I believe as teachers of English language we first get our understanding of the English teaching methods and techniques that would later affect our decisions about teaching our own students long before than official academic training begins. In fact, I, as a non-native speaker of English language, have spent at least twelve years learning it, which also means twelve years observing my teachers’ methods and strategies. Therefore, I would first like to describe my experience as a learner of English, then proceed with describing my personal teaching experience and conclude with a reflection on how these influences shaped my beliefs about language and language learning.
Traditionally, teacher in Russia is regarded as an authority figure, and learners tend to rely on them to a large extent, therefore approaches that Russian professors adopt are mostly
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Now, having no official teaching experience before, I was startled when it came time for me to design the lesson plan. My students knew literally nothing and my aims were manifold. Rather intuitively, I realized my lessons should be based on my students’ needs, so first I conducted introductory informal interviews about their goals and expectations and later while observing progress and dynamics in class, I would adjust some of the topics and activities to better suit my students’ needs. Clearly, my major goal was to improve their communicative competence, but I also kept in mind that both groups took my classes as an extracurricular activity, so I had to present these two hours in form of enjoyable intellectual stimulation, rather than a standard lesson, so it had to be structured in a way that would combine different types of activities while also engaging all four