Teaching, Research and Service Philosophy
A) Empowering the Learner: Cooperative and Collaborative Learning Methods
My Teaching, Research and Service Philosophy can be summed up in three words: empowering the learner.
During my more than four decades of teaching English as a Foreign Language, the word “teaching” was found to be inadequate to describe the complexity of the learning process. There had been a progressive shift of the learning process from the “teacher” to the learner. The teacher is no more than a person who guides the learner through the labyrinth of language acquisition, so to speak. It is a matter of making the appropriate learning tools available to the learners, who in turn use them to learn what they need. There is a Chinese proverb which says:
‘Instead of catching a fish for me every day, show me how to fish.’ How true!
I had compiled and taught a one-week course on email and telex writing for Saudi Arabian Airlines staff in the light of the above paragraph.
It was a five-day course of five-contact-periods per day.
The course was open to participants who had achieved pre-intermediate and intermediate levels in English.
At the commencement of the course, learners were asked to think about their goals and how to achieve them. They were encouraged to work individually, in pairs and in groups. This is needs analysis and relates to my service philosophy. The end service recipient should decide what to learn; not the service provider.
Following is a description of delivering the email and telex writing course. The course is task based from beginning to end. The aim is to minimize the role of the instructor and maximize the role of the learner.
There were two tasks used in delivering this course.
01) The first task is that participants write emails on subjects of their own choice. This is done individually; in pairs and in groups. This is followed by discussing their emails as one group.
02) The second task is to look at a certain section in the email writing course materials by the whole class as one group. Here participants practise reading, discussing and summarizing skills.
Participants are encouraged to research any points they find interesting; and then give a short presentation of that to their colleagues.
By the end of the course, participants were asked to assess it. Their feedback highlighted the following points:
• Confidence building
• Team member player
• Team leader
• Reading, understanding and summing up skills
• Group discussion skills
• Acquisition and development of analytical skills
• Research skills
• Presentation skills
• Encouraging and supportive learning atmosphere
• Healthy promotion of competition
• Healthy promotion of cooperation
• Knowledgeable, confident, encouraging and supportive instructor
• Recognition of individual and team achievements
• Building rapport among participants
• Realizing that working as a team is highly significant by asserting the adage that:
? Together
? Everyone
? Achieves
? More

A couple of negative points are worth noting, and the solutions devised to eliminate them.
The first one was the concern that the course could be monotonous in its delivery plan. The practical answer to that was to manipulate the plan but never repeat it daily. Also I introduced some highly interesting and useful games, such as synonyms and antonyms so as to increase their vocabulary.