Teaching Philosophy

As an educator, my main goal – aside from instructing students on the goals and methodologies of linguistics – is to equip students with transferable skills that will make them competitive in academia and industry. In practice, I facilitate this through employing active learning strategies into my teaching that encourage students to engage with course materials through hands on learning, develop strong communication skills, and to advance their writing through a read-to-write approach. 

Through a focus on experiential learning and research activities, my teaching promotes learner self-determination and encourages students to become self-motivated in their learning experience. In my Sociolinguistics tutorials, students are tasked with analysing transcripts or audio-recordings of speakers and code for tokens of language variation in their speech. In other activities, students will be asked to reflect on the linguistic phenomena we’re learning about in their own lives. Students are asked to comment and provide feedback on their peers’ findings, so they can learn from each other and reflect on their own positionality. To facilitate students in not only consuming, but actively and confidently producing knowledge, in a more advanced activity, students work collaboratively on a set of data to construct appropriate research questions and hypotheses which are shared with the class. 

To help students develop effective communication of their ideas, I integrate instruction on oral and written presentation skills in line with course content. For example, I make sure to provide ample opportunity for students to present their ideas orally to a range of audiences, including one-on-one, in small groups, or to the class. To develop writing skills, I frequently get students to analyse different aspects of academic writing, such as a citation patterns and genre differences, and get them to compare and contrast their usage in their own work. This task helps draw attention to aspects of written communication while also making students consider how they are employed in their own work so they can be more aware of areas of improvement. To support learner autonomy, I give students the opportunity to advocate for the terms of their education by encouraging them to communicate their needs through class “contracts.” In these “contracts” students are able develop a framework of expectations regarding behaviour, norms, rules and consequences so that we can work collaboratively to make the class as conducive as possible to their learning. In the past, students have made suggestions regarding respect of other’s pronouns and not spamming the chat during discussion (for online courses).

Furthermore, when teaching student writing, I emphasise the importance of utilising reading as a means of improving writing techniques, namely, through the transfer of active reading skills to writing. Reading can equip students with transferable writing skills: students learn organisational ability, control of diction, sense of audience, and syntactic fluency, while also learning discipline-specific conventions, genres, styles, and vocabularies. For example, as a Reading to Write teaching assistant, some of the activities I developed to meet this goal involved students reading excerpts from academic papers and deciding which section of the paper they belonged in. In several other activities, students learn about utilising a range of ‘metadiscursive moves’ in their writing; the ‘building blocks’ that help organise the logical structure of a paper (e.g., set phrases, transition markers, hedges and boosters, etc.).