Resource
In some activities it is inappropriate for us to take on any of the roles we have suggested so far.
Suppose that the students are involved in a piece of group writing, or that they involved in preparation for a presentation they are to make to the class.
In such situations having the teacher take part part, or control them, or even turn up to prompt them might be entirely unwelcome.
However, the students may still have need of their teacher as a resource.
Students might ask how to say or write something or 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 for something-a book or a web site for example.
This is where we can be one of the most important resources they have.
A few thing need to said about this teacher role.
No teacher knows everything about the language! Questions like What’s the difference between X and Y? Or why can’t I say Z? Are always difficult to deal with because most of us do not carry complex information of this kind in our heads.
What we should be able to offer, however, is guidance as to where students go to look that information.
We could go further, however, and say that one of our really important jobs is to encourage students to use resource material for themselves, and to become more independent in their learning generally.
Thus, instead of every question about what a word or phrase means, we can instead direct students to a good monolingual dictionary, or the case of creative work, towards a good production dictionary (see Chapter 21,A1).
Alternatively, we need to have the courage to say I don’t know the answer to that right now, but I’ll tomorrow.
This means, of course, that we will indeed have to give them the information the next day, otherwise they may begin to lose confidence in us.
When we are acting as a resource we will to be helpful and available, but at the same time we have to resist the urge to spoon- feed our students so that they become over-reliant on us.