TEFL In The Classroom
Read about bloopers, disasters, and everyday classroom drama here.
What Do You Need To Teach Beginners?
It’s my experience that students at lower levels tend to progress much more quickly, or at least to feel that they are, and this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching them. It’s also my impression that more ready-to-go materials exist for lower levels than higher levels; when learning any language there are just basics you need to learn and these will be the same or similar no matter which book or particular syllabus you follow. This may be why it seems so easy to find activities and games for lower levels.
I also enjoy the challenges of higher level classes, and once you have experience with any level, it becomes easier to prepare for it or to come up with a game for an extra five minutes or whatever. However I do actually feel like my CELTA prepared me better for teaching lower levels than higher ones, and I certainly don’t think that lower levels are “harder” to prepare for by any means. I suppose you focus on different things for lower levels than higher levels.
Some time ago I interviewed teacher John Hall about his experience teaching English to Kosovar refugees in Canada. I learned about all this via a post he made at the ESL Café regarding the skill of communicating with beginners. I would count this skill, however you might call it, as one of the most important.
In his post, he described it this way (and gave me permission to quote him when I interviewed him a few months ago!):
..”.it is as if you have two minds. One of your minds is thinking about what you want to communicate; the other is always thinking about what the students can understand. (The latter not only includes an awareness of the students’ knowledge of English, but also an awareness of their “cultural consciousness.”) When I am speaking in class, most of the time nothing can pass my lips unless it is approved of by both of my “minds.” It seems to me that this is an essential part of good communication: being aware of not just what you are saying, but also being aware of if and how your audience can understand it.
…I would also point out that this is so contrary to the traditional way of lecturing in universities…When I was a university student, I sat through too many classes in which the professor was talking in English but yet in a subset of English almost entirely incomprehensible to me and most of my classmates. What a waste of time!”
Date: October 29th, 2007 |
No Comments
Functional Language Follies
I have to admit that every time the Real Life section rolls around my eyes do a little rolling too. It’s not that I don’t think functional language is useful, but a) the way it is presented in many textbooks strikes me as very contrived (I suppose this kind of goes with appearing in a textbook at all) and b) I can’t stand it that when this functional language turns up on the test, it is with a gap fill in a preposition exercise. Yes, for many phrases part of the trick is memorizing them, but it seems to miss the point when the test is of your memory rather than your ability to use the phrases effectively. And you can use them effectively without preposition perfection.
Oh, yes, there’s one more: c) I get irked when a six-line dialog includes three new and largely irrelevant vocabulary words which are necessary for understanding the dialog. If it’s a lesson on functional language, then let’s do that, and not spend fifteen minutes clarifying bizarre vocabulary.
All my complaints aside, I do acknowledge that there much of the language is relevant and useful – giving and receiving directions (at any level, really), ways of emphasizing (in moderation anyway), expressing sympathy, making small talk, or reading out numbers and understanding signs. I realize that textbook writers need to try to fit one in each unit and should try to make it related to the rest of the content.
Date: October 10th, 2007 |
2 comments
Classroom Management Tips And Tricks From OneStopEnglish.com
One Stop English has hosted some excellent methodology debates (such as on reading skills, teacher burn out, and grammar), so I was over the moon to see a new one, by Adrian Tennan, on classroom management.
He points out that classroom “issues” come up for most teachers, and throughout their respective careers; they don’t just characterize the classrooms of the new and inexperienced. Teachers who realize this are in a better place to proactively solve those problems than those who just feel they have failed as teachers or something because something doesn’t go right in the classroom.
His advice does not consist so much of practical tips but rather describes how to approach classroom management issues: first of all, identify the problem clearly and establish why it is in fact a problem - then look for underlying causes. It’s not enough to know what the problem is; you have to know why it happens to figure out a solution.
While ultimately he says the teacher should take responsibility for managing the class, he does mention the utility of making students aware of how their actions affect others, and of creating an atmosphere favorable to open discussion.
Date: September 30th, 2007 |
No Comments
Learn Each Others’ Names Or Else!
I’m not usually an advocate of violence, nor would I like to imagine the TEFL Logue as some kind of cookbook for student abuse. So I’ll distance myself from the activity I’m about to present by letting you know that it was a Belgian colleague who either came up with it or passed it on…and I have never actually used it so far but would love to find a way to adapt it.
The point is to learn names. Students who have just met each other stand in a circle, facing the center. One student stands in the center with a rolled up newspaper. (!)
The teacher starts by calling out the name of one student. That student has to call out the name of another student – any other student. When that student hears his or her name, he then repeats and has to call out the name of another student.
The task of person in the middle is to find the person whose name has been called and hit them on the legs with the rolled up newspaper before that person calls out another name. Or it could even be before their nominee calls out another name. Obviously this is hard! It only takes a second to call out another name. You can imagine the poor soul in the middle spinning around lashing out with the newspaper. If you’re just meeting the class, you probably haven’t identified a student you don’t like, so putting that person in the middle is not an option. The best thing to do is put a confident – and if possible fast on his feet – student there.
If the person in the middle manages to hit the named person on the legs before they call out another name, that person takes over the middle position.
Date: September 13th, 2007 |
No Comments
Making Fun Of Students
Do ESL teachers make fun of their students?
No, of course not! Mainly though because they tend not to make mistakes that are all that funny…I’ll admit it does seem pretty mean to make fun of people learning your language, including those very ones you are responsible for teaching. Better to ask your colleagues what their students did and make fun of them!
Just kidding.
I can’t say I’m totally innocent though.
Date: September 5th, 2007 |
No Comments
eslHQ Makeover
eslHQ has a new look. Check out my original review of the site for the basics – and a summary of some of the reasons I think it’s cool – and read on right here for the latest.
One change is that the best discussions from the forums are now featured on the main page, so you don’t have to search through the forums if you want to jump right in with advice or questions of your own. You still have to register, of course, as you do to post on nearly any forum, but this is just a matter of sharing your email and creating a user name and password.
A selection of ESL jobs are featured in a box on the right, and a number of already-made worksheets are easily accessible via a page you can get to via one of the new tabs up top. The board games on offer can come in handy if you need something student-centered to fill ten or fifteen minutes, especially with a lower level.
Date: October 16th, 2007 |
2 comments
101 Uses For Spam In Class
I’ve been fortunate to receive some spam with hilarious subjects in the last few months. I don’t actually open the email, but how can you not love “Free laptop, Katie [email address]” “Free lemon soda for Katie” and best of all “aggregator peanut butter banana bread”.
I came across a marvelous suggestion for spam once: use the names in the “from” box as aliases for real people you write about in travel stories or some other context. And why couldn’t I have two students Lenora Higgins and Francesco O’Reilly? Naturally all this talk of spam and its abundance in general made me wonder how to capitalize on this and use it in class. Any ideas?
I am a little curious as to how computer generated spam comes to be, and why or how the presumably randomly-generated content of some spam is better than the equally randomly-generated content of other spam. Sometimes it is almost like poetry. I would love to collect a bunch of grammatically correct but non-sensical sentences to show students. I’d say: see? This is what a computer can come up with. Computers can generally do grammar, but even though the grammar is fine – it doesn’t make sense! Grammar is not all that matters.
There must be other fun and useful ways..?
Date: October 7th, 2007 |
2 comments
Some Textbook Cases of Student Confidence (Or Lack Thereof)
I never fail to be surprised by students, and it’s always striking when a couple of cases can illustrate in practice something I’ve mostly just assumed to be true.
The Case of Student N: big vocabulary, low confidence
Student N started out by informing me in great detail about his lack of confidence in his English. He wasn’t that bad – in fact his vocabulary was probably better than that of 95% of the students I’ve worked with in more than three years – but he felt that he couldn’t speak. I tried to work in some practice of functional language or rehearsing the situations he said he was likely to need English in, but he didn’t really go for it. He wanted to practice spontaneously so we did several Breaking News English stories and a few crossword puzzles. After about six weeks, I don’t think his level had changed much, but it seemed his confidence had. I came to believe though that part of the issue was just his personality: I don’t know that any level of improvement would have really “made him into” the speaker he wanted to be.
The Case of Student M: excellent confidence and fluency, “medium” vocabulary
Student M was woman with a professional job who told me she knew her English was good and she wasn’t sure if we even had a level appropriate for her. [How can you not love a student who says this?] I reassured her that this would not stop me from finding challenging and useful material, even if it didn’t come pre-packaged in a book. We did a few of the same crossword puzzles, and it turned out that she genuinely didn’t know up to half of the words sometimes. It wasn’t just an issue of lack of context to remind her – these were generally new words for her.
Date: September 17th, 2007 |
No Comments
Are Reading Skills A Waste Of Time? From OneStopEnglish.com’s Methodology Debates
In yet another of One Stop English’s methodology debates, The End of Reading, Scott Thornbury argues that the skills learners use to read in English are essentially the same ones they use to read in their own language. And as such, time spent practicing skimming, predicting and so on is largely wasted. He uses the analogy of driving: if you learn to drive in the UK, do you need to start from scratch to drive on the other side of the road in France? Most of us would agree that you don’t.
I disagree that this analogy works for language learning though. Certainly my learners know how to read in their own language, and probably practice skimming and scanning unconsciously. As do I in English. But in my experience, most learners, myself included at times, do have a tendency to focus on individual words when reading in a foreign language. Is it because they are dealing with native-level material without being native-level speakers? Is it because translation like this is what all of their foreign language education up to now has focused on? I don’t know if I can identify the reason, but I think that if these reading skills are not “taught” or emphasized, many students really will never use them, even when they do in their own language.
Date: September 7th, 2007 |
7 comments
Top 10 Do’s And Dont’s For The New School Year
September is known around the world, or at least around the northern hemisphere, as the start of the new school year. I usually get that “something smells school-y in the air” feeling when this month rolls around. I also routinely get the new school year jitters. I can’t say I’m an expert at getting rid of these jitters completely, but I do have my bag of do’s and dont’s for the new school year:
10. Do imagine your students naked. Or better, for a couple of reasons, just in some ridiculously inappropriate attire. If you’re lucky, they might help you out by coming to class already looking silly.
9. Don’t let your nervousness show. It may not feel natural to fake it, because…faking it is by its nature unnatural, but confidence and lack of it is catching. Think of the last time you listened to a speaker who was obviously nervous: you probably felt awkward too. Make your students react and they’ll respond to you in kind.
8. Do prepare. This is of course hardest when you’ve never met the group before. Bring a variety of activities that can fit a variety of levels so that however it turns out a) you’ve got something to fill the time and b) you’ll have something they can actually do no matter what.
7. Don’t be teacher-centered. Get the students speaking, especially with a pair or in small groups. This takes the pressure off you – you can still read out the class rules or whatever at the end – and frees you up to listen and gauge what the students can do, which is essential in the first class.
6. Do plan something fun, but don’t hesitate to do something more traditionally “English class” too…my opinion is that while you don’t have to start ticking off items on the syllabus, many students just feel more satisfied when they do something they recognize as a regular class activity (meaning a whole class of free speaking may not be what they envision). And the pragmatic fact is, having happy campers in the first class generally makes you a happy camper too.
5. Do have a swig of whiskey or your drink of choice beforehand…
Date: September 4th, 2007 |
2 comments
