CHEN Qian

Yunnan Normal University Experimental Middle School,Kunming,650000,China

[Keywords] effective;multidimensional process;educational function

English is the language of international trade,tourism,education,and diplomacy.Similarly,it has been developed as an international lingua franca.It is being a must to learn and speak English language to be one of the members of this globalized world.Due to the wide spread and use of English language throughout the globe,teaching and learning English language has got really surprising importance.This has raised a number of questions related to English language teaching.Teachers play an important role in English language teaching.Also,good teachers are responsible for effective English language teaching which is asked all the time in English education.In order to make learners achieve the goal of learning English language,the learners should be taught English language effectively.No doubt,effective English language teaching makes effective learning.On the other side,investigating good qualities of language teachers is beneficial to teachers and students as well as researchers.For teachers,they can check the appropriateness of theirs and their colleagues’beliefs regarding foreign language teaching and learning.In addition,teachers can understand what their students expect from them and develop their pedagogical techniques through reflection on teaching,which will in turn enhance the complex process of teaching and learning.For students,they can understand their teachers’beliefs and change their erroneous beliefs about foreign language teaching and learning.All in all,effective teaching methods and good qualities of language teachers are the two parts in the essay.

Defining effective teaching is difficult since it is a complex and multidimensional process that means different things to different people (Bell,2005).Though it’s difficult to define,we can simply define‘effective’as being successful in producing a desired or intended outcome.Effective teaching involves the ability to provide instruction that helps the students to develop different knowledge,skills,and understandings intended by curriculum objectives and students learn irrespective of their characteristics(Acheson& Gall,2003).Effective English language teaching makes learners learn English language with ease.It means to say that learners become able to communicate in English language effectively within a short period of time.Thus,effective teaching must be talked.

In my point of view,effective teaching concludes numerous aspects which a good teacher should always master and apply in English teaching classroom,especially in my local junior high schools due to the fast-paced school life as well as limited class setting.In the first place,a good English teacher ought to design the class with student-centered,which offers students opportunities to talk more while teacher talk less.By placing students at the center of instruction,this approach shifts the focus from teaching to learning and promotes a learning environment more amenable to the metacognitive development necessary for students to become independent and critical thinkers (Bransford et al.,2000).According to (Trester,2019),observers surprisingly found that students play a role within the interactive learning environment just like it was a second nature for them only after a short period of time.It can be concluded that students are surely comfortable with this type of class,then they may be able to stay focused on the classroom activities as well.

Secondly,effective English-speaking classes need to be aimed at communication.Thus,guiding students to communicate with their teacher and peers in proper and possible English situations without too many exact answers rather than mechanic or meaningless oral practice is an option to facilitate students’communicative competence,especially for most of the students who are weak in English speaking in my school.

Thirdly,in grammar syllabus,direct method should be adopted for the reason that students discover the grammatical rules from exposure to the language,that is to say,grammar is taught inductively.In the process of experiential learning(learning-and-doing)the students feel more important less passive,and do not get bored so easily during the lesson.Therefore,the inductive technique can render great service to teachers who have problems with keeping their students disciplined,concentrated and occupied,as it partly obviates these problems (Alzu'Bi,2015).A good teacher is capable of arranging different activities for students to recognize and summarize the rules by themselves instead of explaining grammatical rules ahead and compelling students to practice sentence patterns deliberately.Avoiding grammar translation is also one vital part of grammar teaching because in order to establish the meaning,a teacher would relate the grammatical forms to objects and pictures,which will lead to students’thinking limitations.

Besides,teenagers are easy to get bored by activities that last long,as a result,an experienced teacher should perceive and accept this characteristic,adjust activities and keep each of them fast-paced so as to keep students concentrated during the process of teaching.

In addition,teenagers are born to have a sense of competition,it’s suitable for a teacher to develop classroom rules based on competition which can mobilize their learning enthusiasm to perform well in the learning process.Competition among groups can be designed in various types,for instance,leading students to accomplish different tasks or just memorizing the words and expressions appeared in the video or pictures.

Furthermore,though stratified teaching brings difficulty to teaching management and practice,it still shows important and positive effect on students’individual learning and improvement.Shi et al.(2020)believed that stratified teaching focuses on improving students’overall quality and pays attention to each student’s individual development.As far as the students in my local junior high are concerned,their English levels differ a lot,which has been a great challenge for teachers to deal with.Therefore,employing stratified teaching method may be an appropriate way to solve this problem and meet requirements from students to make progress based on their own English competence in all levels.

Another factor of effective English teaching is to pay close attention to students’interests,which are related to them and may bring joy and satisfaction eventually,especially for middle school students.This is because adolescents have fairly passionate attachments to their interests such as movies,sports and stars,they are also eager to know more about their favorite stars’lives.As a consequence,providing students content related to their interests outside the textbook will stimulate their learning motivation together with offering a feeling of satisfaction.As long as they get deeply involved with the attractive content,they will be willing to express and share their own opinions freely.

Nowadays,teenagers live and learn in the digital age,which means classroom learning is not the only way for them to learn.Thus,a good teacher should encourage students to get information and learn English from a variety of sources associating with their own interests and life in a proper way,which means effective internet tools or applications could be adopted in order to not only absorb knowledge,but also broaden students’ horizons of the outside world.It can be concluded by using a drawer media as students' learning interest is higher than not using my drawer media (Al-Anwary,2021).For example,as for the students who have strong desire to improve spoken English,providing them with applications or software to practice oral English is necessary.In the meantime,teachers are supposed to make full use of different sorts of digital aids to collect useful information for the purpose of making classroom activities more diversified and teaching more productive.

Classroom instructions are the important tools for teachers to implement and accomplish teaching procedures throughout the whole class.Intelligibility as well as concision are considered to be the standards of efficient instructions to arouse students’ enthusiasm and the degree of involvement.Unambiguous instructions and explanations can lead students to achieve the tasks confidently and efficiently.This requires teachers to apply convenient and comprehensible language to describe the requirements of the task,guide students step by step using explicit instructions.Undoubtedly,native language should be used properly when necessary to avoid complex,tedious or ambiguous utterances.Besides,body language and mime are practical teaching aids for teachers to demonstrate better what they intend to explain.

It is impossible for people to make mistakes; teenager students are without exception the ones in the process of learning to speak English.A responsible teacher is always willing to help students correct their mistakes,however,a good teacher would offer help only when there is urgent need for the reason that the speech fluency and integrality are crucial when students are expressing their opinions.On the contrary,on the occasion that key structure needs to be mastered using target language,it will be a good choice for a teacher to correct mistakes directly but gently so that they can be capable of grasping the correct sentence patterns.Beyond that,implicit correction through classroom interaction with students is a more acceptable way to respect them and protect their sensitivity.Fostering students’ team spirit and guiding peers in groups help correct mistakes may be a proper way as well.As long as the atmosphere in the lesson is comfortable and supportive,students will be willing to accept the correction from their classmates.

Homework is reportedly a leading factor for improving academic performance for students who have the ability to work independently and for students who have adequate parental support to complete home learning assignments (Bailey,2002).As for homework design,two parts will be discussed which include oral practice and writing tasks.There is no doubt that language is used for communication,as a consequence,oral homework is necessary for students,particularly for junior high students whose English competence needs to be improved fairly a lot by contrast with primary school students.Although repetitive oral practice and imitation are essential for students’English fluency,personalized oral homework will be a solution to simplex and mechanical practice.Inspiring creativity and encouraging innovation to create the situations they are familiar with as well as keen on would be a more effective and acceptable way for junior high students.For instance,offering them opportunities to either create the situations or make themselves in the real situations that are similar to classroom activities may cultivate their thinking and strain capacity and self-study ability.With regard to written homework,demanding students to copy words and expressions for several times is common in junior high in my local city,which aims to enable students to memorize the correct spelling of them.This could be helpful to the students who are memorizing deliberately whereas it would be meaningless for the ones who just intend to finish the homework or memorize mechanically.From my perspective,designing proper tasks that consists of diverse games such as crossword puzzles or matching parts of words and expressions in syllabic divisions may seem easier and more attractive for teenage students.Apart from that,applications and online games with memorizing function always set goals for students to achieve,which could be an option for teachers as well.

The other side of constituting a good English teacher is about good qualities that are also crucial for English teaching.As we all know,teachers do not just teach students knowledge or skills,but teach them in other ways.The first and foremost quality should be the correct values towards the world and life,especially the moral values.Teachers are considered as a transmitter of moral values,that is to say,teachers’ behavior and manners have a big influence on students’ development.In accordance with a famous Chinese saying from a highly well-known and respectable ancient Chinese ideologist and philosopher Zhuang Zi,teachers should teach students by personal example as well as by verbal instruction,a good teacher requires good behavior and manners which can set a positive model for students to learn from.Secondly,it’s clear that good English teachers are professional and knowledgeable in English,including good English competence in listening,speaking,reading and writing.Apart from language competence,attitude from teachers to students need to be always supportive and positive,which means good English teachers consistently encourage students to achieve their goals and learn better in many ways.Teachers’encouragement will be able to help students build confidence and stimulate learning motivation of English learning.In addition,a good English teacher keeps cultivating students thinking competence in mind all the time.Students will be capable of learning English by themselves along with thinking independently and critically in case that teachers always make every effort to give them chances to think and express their points of view voluntarily.Moreover,a good teacher for students is a tutor as well as a friend who can listen to them and understand them.Teenagers may have some problems with authority and are eager to be understood by teachers,a good teacher will accept their drawbacks and attempt to support them with putting themselves in students’shoes,which can make them feel they are not treated as little kids then can open their mind to communicate with and understand teachers in theirs.Last but not least,as Harmer (2015) noted,successful teachers of teenagers try their best to treat students equally.Teenagers develop a sense of fairness and what is right or wrong,good teachers maintain the same criterion invariably in the face of the same behavior or situations of different students.

In conclusion,good English teachers accept the responsibility for effective English teaching as well as educational function.On the other hand,good qualities of language teachers are beneficial to teachers and students.It follows from the above that effective teaching methods and good qualities are the two vital parts for good and successful English language teachers.Being a good English teacher is considerably not easy on the basis of the standards above,however,it still deserves to achieve by reason that students will benefit from a good teacher to a large extent,even for their whole life.They will have the ability to learn English further with great enthusiasm in order to master the global lingua franca better and also obtain the valuable learning capacity through impressive and advantageous learning process.