Personal Skills for Language Development, Essay Example

The statement that a teacher should possess a number of skills to be effective in the classroom practice is obvious.

Though educational researches provide various interpretation of teaching mastery, basic teaching skills, according to Kyriacou (2001), come to planning and preparation, lesson management, lesson presentation, discipline, assessing the progress, reflection and evaluation (p.8). These skills are widely acknowledged and broad, because they cover different subjects and are applicable in spite of the teaching methods.

As a rule, general skills correlate with core principles of education and comprise multiple items. Requirements for successful teaching include extensive subject knowledge, efficient lesson planning, succession of previous and present lesson, good management of time, a variety of learning activities, monitoring of pupils’ progress and motivation, suitable materials, appropriate learning pace.

Besides these common skills, a teacher should represent some specific abilities to stimulate language learning. They are determined by peculiarities of the subject and competencies of speaking, reading, writing, and listening.

Being the first model of imitation, a teacher should use clear, natural, grammatically correct language, not extremely complicated or simplified; have perfect articulation. These points concern all teachers, and chiefly foreign language tutors.

Communication is among the principal purposes of language development; therefore, a teacher should be proficient in relating   classroom and real-world experience, providing opportunities for authentic conversation, and using group methods in the classroom. Teacher’s mastery in utilizing questioning as a technique on different stages of a lesson, distinguishing lack of language knowledge from slips, analyzing feedback on the levels of content and language is also significant for results.

References

Kyriacou, Ch. (2001). Essential teaching skills. Cheltenham, UK: Nelson Thornes Ltd.