Silvana Domaz Portfolio
Since I was a little girl in Brazil, I had an interest in languages. I had the opportunity to take classes in Italian, English, and French. When I moved to the United States and became a mother, I wanted my children to learn my native language. It was important for me that my kids knew about their heritage language and culture.
Thus, while I worked during the week as a software engineer, I held Portuguese classes on the weekends for my kids and my friends’ kids. Teaching language to kids was very rewarding and challenging because kids learn through visual cues and interaction, not grammar or syntactic structures.
Teaching children opened new opportunities for me to teach Portuguese to professionals. It was a fantastic experience to be able to teach the language, customs, and culture of my home country. In 2011, I became a Portuguese instructor for one of the most prestigious international business schools in the world - Thunderbird School of Global Management. I teach students from different nationalities, backgrounds and cultures, at different language levels. It gives me motivation to continue to search for new teaching methods and to understand the difficulties of second language acquisition for adults.
When students participate and feel part of the process through hands-on activities, I am not only encouraging learning but also I am making it fun. Learning a foreign language is about becoming familiar with a different culture and being able to communicate with people of different backgrounds. As teachers, we have the ability to integrate real life experiences with what the students are learning. For example, at the beginning of a class I always chat with them about their day/week implicitly using the material covered on the last lesson. This way, they can relate what they are learning with examples from their own life. Another way to develop student autonomy and independence is through Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). TBLT puts tasks at the core of language teaching. Through authentic tasks, students connect what they know to what they are learning. This way they retain language knowledge and may use it in their everyday lives, outside of the classroom, which means that they become life-long learners of the language and culture. I also invite them to share their concerns with me and ask for help and ask often, as much as they need. Another way in which I empower student participation is by providing positive feedback whenever I can. It is so important for students to feel they are making progress and their participation is valued.
Finally, I believe the students’ language needs are my teaching priorities. As such, I am their facilitator, and hopefully motivator in obtaining their goals. Teachers must assess the materials from the students’ perspective and understand how such a curriculum will influence student learning, not only cognitively but also affectively. My goal as a teacher is always to look for new things to implement, new things that can motivate and make my students learn in a different and better way. For that to happen, I have to listen to them, learn from them so I can better fulfill their needs.
My greatest reward as a language teacher is to see my students being able to communicate and interact with natives, exploring the culture and discovering new insights and lifelong experiences.
There are several overarching goals that I have for my classroom, all of which are based on my beliefs about how students learn. First, I believe that students learn best when they feel motivated. I believe motivation is a central part of teaching. Students need to be motivated to learn, to come to class. As a student, the classes that interested me the most were the classes where the teacher had new and different approaches to teach the material. Teachers who, I felt, loved to teach, loved to be in the classroom and engage the students’ minds. As a teacher, I tried to express that same feeling to my students, the feeling that I am there because I love what I do. As a result, I always try to create the kind of classroom where students are excited to come to, where they feel welcome and ready to learn. I know that students have a variety of learning styles; I try to accommodate their differences by using a variety of materials and techniques such as games, role-play, the Internet, and music.
Second, I believe that students will retain more of what they learn when they are responsible for their own learning and develop independence, autonomy and responsibility. This way, through their own experience, they discover their own learning styles and successful learning strategies. For that to happen, I believe a student-centered approach, active learning and real life examples are essential.
What I believe