“Encourage Me, and I Will Love the Language” part 1 (Motivation, Confidence & Love for the Language)

It is staggering how many people, teachers in particular, underestimate or simply do not wish to acknowledge the undeniable necessity and value of encouragement. This is a universal building block of motivation, confidence and love for the language. And it puzzles me when I encounter a teacher who isn’t familiar with these simple truths.

Here is an example; I was assigned to a teacher who was supposed to curate my master’s work and we just didn’t click as far as chemistry was concerned. I shared with her some of the pages of my thesis and I heard nothing but criticism. And it’s sad really that some teachers have this impeccable desire to label everything with their impatient judgements.

And it was a good thing I knew what I wanted, I was pretty confident about my ideas and the direction I was heading for having studied with one of the best teachers so far but for a young, open-minded soul, an inadvertent or deliberate encounter with such a “specimen of educational establishment would cast doubts and spray vulnerability on young fragile shoulders, for sure.

My point here is that it is vital for teachers to encourage students. After this criticism which was based on teacher’s illiteracy to grasp the individual nuances of how a student created, his vision of the work and aspirations, the student, quite rightly so, lost his interest to share his work because there was a stagnancy of unenthusiastic energy, in other words, a student started to write his work on his own, which was a sensible solution considering the circumstances (and defended it with honours by the way).

So people, we surround ourselves with, are one of the best sources of successful teaching & learning the language. When we look back on things in the past some of them are uplifting, others are challenging, and there are some moments sometimes we wish hadn’t gone the way they had gone.

But one of the secrets of absorbing the language under your skin and keeping it there is connecting the feeling of enthusiasm with methods that are used in the classroom.

English Via Storytelling 2023 Doggedly Extracted From The Adventurous Midst Of Turquoise Imagination Via Sergey Denisov.