Ensayo

DESCRIBING TEACHERS.
 A. What is a teacher?
Teachers use many metaphors to describe what they do. The range of images these and others that teachers use about themselves indicate the range of views that they have about their profession.
 B. The roles of a teacher
Within the classroom our role may change from one activity to another or from one stage or an activity to another. If we arefluent at making these changes our effectiveness as teachers is greatly enhanced.
 B1. Controller
Most people can remember teachers from their past who had a gift for just such a kind of instruction and who inspired their students through their knowledge and their charisma.
 B2. Organiser
One of the most important roles that teachers have to perform is that of organizing students to do variousactivities.
It is vitally important for teachers to get this role right when it is required. If the students do not understand what they are supposed to do they may well not get full advantage from an activity.
 B3. Assessor
Students need to know how and for what they are being assessed. We should tell them what we are looking for and what success looks like so that they can measure themselvesagainst this.
 B4. Prompter
Sometimes when students are involved in a role-play activity, for example, they lose the thread or what is going on, or they are ‘lost for words’ (i.e. they may still have the thread but be unable to proceed productively for lack of vocabulary)
When we prompt we need to do it sensitively and encouragingly but, above all, with discretion. If we are too adamant werisk taking initiative away from the student.
 B5. Participant
The traditional picture of teachers during students discussions, role-play, or group decision-making activities, is of people who ‘stand back’ from the activity, letting the learners get on with it and only intervening later to offer feedback and / or correct mistakes.
 B6. Resource
Students might ask how to say or write somethingor what a word or phrase means. They might want to know information in the middle of an activity about that activity or they might want information about where to look for something -a book or a web site for example. This is where we can be one of the most important resources they have.
 B7. Tutor
It is essential for us to act as tutors from time to time, however difficult this may be. In thismore personal contact the learners have a real chance to feel supported and helped, and the general class atmosphere is greatly enhanced as a result.

 B8. Observer
When observing students we should be careful not to be too intrusive by hanging on their every word, by getting too close to them, or by officiously writing things down all the time.
 B9. Which role?
The role that we take on isdependent as we have seen on what it is we wish the students to achieve. There are times when we will need to act as a prompter where, on other occasions, it would be more appropriate to act as a resource.
 C. The teacher as performer
It suggests that instead of just saying what role teachers should be playing we can also describe how they should be playing it.
 D. The teacher as teaching aidApart from the roles which we adopt in the classroom –and the way that these roles are performed- we are also a kind of teaching aid ourselves, a piece of teaching equipment in our own right.
 D1. Mime and gesture
We can also use gesture to express or demonstrate meaning. One gesture which is widely used, but which teachers should employ with care, is the act of pointing to students to askthem to participate in a drill or give some other form of response.
 D2. Language model
Students get models of language from textbooks, reading materials of all sorts, and form audio and videotapes. One way in which we can model dialogues is to put up two faces on the board and then stand in front of each of them when required to speak their lines.
 D3. Provider of comprehensible input
Of...