I am a community tutor here on iTalki and I teach English and I recently opened my Filipino (Tagalog) class here on iTalki. Anyway, I remember ranting out here about one of my rude students a couple of months ago and it seems that I encountered another obnoxious student who annoyed me.
There's this American guy who booked a Filipino (Tagalog) with me and I accepted it. He messaged me days before our lesson, "I'm an intermediate speaker. I'd like a 100% Tagalog conversation, no corrections and no fixed topics if possible. Thank you :)"
At first, I was like, 'Haha ok... he seems pretty confident with his Filipino for him to say that he does not need corrections. It's my first time to encounter a student who doesn't want corrections. Ok, I'll just respect his wishes.. let's wait and see...'
And when I met him, I told him that we could use Taglish (Tagalog and English combined) since we're just gonna have an informal conversation, plus Taglish is what most Filipinos use in everyday life. In other words, I just showed him how city people talk to each other in the Philippines. When I would mention a few words in English, he would interrupt me right away and reply, 'TAGALOG! TAGALOG!' in a bossy manner. I tried explaining to him that the Tagalog language has limited vocabulary and not all words could be translated to Filipino such as 'Golf Course'. Go ahead and ask other Filipinos, and they would tell you the same thing.
This American student of mine was funny, he kept on insisting 'Golf Courso' even if I gently reminded him that there is no such thing and he kept on insisting his way as if he's the native speaker and he's correct. I remained polite and was Minnesota Nice to him for an hour but at the back of my mind, I really thought that he did not sound natural whenever he would speak in Tagalog. He told me that Taglish is a bad idea because he says that he would not be understood if he would not talk in pure Filipino. He was not only arrogant but also ignorant. He was cocky but did not know what he was talking about. The Philippines is a bilingual country and people here would COMPLETELY understand you and think it's 100% ok if you would talk in Taglish. Even foreigners who live here in my country and advanced speakers in Tagalog talk in Taglish
I have already been a student here on iTalki and I let the teacher set the tone for our lessons. If I have a specific request, I politely tell it to them or if I'm not sure about something, I humbly ask my teachers and do not pretend like I know all the answers. In my opinion, if a student doesn't want to be corrected then he or she is just paying to rant out or to talk to a pen pal and not to learn
A professional doctor can still be wrong sometimes. Even doctors with years of experience can make the wrong diagnosis. They can 'ignore' a patients symptoms and tell them it's all in their head. Not every doctor is top notch. Trust me, I know.
If a student wants to learn a certain way I'm not gonna deny them that right. I'm not gonna say, 'No. We're gonna learn the way these journals tell me to.'
There’s no cookie-cutter teaching technique, and the “learning styles” method is just the latest cookie-cutter trend. It’s valuable to listen to what a student wants, but to put that above everything else is absurd and tantamount to anti-intellectualism. If students knew what and how to study, there wouldn’t be a need for teachers. A good teacher knows how to teach, not just what to teach.
If listening to everything students want is the best approach, that must mean going to school to study pedagogies and methodologies and acquiring a degree in education must be totally worthless. So what’s the point in becoming a teacher if students know how to teach themselves?
The notion that students have unique learning styles and that they know best is a myth that has been debunked by many studies. Often the supposed “learning style” is the one the student is most comfortable with, i.e. the student claims that the aspect of learning they’re not comfortable with is not their learning style. All that does, ultimately, is prevent the student from working on their weaknesses.
Part 2
My professor, who was a native speaker from Hamburg, would hear a student make a mistake and carefully turn the conversation in such a way so that the person`s comments were restated by her, only without the mistake. She treated all of us just as if we were native speakers. It was this subtle guiding and direction , all the while keeping the conversation going, treating you as a real equal in the language, that taught us the correct way of stating something with no pressure on or attention drawn to the student making the mistake. It was very effective. If you paid attention, even if you were the one who made the mistake, you`d catch it, learn the correct way of saying something, and the flow of the discussion was never interrupted. There was never any anxiety created by this teaching style and, for those of us really paying attention, we learned error correction.
So, teaching is an art in many ways. It´s not a free-for-all. It´s not giving the student anything he or she wants, but at the same time motivating them in a low stress, no anxiety teaching environment that is structured by the teacher. Just because a person is a native speaker, does NOT mean a fortiori that that person can teach his or her native language. Why? Because the native speaker never learned their language in the first place, or not at least in the way one learning it does as a second language. Native speakers acquire their native language through a complex neurobiological process that even neuroscientists don`t fully understand. Learning one`s native language is a product of the person`s growth as a human being. The native speaker doesn`t study the grammar of his native language, or its vocabulary or its pronunciation. People learning the language as a foreign language have to learn it the way they would anything else in life. It´s a completely different process. And that`s where a skilled teacher comes in to help.
That's... interesting. "No corrections!" Really!
I can tell you that one of the reasons I take paid lessons (in Spanish) is simply because I know that a paid teacher will be willing to stop and correct me every single time I make a mistake. (My language companions have not been willing to do that.)
