Teaching Languages As An Engaging And Edifying Process.

A teacher should have the ability and preparation to set up his tuition and organise his material in a way that preserves the pupil's interest, motive and pleasure in learning. In this sense, the teacher should always make sure that his lessons' material is organised and delivered in such a way by which: 1) the student always has a clear sense of the use this can be to him, in contexts and situations well familiar to him; 2) the student has a clear perception of the progress he is making in every session, towards an increasingly comfortable handling of the language; 3) whatever unit of new elements each session includes (whether these consist of grammar, vocabulary, syntax or colloquial use of the language), these never come in a quantity or with deadlines that essentially turn the lesson to a strong challenge for the student. The lesson should never be made as difficult and demanding as to be perceived by the student as an implicit questioning or testing of his ability of solving problems. Neither should it disrupt and enfeeble the student's mental association of the new material with the language and the practical use he gains out of assimilating it. The teacher should always make sure that not too much is imparted too soon and in too little time, whenever a new element of the language is introduced. Furthermore, he should make sure that each new introduced element, grammatical, linguistic, or other, is accompanied by examples of its use in real life circumstances. When this is not immediately and ideally possible, the teacher should provide ways in which the student can learn through practising that bears a strong enough ludic component and is thus never perceived as a serious challenge or test to the student's ability. All the above requirements are of particular significance in diverse and heterogeneous cultural and social contexts such the British one. In the varied reality of the United Kingdom, it is a condition sine qua non for any teacher, to be able and prepared to adapt his teaching approach to the requirements of each single student, considering that it may vary in extreme ways depending on the student's age, cultural background, or professional orientation. The teacher has to be ready to accept the existence of different uses of the language, which may very well go beyond (or even be quite limited with regards to) the generally established academic notions of "fluent use", or "sound knowledge" of the language. It is absolutely necessary for a UK based language teacher to be ready to accept the significance and de facto legitimacy of alternative and varied approaches to learning a language, aimed specifically, for example, at a "colloquial use" of it or a use of it in specific professional environments, as much as that may collide with more traditional, comprehensive notions of a formative language course and what it should include. The same thing counts for the preparation for UK-based language certification tests, whose learning programme may as well collide with the teacher's own teaching methods, priorities and schemes. Adapting is a basic and ineluctable condition for a foreign language teacher in today's world, as well as a defining component in his theoretical and practical formation as a teacher and tutor.