Sunday, September 2, 2012

A model of a successful (hapic-integrating) pronunciation teacher?

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker
Found an interesting questionnaire recently that I am going to adapt slightly to use in haptic-integrated work. It comes out of a 2009 study of the application of NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) in teacher training in Iran by Pishghadam, Shayesteh and Shapoori. (Caveat emptor: I do occasionally use NLP material here. I have published articles about it, in fact. Like any therapeutic system, it has practitioners who get it right and those who don't.) Here are the categories:

"1. Flexibility . . . measures teachers level of flexibility in classroom context in general.
  2. Anchoring . . . process by which an internal or external stimulus triggers a response
  3. Elicitation . . . evoking a state by one`s behavior . . . gathering information by direct observation of non-verbal signals or by asking . . . questions.
  4. Modeling . . . the process of presenting the new or difficult material in order to enable the students to accomplish a task
  5. Individual differences . . . give every individual student in the classroom a sense of belonging by considering all of their points of view and ideas.
  6. Leading . . . changing one's behavior with enough relationship to motivate the other person to follow you
  7. Establishing rapport . . . the process of establishing and maintaining a mutual relationship full of trust and understanding between the teacher and the learners
  8. Emotional and cognitive boosters . . . ability in bringing an emotional environment to evoke the learners' engagement . . . "

2, 3, 4 and 6 are especially relevant to body-based instruction. The others are just good communication, in general. And about the only way you can evaluate your work on those four criteria, other than filling out the questionnaire and asking a colleague who has observed you to confirm it, is to consistently review video of your teaching. So how do you look?

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 909-917, July 2011 © 2011 

No comments:

Post a Comment