Ding Ying： Try to Teach With All My Heart

By Wang Ruoxi | Updated: Sep10, 2018

With her excellent performance , Ding Ying, from School of Foreign Languages and Literature of WUST, won the first prize in the Sixth Foreign Language Teaching Contest of Young Teachers in Hubei Province. [Photo/Fang Bin ]

To activate students with correct guidance

As a teacher teaching I ntegrated  Skills of  En g lish, P honetics, A udio-visual I nterpretation and other courses, Ding Ying has more than ten classes a week.  B efore every class, she always makes full preparations to secure teaching quality.

When asked about her biggest concern about students, Ding said, “ Only when my students really learn something and achieve some progress, will the course be a successful one. ”

When preparing lessons, Ding always  analyze s how much knowledge students have already commanded and takes the results into account . “ Though m ost students are willing to get involved in the class , some of them may not dare to speak out their mind  because of lack ing  self-confidence or solid knowledge foundation .”  Also, she added that t eachers  should bear the responsibility to reduce the anxiety  of their students so that  they could keep up the pace in the class through earnest  efforts .

Before class, students  are often asked  to “ take some tasks ”  beforehand — to gather relevant  information  about the class through online searching or referring  to books ,  then students would be confident enough  to speak out their mind.

During the  class,  in order to make sure that all students with different knowledge levels could improve themselves,  Ding adopts several discussion  methods in forms of  two-person discussion, group discussion and class discussion . “ A t the beginning , s ome students are  so  shy  that they are only willing to share their inner thoughts with the members of their small group . However, the situation changes when their confidence grows after several times of practices. ” Under the encouragement and guidance of Ding, almost all her students are confident enough to speak English in public.

To improve herself by acquiring extra-curricular knowledge

“ Though the updating rate of t eaching materials  is rapid, it cannot catch up with that of knowledge . Therefore, to acquire  extra-curricular knowledge  has become a must for all teachers, ” said Ding Ying.

Take the classes of Integrated Skills of English as an example,  when teaching the unit of “population aging”, Ding would collect  relevant information  before class,  and discuss ed  with her students  in class over topics like “ disadvantages  of an aging society” and “ impacts  of the population policy on the process of aging”. In I nterpreting class es , Ding Ying would utilize  the latest government work report as exercise material. Impressed by this new way of teaching, students all discussed with her in English  with abundant interest .

T o read all kinds of Chinese and English news and articles every day  has been the requirement of Ding for her students . In each class, students are invited to give oral presentations  accordingly as well .

To offer the best through diligent stu dying

How  can a teacher  apply effective teaching methods into  practice? Reading T ask-based Language T eaching and L earning  Approach  by Rod Ellis  enlightened  Ding Ying a lot .

She read the book over and over again, and came to conclusion  that “task s ”  usually lay emphasis on the expression of meaning, which can complement other teaching methods. Hence, she started  to apply task-based approach  in her own teaching .

By  scientific and advanced teaching methods  that students are willing to take, Ding Ying can do perfect job in teaching with accumulated experiences.

To encourage students to make progress as a mentor

“In my class, it is the assignments, tasks and task-based assignment s rather than the exercises in workbooks are the real homework, ”  said  Ding.

Once, s he asked  her  students to conduct  a survey  of  find ing  out how many of them belong to the  only child  group , and to ask the  elders about the ir opinions on aging population. All of these assignments were required to be presented in the form of English articles and discuss ed during  class  time .

At ordinary times, students  would send their recordings of homework and dialogue exercises to Ding Ying , on which the latter often  spen ds lots of  time , checking and correcting and sending back feedback s  of  their pronunciation and intonation.