taught
junior and senior high school students, college students, and company
employees. Teaching English at private institutions required a lot more of my
time and teaching skills as they wanted their students to have the best
learning atmosphere in the classrooms. At both institutions, I was required to
follow their own teaching procedures but also given opportunities to creatively
design my teaching. Click here
to view a typical lesson plan that I used for my teaching at both institutions.
• Teaching English to teacher trainee students at
university
I taught several courses to teacher trainee students at the
Department of English Language Education. I taught both courses that are aimed
at improving their linguistic and communicative competence and those aimed at
providing them with the required pedagogical skills. Below are descriptions of
two of the courses:
a. Speaking III
This is a course offered to third semester students at the
Department of English Language Education on purpose of developing high
intermediate level of spoken English. The materials designed for the course
were topic-based and teacher-generated. The reason was to link what the
students would talk about in English with issues that they were familiar with.
In other words, the assumption was that students would not be able to practice
speaking English optimally if they were assigned to talk or perform about
things they were unfamiliar with. Performing role plays, conversations, and
short presentations or commercials were among activities assigned to help
students gain the intended spoken communication skills.
In general, most of the students were eager to participate
in every class session. I found that they brought into the class interesting
ideas in their performance and presentations. There were students who performed
a family drama, who presented or promoted a new cosmetic product or Multilevel
Marketing Product, who persuaded people to donate to a foundation, etc.
Although some of them still faced difficulties to produce the correct spoken
English, they were confident with what they were sharing to the class because I
encouraged them to talk about things they were familiar with.
b. TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) I and II
This course is aimed at providing final year undergraduate
students (teacher trainees) at the Department of English Education with general
but comprehensive insights on issues related to English Language Teaching.
Issues such as pre-service and in-service teacher education programs, teaching
approaches and methods, curriculum and syllabus, material design and
development, motivation and learning styles, ELT in EFL contexts, and language
testing and learning assessment are covered in the course. In addition to
providing students with better ideas on how ELT is best implemented, this
seminar-type class also enables students to practice communicating their ideas
in English-an opportunity, which is rare in EFL context.
Students are divided into groups of two or three, and then
each group was assigned to prepare and present a fifteen minutes presentation
in front of their classmates. A question and answer session followed each
students' presentation in which, both I and students audience could ask
questions, comment, propose, or argue on the topic just presented. Every
student is required to hand in his or her individual responses and comments on
the topic presented by their classmates in the following class meeting.