Teaching Afrikaans is my life and I see myself as “born a teacher” and a scholar for life. I come from a teaching family and have taught high school students for fourteen years before I started teaching at Stellenbosch University. I have learned valuable lessons, methodologies, and teaching techniques from those years which I have adapted for teaching higher education students.
Every day I learn new things from my language learning students, from my postgraduate students, from my colleagues, from other experts in the field and from reading and doing research in the field of language acquisition. My students make me passionate about teaching and they motivate me to do better and try better; and be a better person and lecturer. I see my students not just as students learning Afrikaans but as “whole persons”: each with their own identities, worries, histories, cultures, emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence, and affective intelligence.
My teaching philosophy is not only focused on the subject content, but my objectives is to motivate students to be multilingual and culturally sensitive people in a diverse society; to be more authentic users of languages; to be critical thinkers and develop their own voices and not only followers of other peoples’ thinking; and be full of confidence as they face the world and her challenges. I respect students’ self-concept and self-efficacy. I care deeply for my students as my teaching strives to find a balance between challenging my students to do their best but at the same time supporting and nurturing their efforts to be successful. I also believe that teaching and learning are the most effective when my students are working on authentic tasks which mean that my instructional process is a combination of demonstrations, observations, and guided practice.
As a language teacher, I see the value in multilingualism, and I encourage my students to see the value in learning a new language: it improves literacy and learning skills; it increases confidence; it encourages mental flexibility; students develop problem solving skills and it cultivates greater cultural awareness. I try and teach them appreciation for all languages and cultures – especially in a culturally diverse country as South Africa is. I try and make them aware of the importance of respect for other people’s languages and cultures because as our motto states: “!ke e ǀxarra ‖ke: Diverse people unite”. My tutors and I represent Afrikaans and it is important for me that students have a positive experience in my class and that the political baggage which Afrikaans carries as an apartheid language is turned upside down. I encourage cultural awareness and appreciation for Afrikaans as a language and try and break some of the stereotypical thinking students have on Afrikaans. I introduce them to the Afrikaans cultureI lecture on the different varieties of Afrikaans and tell them about Kaapse Afrikaans, tsotsitaal and “tronktaal”.
A key aspect is to make Afrikaans authentic and real. Afrikaans is not a language to be used only in classrooms but in the world outside the class. I use the campus as the authentic world in which the students operate in.
In my quest to be an authentic teacher I ask in the first place how I best serve the needs of the students in my class and how can I help students to grow and develop. In the second place I care for the education and the learning experience of the students more than my own self-interest.
One of the key elements in teaching Afrikaans as a foreign or second language to students is to motivate them and to keep motivating them. Therefor I teach with enthusiasm, a friendly smile, and an open-door policy. My personality helps me to interact with my students to be a facilitator of and a guide for learning and not a teacher which teaches from a higher pedestal. I also try and teach my students to communicate with me in Afrikaans – even if they are afraid to make mistakes. Thereby I encourage them to not be afraid of making mistakes because through mistakes we learn how to improve our Afrikaans.
I want my students to be critical thinkers and voice their opinions on relevant topics. When I teach literature, I teach on topics like homosexuality, feminism, marginalised poets, and the use of lyrics in ideology. I think it is very important for students to be critical thinkers to prepare them for the challenges which await after university. I aim to make them responsible citizens of South Africa and the world.
I have also through my years of teaching used technology as a pedagogic tool and from the start of my teaching career I have encouraged students to make use of technology – although I feel the personal connection with students is very important and that technology cannot replace the teacher. I use youtube- video clips and DVD’s and CDs to teach Afrikaans vocabulary. Students can use their cell phones as a dictionary, and I have used it as clickers in lectures.
I believe because of my enthusiastic, motivational, authentic, and caring approach to teaching Afrikaans, it enables the students to acquire Afrikaans language skills in a way that keeps them interested and motivated. I also encourage the use of their own critical thinking skills in oral discussions and writing assignments which makes their learning their own. I have seen many positive results in my students but the most important one is when I see them outside the classroom and they are not my students anymore, but they come to me and try and communicate in Afrikaans with me. I have found that the students have not forgotten my devotion to teaching them and how much I love teaching them.