Phuong thi Anh LE has been a TESOL teacher and teacher trainer for over 34 years in Vietnam. As a researcher, she has presented and published extensively on various issues in TESOL and teacher education. Her major research interests include syllabus design, assessment, teacher development, intercultural communication and pragmatics. She has also participated in various national teacher education projects and works as an MA thesis supervisor. She earned a Master of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University (Australia) in 2000 and a Doctor of Education at La Trobe University (Australia) in 2008. She was a Fulbright scholar in USA in 2009 and she joined the Asia Teacher-Writers group in 2010. She has integrated creative writing into her teaching in various courses for the last few years. Email: leaphuong2003@yahoo.com

Acknowledgement

The text was originally published at

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/developing-expertise-through-experience

 

Earliest experiences of language learning and education which have affected my current views and practices.

School education: I passed the entrance exam to enter a prestigious secondary school in my town with flying colours. There I had a solid education foundation that many students would envy.

In English lessons from Grade 6 to 9, we learnt mainly about Reading Comprehension, Grammar and Vocabulary. My teachers were very good at providing us with a sound basis of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Also, I did a lot of grammar and vocabulary tests independently.

At the end of Grade 7, I took an English course for about 9 months at an American Culture Centre where I learnt Listening and Speaking skills. This centre had a fantastic Self-Access Centre with lots of great English books which varied from picture books, short stories, science books to dictionaries, with an Audio-Visual room with language videos and recordings. This was where I spent a lot of time browsing books and watching videos of all kinds, about animals, inventions, films, music, etc. I did not completely understand these materials, but I found the activities fascinating.

From this centre, I also bought a lot of graded readers from 1000 to 3000 words about famous people, abridged stories, both fiction and non-fiction to form my own library of English books. My home library was big enough for me to read until I was in Grade 10 when it was destroyed during the war. I was highly attracted to the contents of the books even when I did not understand them completely. During my reading, I often jotted down interesting sentences I found to learn by heart. These experiences made my exposure to English a joy, rather than a chore.

When I was in Grade 10, I became a co-founder and member of an English club which consisted of about 10 high-school students who loved English. We met once a week to practise speaking in English and we also took turns giving presentations about topics that we chose ourselves. To improve my Speaking skill in English, I often talked to myself in English, trying to express what I wanted on my daily 20- minute walk to school or back home.

I was also influenced by my teachers of Vietnamese Literature who inspired us with their lessons of literary works and activities in story-telling or debates. One of our teachers sometimes even shared his own poems with us. This made me love literature.

In this way, my school education not only provided me with a general knowledge of various subjects but also developed my analytical and critical-thinking skills.

College education: I entered college right after the war, which ended in 1975. The whole country experienced serious economic difficulties. I went to a prestigious College of Education and majored in English education. Like many of my classmates, I appreciated the opportunity to go to university and classes were actually a happy time for us because in class we temporarily forgot daily challenges, like the lack of food, clothes, electricity and water in our daily lives.

In those years, basic facilities like books, videos, photocopiers, cassette players were not available at my college. Very often, our teachers brought their own books and cassette players to class to teach us. I did not even have notebooks to write in and one day, when I passed by a photocopy shop, I saw many strips of unused A4 paper of about 7cm wide lying on the floor and I had a good idea.  I was very happy when they gave me this waste-paper for free because the quality of the paper was relatively good. I made my own notebooks by just binding the sheets together with a rubber band.

Our college lecturers often lent us their books to be photocopied at shops and these copies were of the worst quality paper that I have ever known. It was yellowish paper dotted with sand and straw and the words were practically illegible in the poor light of rainy days. However, it was my lecturers’ dedication and my friends’ enthusiasm that compensated for the lack of facilities in my studies during those years. I still remember in our second and third years at university, whenever there was a power- cut at the college, our lecturer of Listening skills sometimes had to take us to his home to teach. We then had Listening lessons from his family’s cassette recorder. Such classes were a big treat to us because we were able to learn in an informal setting, on the floor of our teacher’s tiny living room.

I enjoyed college classes, particularly dramatization tasks and musical and drama performances in English in the English Department. These events left a strong impression on me.

My college education likewise provided me with favourable learning environments where I had dedicated and competent lecturers in addition to supportive and motivated classmates. All this helped me tremendously in becoming a passionate and responsible learner who loved the English language - its music and beauty. Four years at college passed happily. Learning was always a pleasure for me because I loved the English language and its cultures, and I had great teachers and classmates.

Overseas Education: After working for 15 years, I won a scholarship for a one-year Post-Graduate diploma in TESOL at an Australian University. After that, I had several trips overseas to do further training in various countries, including UK (British Life and Literature), Australia (M.A. in Applied Linguistics) and USA (as a Fulbright research scholar). I also did my Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) at an Australian university. These opportunities marked a great development in my professional awareness. The experiences I gained from these opportunities have exerted a huge influence on my teaching, enabling me to become an independent researcher, to apply what I had learnt to my teaching and to share my experiences in national and international conferences and journals.

 

Influences arising from places/institutions in which I have lived and worked

Hometown: I was born and grew up in a town which was a former capital of my country. It was renowned not only for its beauty but also for the strong appreciation for education. It was common for parents to make sacrifices to give their children a good schooling, and my family was no exception.

Because of the war and its aftermath, sending me to school was a big burden for big families like mine. My father, a shoe-maker, and my mother, a small shop owner, had to work from dawn to dusk to raise nine children. Therefore, together with other siblings, I shared the housework and helped my mother with her shop since I was still a teenager. I also worked as a tutor during school and college years.

Teachers’ College: My official teaching post was in a Teachers’ College in a seaside city 650 kilometres from my hometown. This was where I worked for over 30 years as a TESOL teacher and teacher educator.

During those years, it was hard to find a desirable teaching post. University graduates were often sent to remote mountainous areas hundreds of kilometres from home. Therefore, with some classmates, I ventured to look for work myself in this town because we learnt that it was beautiful with a nice climate. Another major reason was that it had various means of transportation for me to travel home twice a year.

I was happy to be accepted into a Teachers’ College, which was in the town centre by the beach. Like many other colleagues, I lived upstairs in the college dormitory while our students lived downstairs. This made us teachers who lived there dedicate nearly all of our time to English teaching and learning.

Our students had to complete a three-year course to become secondary school teachers. Many years later, we cooperated with other universities to train students of English for high schools and the hospitality industry and upgraded their qualification to degree level. This required us, teacher-educators of English to improve our knowledge and skills to meet the new requirements of our society.

Even though the college was small (about 200 to 400 students of English) and had very basic facilities, with no English books in the college library, the management boards at college and department levels believed in the competence and dedication of the English staff so we had a fair amount of freedom in our work to choose suitable textbooks, ways of teaching and forms of assessment. This gave me favourable conditions to frequently integrate new things into my teaching and improve it.

During my first ten years at the college, I taught language skills for students but later I taught Communicative Language Teaching Methodology, American/British Life, American/British Literature and Intercultural Communication. In a small college, we had to be a teacher of many things in such a small college, so even though I was not an expert in any specific fields, I had the chance to learn and teach a range of various subjects.

Apart from teaching at the college, I also taught English to adult learners in private English Language centres and worked as a translator/interpreter for many organisations, including UNICEF, UNDP, Medecins Sans Frontieres, etc. for many years.

Project work: For about eight years, I also worked for Australian projects, team- teaching with Australian counterparts to prepare local students for Australian universities and to train local teacher educators in Communicative Language Teaching. These projects not only improved my experience in working with native- speaker counterparts but also gave me to access TESOL materials, which were a valuable resource for English teachers in those days. These experiences also equipped me to work as a trainer for similar national and regional workshops on various occasions.

Over the years, I have played various roles (learner, teacher, teacher-educator, assessor, researcher, presenter, thesis-supervisor and journal-reviewer) and these experiences have all helped to shape my professional life.

 

Key people who have left an enduring mark on my life, beliefs and practices.

My high school teachers, university lecturers, colleagues and students have all been important influences on my professional path.

School teachers: My Grade 4 teacher was the first to inspire me to become a teacher. She was so caring and gentle to her pupils that I really idolised her. One day, she asked me to help her carry a pile of her pupils’ copy books to her home and we had a friendly conversation on the way. She gave me some encouragements in my studies and that incident made me like her even more. From then on, I truly wanted to become a teacher like her. My choice of this profession started just like that.

In high school, my teachers were all highly devoted and competent. They gave me a solid, comprehensive high-school education. They also impressed me by their care and devotion to teaching and this consolidated my passion for becoming a teacher.

University lecturers: Most of my lecturers were highly experienced and some had trained in English-speaking countries. They had successfully produced many generations of English teachers for my country. Like my classmates, I enjoyed their classes. For example, the Translation lessons were full of laughter because our lecturer, who possessed a very good sense of humour, often made witty remarks and made us pay close attention to the ways language was used. Our teacher of Listening and Speaking skills attracted us with popular folk-songs and stories of U.S. culture, in addition to dramatization tasks in our Conversation classes. Our teacher of Writing skills gave us a fair amount of freedom in his classes and encouraged us to do peer-editing.

We had a very friendly relationship with our lecturers and felt comfortable with them both in and outside classrooms. These teachers loved teaching and truly cared for us so we always tried to study hard to make them happy.

The subject that made a strong impression on me was Teaching Methodology. At that time the war in our country was only just over and life was extremely hard. Our college did not have a library of English books so our lecturer of Teaching Methodology lent us a book called Language Teaching: A Scientific Approach by Robert Lado (1964). Each group in our class was allowed to keep the book for one week to copy one chapter before we shared these chapters among ourselves. Our course lasted for about 4 months with a weekly class of 150 minutes. During these lessons, our lecturer talked about an issue in language teaching and we noted down key ideas. By the end of the course, I had managed to copy just a few chapters before we had to participate in our three-week practicum.  During this practicum, each student teacher had to give a lesson of 50 minutes. Actually, I do not remember what and how I taught this lesson, but I still remember that when I looked at my wristwatch to check the time sometime before the lesson ended, I was so nervous that I could not see the hands on the watch screen!

It is true that before I became a teacher of English, I did not learn from books. My methods of teaching were formed and shaped mainly from the people I met in my studies and work. Certainly, my school teachers’ and university lecturers played an essential role in my teaching career.

Australian trainers/lecturers: In my early years as a teacher, I participated in various workshops on language teaching methodology organised by Overseas Service Bureau (an Australian organisation), and later became one of the trainers myself. These workshops provided me with practical skills and techniques in how to teach English more effectively.

During my post-graduate education, it was the Australian lecturers who inspired, motivated and guided me towards my work as a researcher. They taught me not only the theoretical foundations, but also gave me constant support and practical advice in my research work, guiding me towards my independence. Besides, my Ed. D. supervisor was an excellent mentor in providing me with valuable professional advice in my research projects.

Local colleagues: I became more aware of teaching skills when I observed my colleagues’ lessons in the college where I worked. These colleagues – about 10 of them in their 20s – were all graduates from our National College of Teacher Education. From these people, I learnt practical and useful lessons in language teaching.

I spent every day of my first six months at the college observing their classes and I was impressed with the teaching of two teachers in particular. One was a teacher of Translation and Writing, who was a gifted teacher with not only a broad knowledge of different fields but also an exceptional sense of humour. Every lesson he taught was integrated with interesting stories that he told in a humorous voice which generated a lot of laughter in his class. The other one taught Reading Comprehension and mesmerised his students with his knowledge of literature. Their classes were highly lively and relaxing, with plenty of student participation. They showed me how to establish a strong bond between teacher and students.

What I also learnt from these teachers was the close relationship with the students not only in class but also in life, where the teacher acted as a guide for academic issues but also as a friend in everyday life.

At that time, in my college, there was no fixed curriculum that teachers were obliged to follow so teachers were responsible for what they taught, with only some general guidelines for them to follow. This gave the teachers enough freedom to find suitable ways and materials to teach their students. I was also accustomed to using my own way of teaching which was a combination of what I learnt from people and my education. In a way, my colleagues were also my trainers - always very willing to answer my questions regarding teaching.

Foreign colleagues: I also had opportunities to team-teach with native-speaker trainers in various projects in my country. From them, I learnt about the Western working styles and ways of thinking.  When I was studying overseas, I also had innumerable class observations of different disciplines at various school levels, language centres and university environments. These sessions helped broaden my experience about how to teach creatively and effectively.

In addition, conferences have always been valuable events for me to exchange my knowledge about teaching with my international colleagues. Over the years, I have made full use of these opportunities to accumulate innovative ideas and practices from different countries to update my teaching.

My participation in the Asian Teacher-Writer Creative Writing Group with many other Asian teachers of English had a profound influence on my teaching. Thanks to this group, I learnt how to write poems and how to develop the learners’ creative writing skills. As a result, I have been able to have poems published and to show my students’ poems and stories in various international conferences.

Students: It is impossible to not to mention the roles that my students have played in my professional development because it is their learning difficulties and successes that have challenged and motivated me to improve my teaching.

I have been lucky in having had many students who loved learning English. As students, they have been willing to try new things that I ask them to do. For example, they were ready to spend many evenings rehearsing a performance for a dramatization or to write poems as part of their work. They also went out of their way to write scripts for a dramatization and to make their own props for their performance for a Literature course. They seemed to willingly accept the challenges in their learning. It is because of these hard-working students that I continued to seek out effective methods and introduce them in my teaching.

In my career, all these people have accompanied me and helped to make me develop as a professional in the field.

 

Key ideas I have encountered which have helped form my beliefs and practices.

As an English learner and a professional, I have picked up numerous principles, approaches, techniques and lessons from various experts and materials. The approach that I find most effective is the Eclectic Approach. 

‘It is a method of language education that combines various approaches and methodologies to teach language depending on the aims of the lesson and the abilities of the learners.’   Wikipedia.

Furthermore, I find the following principles in language teaching by Michael Lewis and Jimmie Hill (1985) particularly useful and they have significantly influenced my teaching.

• Learning is more important than teaching.
• Teach the students, not the book.
• Involve students in the learning process.
• Don’t tell students what they can tell you.
• Students need practice, not you.
• Vary what you do, and how you do it.
• Students need to learn how to learn.
• Useful and fun is better than either alone.

 

Critical incidents in life and work which have given me new insights.

First workshop in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT): My first participation in a CLT workshop organised by native-speaker trainers took place 10 years after I started my teaching career at a small college. At that time, very few teachers in my country had the opportunity to access modern ways of English teaching so this was a unique chance for me. There, I first learnt about how to conduct pre-while-post stages in a language lesson, how to use songs as listening texts or how to conduct top-down and bottom-up approaches in teaching reading. This workshop marked a great change in my practical teaching techniques and my choice of teaching materials.

Class observation: During my years overseas, I had more chances to observe numerous classes at various language centres and schools where teachers were highly creative in their teaching. My most interesting and useful class observations were in a famous high-school in Melbourne, Australia where I saw sessions on book reports in Grade 8, where students illustrated the books they read with dramatization and designed their own booklets with the story summaries. In this school, I also observed Literature lessons where students watched excerpts from films and shared their analysis. From this, I understood further the significance of promoting students’ critical thinking skills and creativity.

Shakespeare’s plays: I attended a one-week workshop on teaching Shakespeare plays given by an American lecturer for university lecturers in my country. In this course, participants were introduced to simplified forms of Shakespeare’s plays which we learnt to dramatize and justify our attitudes and actions to the audience. This showed me a new way of introducing Shakespeare’s plays, completely different from what I had learnt in traditional university lessons on Shakespeare.

A further chance to learn more about Shakespeare works occurred during a summer course in Oxford. The organisers invited a local theatre group to come and perform an excerpt of Hamlet to the course participants. After that, these performers answered our questions about their roles in the play. This experience helped me understand more about the characters and inspired me to watch other Shakespeare plays performed by various theatre groups in Oxford. These experiences triggered new ideas about how literature can be introduced into classrooms with different activities, like story-telling, dramatization, story and poem writing, which can motivate learners and tap into their creativity in learning literature.

Doing research: My research skills started informally by observing numerous lessons of various disciplines in different educational contexts. However, I formally learnt research skills from my MA and Ed.D.thesis supervisors.  

My first attempt at doing research actually began with a contrastive study of fillers like ‘well, uhm, er, etc.’ between native speakers and non-native speakers. My supervisor asked me to transcribe several conversation recordings that I had collected during a week. I worked very hard to transcribe these and proudly showed her several pages of my work. It took her only 30 seconds to glance at these pages before she said, ‘This is meaningless.’ I was shocked. I learnt later that I had to note the raising and lowering tones of these words, as well as the pauses before and after them. I also learnt that I had to pay attention to the context, the participants’ relationships, and the aims of the conversation, etc., to interpret the meanings and the functions of those fillers. That was a memorable lesson to me in doing linguistic research.

I learned a lot more about conducting research and writing research reports from my Ed.D. supervisor with his frequent questions of How and Why. He also taught me to look closely and critically at what I did as a teacher and action researcher. This helped me to ask the right questions and find ways to deal with them appropriately.

Asian Teacher-Writers Creative Writing group: In 2010, I joined a group of teachers from various countries, mainly in Asia, headed by Alan Maley. The aim of this group was to assist ESL teachers in Asia to write creatively and to promote learners’ abilities to write creatively in English. Participation in this group actually marked a radical turning point in my teaching and research career when I began to focus increasingly on creativity in teaching and learning.  

 

Themes emerging from my chapter

My current teaching has undeniably been developed and influenced by various factors and people over the years. This impact comes from a combination of the environments I have lived, learnt and worked in, as well as the people I have met and worked with. They all have played their roles in shaping my teaching.

I believe that no single training course can provide all the skills and knowledge that a teacher needs. Professional development should be a long process of being exposed to, accumulating and selecting the most appropriate techniques for one’s own teaching. During this time, it is the teachers who should regularly update their knowledge and skills by observing, reading and selecting and trying out what they learn in the classrooms. This process develops with time.

Regarding teacher education, it might be a good idea for teacher training courses to focus more on trainees’ understanding or/and practice of the following themes.

 

In language teaching and learning

• Learners’ passion and motivation is a key factor for their successful learning.
• Learners’ formal and informal exposure to language should be strongly encouraged.
• Learners need to be trained in how-to-learn skills.
• An eclectic approach can accommodate diverse types of learners, learning styles, and learning environments.
• Teaching is both a science and an art.
• Successful teaching is a lifelong process which should start from learning to teaching, researching, improving, sharing and further learning.

 

In teacher training and development

• Each teacher needs to learn to shape their own way of teaching from various sources (materials, teachers and students, etc.).
• Informal and formal reflection on one’s own and others’ teaching is highly recommended.
• Adaptation and flexibility is essential to make methods of teaching, syllabuses and materials appropriate to the learners.
• Teachers need proper training on how to do action research on their teaching.

 

 

A brief statement of my beliefs/values about language and about learning languages

•  Language and culture cannot be separated.

• Knowing another language can change a person’s viewpoints and lifestyles.
• Learning a language can be done both formally and informally.
• The more fun learners have in learning, the more success they have as learners.
• Successful learning requires various thinking skills, such as those elaborated first by Bloom in 1956 and subsequently revised in 2001. (Krathwohl, 2010).
• Skills in learning how-to-learn play a critical role in learning languages.

 

References

Krathwohl, D.R. (2010)  A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice. 41/4: 212-218.

https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2.  Accessed Oct 20, 2018

Lado, R. (1964) Language teaching: A scientific approach. McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Lewis, M. and J. Hill. (1985) Practical techniques in language teaching. London: Language Teaching Publications.

 

Suggested Further Reading

Cross, D. (1995) A practical handbook of language teaching. New York: Prentice Hall / Phoenix ELT.

Hedge, T. (2000) Teaching and learning in the language classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Scrivener, J. (1994) Learning teaching: A guidebook for English language teachers. Oxford: Heinemann.

Ur, P. (1996) A course in language teaching: Practice and theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Coming soon! Please check the Pilgrims in Teacher Training courses in 2027 at Pilgrims website.