[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 8 | April 4, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

How we approach language learning, whether as a learner or a teacher, is crucially defined by our psychology; the way we view ourselves and our abilities, our motivation for engaging with or persisting in tasks, our beliefs about how the language should be learned and taught, our emotional experiences of the undertaking, and our relationships with others. It is important that we understand how our thoughts, motives and feelings can affect how we learn and teach. As such, the field of psychology represents a rich and important source of information for teachers to enhance their practice and their sensitivity to their own and their learners’ needs.

In my own work to date, I have focused largely on the psychology of language learners. As teachers, it is important that we reflect on how we understand our learners as individuals.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 8 | April 4, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

It remains an interesting irony that subject teachers have been exhorted, ever since the famous Bullock Report in 1975, to become ersatz-language teachers in the ‘Language across the curriculum’ movement, whilst language teachers have never been exhorted to understand the world of content.  They remain in the dark when it comes to subject teaching, and rarely observe teachers in ‘normal’ classrooms.  The closest they often get to that world is by practising ‘Soft CLIL’ (allegedly ‘language-led) but this is something of a misnomer.  Why would we want to make something ‘language-led’?  Why not make it ‘concept-led’?  Just use the language to help.  If subject teachers are being asked to understand language, why cannot language teachers be asked to understand (and use) content?  After all, there is a huge smorgasbord of the stuff out there, just waiting to be used.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 8 | April 4, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

As the ideas associated with growth mindset continue to spread, schools are envisioning and experimenting with new forms of assessment that highlight the growth process and the individual path of each learner. One example of this is the student-led conference, which is quickly replacing the outdated model of parents and teachers discussing a student while he or she is not present. In the student-led conference, learning takes center stage. Students prepare by reflecting on their academic and social growth, work habits, and behavior. Together with their teachers, they set goals that are personally meaningful and achievable.

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