Belinda Young-Davy has been teaching in the LTS Program since it began in 2004. She is also faculty in the American English Institute (AEI).

How are you connected to the LTS program?

I teach the Second Language Teaching Methods class (LT 435/535), and have also taught the Assessment class (LT 549). I really enjoy teaching methods because it gives students who are about to embark on a language teaching career a sense of the history of the field. It also introduces them to the complexity of language learning in a way they may not have thought of before.  The assessment class in also an eye opening experience. Most academic classes, including language classes, still rely heavily on traditional testing such as multiple choice, fill-in the blanks, etc. The assessment course illustrates how to think outside the box when assessing students, and come up with effective, interesting and even fun ways to assess students. The class is also an opportunity to get ideas about how to include students’ input in the assessment process.

What other classes do you teach?

I teach academic writing and oral discourse for the AEIS (Academic English for International Students), which is an English language support program for matriculated students. I find teaching writing very interesting because students are not just learning techniques. They are learning how to examine and explore other people’s ideas in a way that may give them insights into other cultures, their own culture, and themselves. In fact, it is not unusual to find that the shy, quiet student who sits in the back of the classroom and is cautious about sharing ideas publicly comes out of his/her shell — on paper, at least — by the end of the term.

What projects have you been involved in?

I have also been a student advisor for AEIS students. Being an advisor gave me a new perspective on international students, which is the students’ own perspective. As an advisor, I have gotten a look at the ‘bigger picture’, which includes how they are adjusting to a different culture, a new educational environment and teachers who have very different expectations of them than they have faced before. That information gives me more information I can use to make my students comfortable in my class, and across campus, so that they can succeed in their goals.

How do you balance your life as a teacher with other activities you care about?

That’s hard. Teaching takes a lot of planning, which means it take a lot of time outside the classroom. In the past I tended to let my teaching responsibilities dominate my “leisure” time such as looking for interesting articles/podcasts, trying to create activities that address different learning styles, and reworking things that didn’t work as well as I had hoped in the previous term. The result is that I found I was spending too much time at the computer on weekends. Now, I schedule “down time” for myself so that I don’t forget to have fun.

What do you think is most important for new language teachers to learn or experience?

Patience. Sometimes in our haste to give our students the skills they need we can overwhelm them by going too fast or trying to do in the first weeks of a class. We have so many ideas and activities we can’t wait to bring to the classroom. That means that our good intentions can result in overwhelming our students or failing to get a good idea of who they are as individuals, and listening to their voices. However, if we slow down and take a couple of weeks to get to know who our students are as individuals, we can be much more effective teachers. We might find out, for example, that some of the activities we had planned would be more suitable for a more out-going class, or that they need to be more challenging for a highly motivated group. So, I believe focusing first on who our students are and what they need makes us better language facilitators.

What advice do you have for graduate students coming into the MA program?