by
Ika Kartika Utomo
Somebody once told me that being a teacher and being a model are not poles apart. Entering the classroom is just like walking on the catwalk. Every eye in the room fixes on you. Everyone pays attention on your moves, your attire, your expression, your gestures, and even your words. Therefore, everything you say in the classroom can be either a death sentence or a breath of life for the students.
When I was a student, one of my former English teachers used Grammar-Translation Method in his teaching. He focused on the grammatical parsing such as the form and inflection of words. Thus, if you did not understand grammatical rules and structures, you were doomed. Every time he said ‘tenses’, I got cold feet because the word itself gave ‘negative impression’ for students. It was such a nightmare for me. Later I realized that certain words from the teacher gave unusual reaction for students, which can be both positive and negative.
Now that I am an English teacher, I have some experience of using words which give ‘negative impression’ and words which give ‘positive impression’ for the students. For example, on one occasion I was teaching about ‘past events’ and I wanted to check students’ understanding by making sentences about past events. So I just gave an instruction to ‘make a sentence about what you did yesterday’. Some of the students did it well, but some other had difficulties because they had to ‘make’ a sentence. It seems that the term ‘make’ itself gave a pressure for some students. So, on the other occasion, I changed the instruction. I did not literally ask the students to ‘make’ sentences, but said ‘Let’s play a game’. I asked them to play a guessing game about what somebody did yesterday. Amazingly, they could make sentences about past events without difficulty.
Another experience I had in a conversation class. We all know that the students have to make a conversation as the assessment in the end of a lesson. The first time around, I simply asked the students to ‘please work in pairs and create a dialog’, and the result was just ‘standard’ good. They created acceptable dialogs, but they were plain. They were like the dialog you can find in a boring textbook, no improvisation, no gambits, and no hedges at all. The performances were also plain without intonation and expression, although they were parts of a real conversation. I tried to find the problem, so the second time around I changed my instruction. I said ‘please make a drama’. The result was amazing. They came up with fresh ideas, and put a lot of gambits and hedges with perfect intonation and expression in their conversation.
I notice that we, as teachers, should understand that our students have great potential in learning English. It is our duty to find the right button to push. They can do great things if we can find something to thick them. So pay attention to your choice of words because every word matters.
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