THE AREAS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (ELT) THAT ARE OF PARTICULAR INTEREST TO ME
One of the areas of English language teaching that I find really fascinating is grammar, the bedrock of a language. When teaching grammatical concepts, I make the teaching fun and the concepts relatable for my learners, by using experiential, real-life examples and a communicative approach/method and I constantly let my learners know that having a good knowledge of grammar will enable them to send language on wondrous errands.
Creative writing is another area that deeply interests me and the interest was sparked in my primary school, when I did engage in drawings, using crude images to tell stories and many classmates and some teachers would laud my efforts. However, the turbulence that characterized the later part of my teenage years and beyond badly dented my confidence and self-worth and subdued my passion for drawing, but my fondness for writing was too stubborn to be repressed. Paradoxically, that turbulence, chiefly provoked by the environment of hate that fate pushed me to spend a good part of my life living and growing up in, later had a deeply edifying impact on my entire existence. I would constantly withdraw myself from the depressing environment to seek solace in reading and writing and these twin passions started making those painful experiences and memories recede in my mind. I drank copiously from the comforting waters of literature, as reading and writing became the escapist balm calming the storms raging in my life. In all my teaching career, I’ve been able to infect many of my students with my enthusiasm for writing. In fact, my literature lessons are hardly uninteresting, not only because I deeply enjoy and encourage relating storied events to lived experiences and realities around my learners and me but also because I constantly engage my learners in text reading, text analysis, and text creation (short stories, poetry, biographical and autobiographical texts, etc.), helping them develop their perceptual, interpretive & critical skills, as well as their writing skills.
Finally, I also find speech work (Phonetics) exciting. Many years ago, when reading extensively became a form of escapism for me, one of the life-changing things I did was to buy two dictionaries – The Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (OALD) and later the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CALD). Then, I embarked on an aggressive reading of the whole dictionary! Yes, I read the whole English dictionary – dictionaries, actually (OALD & CALD) – over a period of time. I would skip the words which meanings I already knew and would painstakingly write out so many unknown words, phrases, idioms, etc. and their meanings. It was laborious and back-breaking but I was enjoying the feeling of knowing more and more about a language that had always awed me - the major reason I decided to study English. Apart from learning the meanings of so many English words and phrases, I also learnt to transcribe tons of English words and I started transcribing anything and everything! That hugely boosted my speaking prowess and a lot of people, especially students and some colleagues, would ask if I had schooled abroad or if I attended some elitist schools in Nigeria. I did simply tell them (and still tell them) that I’m a product of public schools and of storm-induced transformations.
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