Experience Summary
My goal in studying linguistics is to become a professional ESL teacher. I am very much interested in language development at all levels, but especially in nonnative language development. I am a native speaker of English, but I am also fluent in Spanish as well. I love to teach and learn language. I am a professional student currently enrolled in a master of arts program for applied linguistics at the University of Montana. I will be teaching a course in English for Academic Purposes next year at the university. My specialty concerns the teaching of the four primary skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) to nonnative learners of the English language. Therefore I am qualified to teach English grammar, reading, and writing among other things. I have done a lot of tutoring in the past six years and look forward to helping as many people as I can.
Teaching Style
I am passionate about teaching and learning, and I love all people. I am an advocate of task-based learning, multiple intelligences, and the all-around inductive/constructivist approach to learning. I am a firm believer in the idea that all people have the same innate capacity to learn, but that this is manifested in different ways. This is particularly important because I beleive a good teacher should be able to discover the individual and specific ways that a student relates or acquires information best (visually, aurally, kinesthetically etc.) and can then take that information and develop appropriate excercises and teaching materials to help maximize that student's learning experience. Different teaching styles are needed for different learning styles, and I will accomodate as necessary.