Teaching Philosophy My views about the relationship between learning and language owe a great deal to my initial exposure to Vygotskyan theory during the early stages of my teaching education. Vygotsky made a case to consider the relations between language and thought as differentiated entities that maintain a complex interaction possible through individuals’ participation in social life. According to this perspective (more recently evolved and known as socio-cultural theory), people's natural need to live and thrive in society moves them to develop mental processes that are supported by their engagement with physical and semiotic artifacts. Among the latter, culturally generated tools such as language allow individuals to make sense of the world and internalize these views as part of who they are (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2001). Therefore, acquiring and using a language is not a phenomenon that can happen in a vacuum. Language learning and use are necessarily part of a social process that serves a social function.
This holistic and complex view of the interaction of language, the human mind, and social actions initially made a profound impression on me. Through the years, the influence of socio-cultural theory on my second language teaching, has led me to develop a teaching practice that incorporates communication events that resemble those that students are likely to encounter in real life. With that purpose, I consider my role as one who facilitates and orchestrates scenarios to engage learners in problem-solving tasks and encourage them to communicate with others in the process. In the EAP classroom, this problem-solving approach may be accomplished by different means, but I particularly favor three broad strategies that are informed by socio-cultural theory: raising awareness about the linguistic practices of students’ discourse communities, engaging students in genre-relevant writing tasks in accordance with their writing needs, and encouraging peer’s assistance that may help learners move forward in the zone of proximal development. During my appointment at Vantage College (UBC), my contact with Systemic Functional Linguistics has reinforced my conviction regarding the pedagogical value of learners’ interactions as they struggle to make sense of new linguistic tools, especially after appropriate linguistic awareness has been raised by the instructor. These interactions, defined in the SFL Teaching-Learning Cycle model as joint constructions (Rose & Martin, 2012), are considered essential to develop learners’ understanding of linguistic practices in their discourse community (Gebhard, 2010). This view of language learning inspired in Halliday’s (1975) and Painter’s (1984) groundbreaking work, has encouraged me to continue exploring the pedagogical possibilities of joint constructions and other forms of collaborative work.
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