Times  TESOL

Sept. 12th, 2015

Sophie

The best Teacher In My Life

Throughout in my life, I have been lucky enough to have a very good teacher.

I met Marion when I moved to Germany with my husband to study abroad. She was a German teacher in the first German course that I attended. I was in the basic stage: I had German course just for two months before in Korea.  It was the very new  foreign language that I had never spoken.  Marion boosted my self-confidence, and I reached the Intermediate stage at the end of her course, which was about 6months, thanks to her outstanding teaching style.

Marion was a perfect enabler who I had never met before. Her teaching style

was very fresh to me.  She made all the member of class feel the main characters in the class and encouraged students to take part in the class activity without anxiety.  She never pressed us to do something, nor bossed us around.  She just made us feel comfortable and have plenty of self-confidence in our selves through her continuous encouraging and praise.  She inspired students to further efforts and we could present more actively and freely.  I think she applied Stephen Krashen's 'Affective Filter Hypothesis' successfully.

Marion was an effective teacher ; she was an all-round teacher - enthusiastic, empathy, authenticity, friendly, creative, showing respect etc.  She was always ready to listen to us and no utterance was ignored in Marion's class. Her authentic attitude made the class atomosphere be full of liveliness and faithfulness. She let us

pair up to discuss and present our work. We could enjoy to share our opinion and help each other sincerely.

Marion was a very modern teacher . She never lectured nor explained in an one-sided way. She always allowed us to have a chance to create our own idea and speak freely. She applied different teaching techniques such as discussion and teaching/mentoring. It helped us increase our retention rate to 80-90%. Besides she applied the intergrated-skill approach so that we could use all four skills in our class ; reading, listening, speaking and writing.  Due to her distinguished teaching style, we could make remarkable progress in German.

Marion , the best teacher in my life made our learning environment not only

comfortable with low anxiety and high self-esteem but also perfect CLT(communicative) environment. And her own teaching  method let us be the leader of the class successfully.  Nobody dropped out of the course, and all of members of the class reached to the next grade. Now I really wish I could be such a great teacher owning my own teaching style.