Teaching EFL with Your Fingernails

Greetings, everyone
I will start a series of posts on one aspect of my professional career I rarely post about: Teaching EFL/ESL (English as a Foreign Language/English as a Second Language).

_{Classroom at Illinois State University}
Even though it can be argued that in order for any language to be learned you only need one avid learner, didactic resources play an important role in the teaching of the four basic skills any language course involves, namely: listening, speaking, reading, and writing (most likely developed in that order).

One of the reasons I quit my teaching possition at the Universidad de Oriente was because, as the Spanish expression goes, we were teaching with our fingernails. The idiomatic expression (a fascinating area I hope to post more about) stands for an activity that is performed under very difficult circumstances and with limited resources.Trabajar con las uñas (teaching with our fingernails) means to work without the minimum required tools. As any artisan would attest, this does not mean you cannot have the job done, but chances are the result will not be as good as desired or expected.

Over the decades, theoreticians and pedagogues have joined forces to put together a series of principles under which effective and efficient teaching-learning experiences can be carried out.
All these principles are condensed in textbooks that suggest certain approaches, methods, and techniques and which can be used and adapted by skillful teachers to meet the needs of their particular students and make the best of whatever resources are available.

_{Sample of some of the textbooks I used over the years.}

The textbook, along with their accompanying materials (audios, videos, apps) find their best realization in a conducive environment, which in the past was predominantly a classroom, but that now can take different forms or formats. Learning to speak a language requires a lot of practice and interaction with fellow learners or with native speakers. The time it takes an average learner to acquire enough of the target language to satisfy their needs may depend on this exposure.

_{Presentation of a textbook at a symposium in UNET (Universidad Nacional Experimental del Táchira)}

Modern teaching tools include online courses and smartphone apps that have infused TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) with a lot of vitality and versatility. Even though the role of the textbook, the classroom, and the teacher seem to be minimized or even totally cancelled in some cases, human interaction and the modeling and guidance of human instructors are still a key aspect of the learning process.

One teaching tool may substitute another or deem it useless, but usually, when it comes to language learning, all learning materials can complement each other and because people have different learning styles (multiple intelligences?), there is not one single right way to teach and/or learn.

One thing is true, though. Learning a language, like learning any other skill, requires hard work, dispossition, (human and material) resources, interaction, and a favorable environment. The efficiency of the process and the quality of the result will repend on the combination of these factors. Teaching and learning con las uñas should not be an option.

_{Classroom at Universidad De Oriente}

written by @hlezama

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