When I teach communicative English classes, there is one thing I have always tried to remind me of: ‘Are you sure you totally understood what your students were meaning to say?’ However, it was not in the first few years of my EFL teaching that I made it a strict rule to remember as a teacher. In those years of a novice EFL instructor in South Korea, I had felt satisfied myself correcting or paraphrasing my students’ less-than-perfect (in terms of grammar and word choices) English sentences in class on the basis of how I interpreted what they said. Most of the time, my students showed me a gesture of agreement or appreciation by nodding…or taking a moment of thinking before the nods. I was such a naïve teacher that took their docile responses as a wholehearted acceptance or having no other opinions.
picture source: https://www.tes.com/lessons/Jif-bYKcIYQ6PQ/studio-advanced-4-31-32-spirit-mask
Then one day, one of my colleagues who was a native English speaking instructor (teaching beginner’s and intermediate level classes of Critical Thinking English) said he was tired of correcting his students’ speech or writeups that had no logic at all. He went on to say that most of his students tended to become silent in the middle of expressing themselves and then wanted him to reword or finish their clueless sentences. He said his students would never care even if he got on their case about it or misled them. I was shocked listening to his complaints and series of pathetic bravado in class. But then again, he was NOT the only instructor there who got unnoticeably trapped in the world of illusion that made teachers see ‘silence or quick agreement of students’ in English language class as their lack of logic or critical thinking skills. I looked back on my own teachings, and there was another clueless instructor named Jean Lee who misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misled students. The students were full of ideas and great analytical skills that could outdo the instructors, but only lacked the proper amount of vocabulary to describe their thoughts and time to practice the challenge of arguing or debating issues in English. Contrary to many of the EFL instructors’ belief, what they wanted was not paraphrasing their words by teachers’ wild guesswork. They needed a good listener that hears them out while we, the instructors, were judging and labeling them way too fast as “illogic” without warrant.
I’m still thinking about what was going on in those Critical Thinking EFL classes. 'Were the teachers like me and my colleague (mentioned above) truly showing the students how to approach a problem and argue different ideas or attitudes?', 'Weren’t we always instilling our own parochial opinions into their minds?', 'Should that native English speaking instructor have learned more about the cultural differences shown in the attitudes of Korean students?' Could be. In hindsight, I came to realize it was the students that showed and taught a decent amount of patience and manners in the process of making a good English language class. Thanks to the awakening moment of conversing with my colleague, I was able to reflect on my own path of teaching English classes and no longer a stone-deaf teacher that enjoyed wild imaginations in class.
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