We're Not Going To Drink Them In Spanish

  Okay, so we're going to use this pro-forma as our lesson plan and we're going to fill one out as though we were planning for an actual lesson. So, we start off with some basic information about the class. So, the name of the teacher, date and time and the class level. In this particular case, our class is going to be an elementary class and the room will be room 3. Having looked through the registers we see that the expected number of students for this particular class is going to be 10. This will help us in creating our worksheet copies. The context of the lesson for this class is going to be present continuous tense and it may well be the first time that this particular level of class has been introduced to this tense. So, our focus is going to be fairly general and it's going...  [Read more]

  This presentation is going to focus on the theories, methods and techniques of teaching and we're going to start with a quote. This is an interesting quotation because it contains within it a philosophical argument and it's a philosophical argument in the way in which we learn. Basically, this one is saying that the intelligence of their own children comes about due to a natural process. So this one could be said to be due to nature. This is exactly the opposite of this one, which is saying that they're teaching the environment that we create, creates that intelligence. So this one can be said to be due to nurture and this argument 'nature versus nurture' has been going on for thousands of years. These two viewpoints are two ends of a scale, or a continuum if you like, and every...  [Read more]

  Just to finish off this particular section on lesson planning, we're going to go through a couple of procedures that should take place during the study phase periods, particularly when we're doing the activities. It is quite important that before we actually go into a study activity that we go through a process of showing how that activity is going to work and one acronym that is often used for this is D-E-GO. The D part of this stands for a demonstration of the activity. Now, it's very important that you don't try to explain how the activity is going to work but rather you actually demonstrate the process. An example of the demonstration of the process of the activity could be something as simple as taking the first question and using it and writing it on the board. This will...  [Read more]

  The next item that we're going to consider is the use of resource books. There are many different types of resource books available and within those books there tends to be a general pattern and typically the resource book pack will come in a three book series and typically that three book series will be in the form of the student book, a workbook and a teacher's resource book. So for example here are those three books for this particular series called ?Total English? and in the student book the type of information that we can gain from here is the actual background to the teaching points themselves plus some additional information in terms of short worksheets and so on and so forth and tape transcripts at the end for listening activities, which these days often come on a CD...  [Read more]

  So, for the study phase what we're going to do is to show them the idea of the cartoon strip. In the cartoon strip what there's going to be are some people with speech bubbles and this is going to represent where dialogue will appear and in the bottom, there are these rectangular boxes, where there will be descriptive things happening. So, it will explain the actual situation that these people are in. So, we get across the idea, first of all, that these are speech and these are for description and we can then show them a blank one of these cartoon strips and try to elicit from our students what could possibly the people be saying and in what actual situation are they in, in order for them to say that. Once we've gone through that, we can move on to our first study activity and in...  [Read more]

  So, now we're going to fill the actual procedure of the lesson plan out itself. We mentioned at the start, the first thing we do, is to get some general information about the class that we'll be teaching and then, in order for someone to be able to cover our lesson, we need to present enough information in our lesson plan that they can actually carry it out. What I'm going to do is for each stage of the lesson, I'll indicate what I'm going to do in the lesson and then, we'll cut away from that to have a look to see how that will actually be achieved. So, our lesson is going to be based on a 45-minute lesson and the first phase is going to be the engage phase and it's going to be a straight arrow ESA lesson. I'm going to take approximately five minutes on my engage phase and in...  [Read more]

  So let's have a look now what might take place in a typical writing lesson and, again, we're going to use the format of a straight arrow ESA lesson. Our first stage is to the go to the engage stage and, if we think back to what we said before, what we need to do is try to generate interest. So, an example here could be we show a picture first of all taken from a newspaper or magazine and then we can ask the students some questions. From looking at the picture we can ask them if they can tell us what is actually happening now as shown by the picture. Then, we can generate a bit more interest by asking them to give us ideas about what they thought was happening before this picture took place and what happened after. So, here we're just trying to build up the idea of a sequence of...  [Read more]

  So what we're going to do is to run through a series of methodologies that were created mainly in the 1900s that adopted the idea that language learning should be much more communicative, much more natural. The first one is called audiolingualism and it's also called the army method because of where it was developed. Basically, psychology, during the 1950s and 60s, was building up new theories about behaviorism. Perhaps the most famous experiments that were done in this particular area were by Pavlov, where he was showing that most animals undergo a stimulus response mechanism and he had a series of famous experiments, where by ringing a bell, he could cause a dog to salivate, that would be his response, in the expectation of getting some food. This behaviorist idea of stimulus...  [Read more]

  The next item we're going to consider is the use of dictionaries and here perhaps the first thing we should do is to make a distinction between the two main types of dictionary and that distinction is between the monolingual and the bilingual dictionary. In a monolingual dictionary you have a word and its associated meaning and those two are both described for example in English so the word and the description of that word are both given in English. Whereas in a bilingual dictionary that word meaning could often be for example the word given in English and the explanation given in Thai and vice versa. So what can we use a dictionary for? Well, within the dictionary itself obviously we can get things like how words are spelled or the spelling of the word. We can also get the...  [Read more]

  The next idea we're going to consider is the use of visual aids and visual aids can include some examples such as real, objects, which we call realia, the use of pictures and photographs and also the use of models. So let's consider some of the ideas surrounding the use of visual aids. Well, why are they useful? Well, first of all the use of a visual aid can reduce teacher talk time. It's very much more simple just to show a real object than to try to describe it so that we could just ask the students ?what is this,? and they would say ?this is a pen,? rather than trying to actually describe it. Again if we were trying to show examples of fruit and vegetables rather than to try and describe them why not use an actual model and this is going to be much more visually stimulating...  [Read more]

  So, let's have a look at a typical receptive skills lesson. The main focus of this lesson is going to be reading, although there will be some listening involved as well and it?s going to be a patchwork ESA lesson. As a patchwork lesson, it will start off with an engage and this engage what we're going to do is to play an extract about Elvis Presley and it's going to be an Elvis Presley song and we can ask the students if they know who it is and if they know anything about him can help generate the interest in this. We can also ask them what they'd like to know about it. What we can then do is just to introduce them to the text but they're going to read the detail later on but just at this stage we'll do a quick skimming or scanning exercise to find some information from that...  [Read more]

  Hello. This presentation is going to cover this section on lesson planning and what we're going to do is to have a look as to why we go about planning a lesson, what do we actually put in it? We'll create an empty lesson plan pro-forma and then having done that what we'll do is to fill in that lesson plan for a particular teaching point. So, our starting position is going to be: "Why do we plan lessons at all?" There are a number of reasons why we need to plan a lesson. The first and foremost perhaps is that it's going to create a logical sequence for our lessons. If we didn't have a lesson plan, it is quite possible that we could go all over the place and it would become confusing for the students. By having this plan, what we've created is a structure that we can work from. So,...  [Read more]

  And now we'll have a look at the present perfect continuous tense. As its name suggests, what we're going to do is combine the present continuous usages and the present perfect usages into a tense that basically expresses the fact that we've got an action continuing up until the present point in time. For the form of this tense, again, we're going to combine into various aspects of both the perfect and the continuous tenses. If we have a look we always begin with our subjects, then we have our, two now, helping verbs. The helping verb 'to have' for the perfect tenses, as well as the helping verb 'be' for the continuous tenses. For our subjects 'I', 'you', 'we' and 'they', we leave 'have' as 'have' and for 'he', 'she' and 'it', we conjugate it to 'has'. Because it's a continuous...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Venezuela? Are you interested in teaching English in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela? Check out our opportunities in Puerto Cabello, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT! Tests are a great tool to measure students' knowledge. They can help us evaluate if we're achieving our purpose when teaching an specific topic and, of course student can see their...  [Read more]

  A final example is going to be an example of a patchwork ESA lesson and remember we said the form of this particular lesson will start with and engage always and will finish with and activate and there'll be some variation of E, S and A within the brackets here. So we're going to generate our patchwork ESA lesson as follows. Starting with the engage, the students are going to look at holiday photos and talk about what they like and don't like from what they see. From that, we're going to move directly into an activate phase and what the students are going to do is to make comments about holiday brochures and try to act out a role-play between the travel agent and a customer. Again, as this is taking place, the teacher will be moving around and looking for gaps in knowledge in...  [Read more]

  http://www.teflcourse.net The 'going to' future tense is used to make predictions based on evidence and to talk about plans and intentions. This Online TEFL Course video discusses two teaching ideas that can be used with the 'going to' future tense. The first idea encourages students to make predictions based on evidence with a weather forecasting activity. The students are given information about the weather in a particular country and give weather forecasts for the following week or month: On Monday it's going to rain in the morning but then it's going to be sunny for the rest of the day. In the second teaching idea students discuss plans for an upcoming birthday party/holiday: We're going to eat at a fancy restaurant. I'm going to have a massive birthday cake. I'm going...  [Read more]

  This particular methodology is known as a straight arrow ESA lesson. If every single lesson that we undertook with our students was a straight arrow ESA lesson then it is quite possible that the students would be able to predict what is going to come up next and whilst this is good for the lower level students, then it could potentially become a little bit boring for our higher level students. So what Harmer did in his ideas about ESA, was to generate two other types of ESA lesson that we can use to try and generate a little bit more interest. So, the other two types of ESA lesson that we can follow: The first is known as a boomerang lesson and the second is known as a patchwork lesson and what we're going to do is to have a look at those other types of ESA lesson in a little bit...  [Read more]

  So now we'll consider the actual classroom arrangements themselves in terms of the physical desk layout. There are possibly three main types of arrangements that are used within classrooms and we're going to indicate the desks here as being boxes and the arrangements of the students within those desks will be blue crosses. So here we have the desks ranged in rows and the students sitting within those rows. The second arrangement could be the use of horseshoes or semi circles and finally the use of individual desks. So for each of these arrangements what are the potential advantages and disadvantages of arranging our seating in this way? Let's take the rows first of all. One of the potential advantages is that it does give the teacher the opportunity, if it's arranged correctly,...  [Read more]

Spain is popular with foreign ESL teachers for many reasons including the consistently booming job market, the easy going culture, the warm climate, and the great food. Jobs can be found all year-round in many areas, but are you eligible to work there legally? The simple answer is no, you do not require a degree in order to legally teach English in Spain. There are no government requirements for teachers to have any kind of academic background and the demand is so high in many areas that employers are equally unconcerned about your degree status. Generally speaking, schools in Spain prefer native English speakers in their classrooms as this is what most local students are looking for. However, they will not simply hire you on that basis without having completed some form of teacher...  [Read more]

  One of the major ideas here when writing on the board, is that we need to be aware that whenever we're using the board to write down information, we should not be talking and whenever we are talking we should not be writing on the board. This will inevitably lead to what's known as dead time when nothing is being said as we're putting information on the board. This dead time is not a problem but we can actually minimize it by using a number of techniques. We could use pre-prepared material. So we put information onto large pieces of paper and then instead of writing on the board, we actually stick those materials onto the board as we go through the class. Another idea is to actually ask students to write on the board for you. Another thing is that we could actually put work up...  [Read more]