Summary

 

Learning at the Post Graduate Institute of English in the Open University of Sri-Lanka was a great opportunity for me. As an English teacher I gained a vast knowledge on teaching the four skills involved in teaching the target language, lesson plan preparation, classroom management and the distribution of activities among students in a classroom. As a novel teacher involved in teaching English, I was not aware of the techniques required to be followed in a classroom. Before I followed this course, I always believed in a teacher – centered learning environment. However, after following this course I learnt that the students have to be given priority in the classroom. Thus, I changed my style of teaching where more focus was given to the students with the close observation of the teacher. Encouraging a learner centered environment instead of following didactic principles brings better results in students’ acquiring the target language. This can be seen through the feedback given by the students at different intervals. (Link for student feedback: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ShNpf0amU5mQq755N5LX0Z0_aLboG2bw?usp=share_link)

Classroom management and providing the students with lessons that suits their culture was another important lesson that I learnt from this course. At the beginning as a novel teacher, I was not aware about making the lessons culture friendly to them. But, after being introduced to articles such as Language and culture in ELT by Claire Kramsch and Zhu Hua, I understood that the lesson materials should be prepared in a way to suit their culture.

My improvement as a teacher can be clearly seen from the feedback, I received for my classroom Supervision by my Supervisor Madam Mihiri. On the first day I did not receive good feedback because I did not encourage a student-centered learning environment. However, learning from the comments I received on the second day, I encouraged student involvement in activities with less teacher participation. For this I received positive feedback during the session. Thus, TESL has guided me a lot on how to become a good English practitioner.

Chathurima Jayasuriya