高中英语组：姬淑彦

As we can see from the new textbooks, each unit is designed in a theme-based mode. It encourages me to spend more time understanding my students’ interests and refreshes my roles as both a learner and a teacher. For me as a beginning teacher, the journey is quite challenging but interesting.

The new textbooks provide a couple of insights relating to students’ daily life, social-related topics, and even spiritual guidance. With a broad range of content, students will be free to find their personal interests and be motivated to start their language learning journey. Born in an era of information explosion, students are easily distracted. Therefore, I have to start by catching their eyes in the first class of each unit. Their preferences are definitely the original learning motivation, especially in the language class. With various themes of content on hand, they have more access to engage in their preferred class activities. Then, they often feel confident and free to express opinions, share experiences, and explore new fields. As a result, the activated interests stimulate the immersion in available resources and new content learning. Focusing on students’ learning interests is never a new approach to mention, however, I witness a firm bond between the students-oriented teaching method and the theme-based mode. Their better class engagement, as a powerful motivator, refreshes my teaching every single day.

However, this innovative teaching mode, requiring both language proficiency and content knowledge, is challenging for me without a doubt. Without sufficient knowledge in different areas, teachers are challenging to activate students’ background knowledge, provide instant scaffolding, and evaluate their learning outcomes. In an efficient learning system, each process is significant. For me, it is common that I have to do a lot of themes-based research before beginning a new unit. However, critically, doing regular research is a crucial opportunity to grow as a lifelong learner. The role switching also boots my reflections, which can be shared with students, for instance, challenges faced in the research process, effective approaches to understand new contents, and different methods applied in various tasks. Generally, my teaching-learning cycle inspires me to be more competent in both language skills and knowledge expansion.

Equipped with the innovative textbook and both competencies, I feel much more confident to understand various texts and scaffold my students to explore them in-depth. Based on students’ interests, I am able to construct an engageable learning space through appropriate content in textbooks and other teaching materials. There they can have dialogues with the texts, share opinions with their peers, and interpret self-meaning. To provide instant supports and feedback, I need to be a knowledgeable instructor, helpful scaffolder and committed life-long learner. To conclude, the refreshed textbooks and the design of theme-based mode inspire both my students and me.