“Omnia sponte fluant -- the literal meaning of this quote from the famous Moravian pedagogue Jan Amos Komenský is simply “may all things flow freely”.
But what Komenský’s demands of a teacher is far from simple. Instruction must adapt to student need and nature; and the instructor must unfold course content in an order of ascending difficulty, going from the known to the unknown and from the simple to the complex at a free-flowing but student-centered pace.
As a language teacher this careful pacing and ordering of material is what I try most to achieve and my way to achieving it is to draw on my understanding of the language learning process gleaned from a lifetime of language study.
In this respect, my work is geared not only toward increasing the student’s basic communicative competence in a language but also toward increasing the student’s basic understanding of both that language’s general design and the particular intricacies which that design contains.
Special support for dealing with such intricacies, whether of English spelling, of Italian passato remote tense, of French pronunciation, or of Old English and Latin paradigms, aims to increase learner confidence and provide a solid intellectual foundation for intensive mastery and extensive practice in any of the four basic language skills -- speaking, understanding, reading or writing.
But what Komenský’s demands of a teacher is far from simple. Instruction must adapt to student need and nature; and the instructor must unfold course content in an order of ascending difficulty, going from the known to the unknown and from the simple to the complex at a free-flowing but student-centered pace.
As a language teacher this careful pacing and ordering of material is what I try most to achieve and my way to achieving it is to draw on my understanding of the language learning process gleaned from a lifetime of language study.
In this respect, my work is geared not only toward increasing the student’s basic communicative competence in a language but also toward increasing the student’s basic understanding of both that language’s general design and the particular intricacies which that design contains.
Special support for dealing with such intricacies, whether of English spelling, of Italian passato remote tense, of French pronunciation, or of Old English and Latin paradigms, aims to increase learner confidence and provide a solid intellectual foundation for intensive mastery and extensive practice in any of the four basic language skills -- speaking, understanding, reading or writing.