Who teachers are in class: observation of a teacher’s role taking in an EFL class

The advancement of pedagogy in language instruction highlights the value of students’ participation in the class. As a result, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes are designed to include more language activities in each study session to maximize the student talking time (STT). This trend is obvious in my observation of an Egyptian EFL class video clip, where a female native instructor organized several activities in order to help her post-secondary students understand two key words in a reading. The emergence of these activities, inevitably, diversifies teachers’ roles in EFL classes as they turn from the ones who only “teach” to the ones who also “prompt” and “assess”. Some teachers, such as this instructor in the video, however, might find difficulties adapting to their new roles. After focusing specifically on the way she communicated with her students throughout the activities, I conclude that instructors’ ability to discern their roles as controllers, prompters and assessors and take corresponding attitudes and behaviors influence the successful language acquisition of students.

It is observed that three activities constitute the target study session. In the first activity, students were asked to gather their definition of “gene mapping” and “discrimination” within groups of three to four people and write down the best definition in a transparency. When this was finished, the teacher then asked students to think of the link between the two words and present it to the class. At last, the third group project focused on students’ ability to name all the words and expressions related to “gene mapping” and “discrimination” that came to their minds. Various teacher-student interactions took place during these in-class ac...

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...responsible assessor, students would have better understanding of where to improve their logic and refine their word choices

In conclusion, the observation of this Egypt language class presented evidence that the ability of playing different roles at different situations can influence students’ language learning. The teacher of the class successfully acted as a controller but disqualified as a prompter or an assessor, which led to the fact that although the class was organized and disciplined, students had limited desire to disclose their ideas, acquired little confidence, and kept their mistakes uncorrected. In order for the students to achieve further improvement in language acquisition, I suggest this teacher digest Harmer’s theory that “part of teacher personality is the ability to perform all these roles at different times” (25) and make changes accordingly.