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Teaching Philosophy Xiao Yang Miss Zhang was speaking English to us. I didnt understand a word she said, but the rhythm, the change of tone and the emotion behind her beautiful English struck me like music. It was like chanting, and I was enchanted. It was the first time when I felt that foreign language has its own heartbeat. Before, I was told and taught as if it were just a useful tool. It is a fundamental belief for me as a language teacher that language is a dynamic and organic system. It cannot be separated from the environment where it is rooted and it becomes part of the learners mind and identity. Therefore, language is not an extraneous tool that we hand to learners. Rather, it is what they construct through guided interactions in the target language environment and what they internalize from that experience. My role as a teacher is to facilitate this process of interaction and internalization. As I identify with Vygotsky's concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), I try to involve scaffolding techniques in my classroom. For example, when introducing the modal should in class, I will bring in the context of using gestures in different cultures. I will first model examples for them introducing what gesture should or shouldnt be used to signal waiters in my culture. Then students are asked to work in pairs to use this modal to introduce gestures that should or shouldnt be used in a specific context in their countries. In essence, what I do is to provide guided interactions, to respond to student questions not with an explicit answer but with a more specific question that points to the answer. Ultimately, it is not the answer that matters, but the whole interaction and negotiation process we go through together in the target

Teaching Philosophy Xiao Yang language. I resonate with Gouins conclusion a century ago that language learning is a process linking perception with conception. Learning a second or foreign language is about establishing new connection between learners perception and conception in the target language rather than translating from native language conception. It is about having learners experience and do things in the target language. Therefore I am interested in language teaching approaches and methods that aim at providing authentic context for language use, for instance Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Content Based Instruction (CBI) and Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT). However, I struggle with how to implement these ideas in my home country China where English is taught as a foreign language and students have little opportunity to communicate in English outside classroom. I still think it can be done because interaction is not just about talking to native speakers. It can happen between non-native speakers, among learners themselves. It also takes place in various forms, especially with the help of Internet. Discussion of interesting topics in an online forum and sharing opinions by replying to a news article can be ways of authentic interaction as well. I believe in education as a process of empowering individuals, and language teaching enables learners to internalize the dynamic language system so that they can establish new connections with the world and people around and interact in a meaningful way.