What Is An Esl Classroom

  Throughout section on the teaching of productive skills and the teaching of receptive skills our activate activities will usually involve some form of game and our final consideration here will be the use of games in the classroom. We can start with a definition of what we actually mean by a game and it basically has three components. A game is an activity that has rules it should have for its purpose in the classroom a teaching point and by nature to the fact that it's a game it should also include an element of fun. So that will be our working definition for a game that we're going to use in the classroom. There are many different types of games and they range between the competitive and those will require cooperation and there are all sorts of games that involve both of these...  [Read more]

ESL stands for English as a Second Language and refers to non-native English speakers who live in countries where English is not widely spoken. It refers to people who study English as a second language in addition to their native tongue. From Japan to Spain, students all over the world study English as a second language. Teachers from English-speaking countries frequently head abroad to teach English. Popular destinations for ESL teachers include Vietnam, Spain, China, South Korea, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates - but pretty much anywhere around the world is an option! Many schools offer ESL as a subject to students who speak a language other than English. ESL teachers will assist students with their speaking, reading, writing, and listening skills. ESL teachers can be native...  [Read more]

  Here are helpful tips how to identify the various future tenses in the English language and complete worksheets successfully. The video also helps you to structure an effective lesson around the future tenses in an EFL classroom around the world. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Unit 13 introduced the new topic of ?teaching pronunciation and phonology? and the first aspect discussed was pronunciatio. I have learnt that pronunciation is...  [Read more]

  Our next consideration is going to be how we actually group our students. There are perhaps three types of grouping arrangements that we can consider and within those we'll have a look at the potential positive and negatives of those particular arrangements. So firstly, what arrangements can we use? We could arrange our group as a whole class so all of their activities will be done as a whole class. They could be working as individuals and the final grouping arrangement we'll consider is that of small groups or indeed the use of pair work. So for each of these types of arrangements what are the potential positive and negatives with that type of arrangement? For the whole class certainly one of the main positive features is that it gives that class a sense of belonging. Secondly...  [Read more]

  There are many great reasons for choosing an in-class TESOL course from ITTT and the most important is probably the hours you get to practice the teaching skills that are taught during the daily input sessions. A large portion of the course schedule is devoted to these practice sessions which take place in a real English language classroom populated by genuine English language students. This part of the in-class TESOL course offers the very best preparation for your future teaching career and to ensure you get as much out of it as possible you will be guided and observed by a professional teacher trainer who has years of experience in the classroom. Before you are let loose in the classroom to take part in a practice session you will spend several hours planning and preparing for...  [Read more]

  No matter which of our online TESOL courses you choose, you will have the support of an online tutor. From start to finish you will have access to a professional tutor whose one and only focus is to guide you towards successful completion of your training. Whatever problems you encounter or questions you have, however big or small, your online tutor will be able to supply the answers and steer you towards a successful conclusion. To ensure we offer the very highest standard of support and guidance to all our trainees we only take on teacher trainers who have extensive experience of working in an international English language teaching environment. All our tutors will have worked for several years in a range of different classrooms and in a variety of different countries. On top of...  [Read more]

Teaching English abroad can be a rewarding experience for individuals with a degree in education. Many countries require English teachers to have a bachelor's degree in any field, so having a degree in education can be a strong asset. Your background in education can provide you with valuable skills and knowledge that can enhance your teaching abilities in an ESL (English as a Second Language) classroom. Having a degree in education can also open up opportunities for you to teach in international schools or language institutes that prefer or require teachers with a background in education. Your understanding of pedagogy, classroom management techniques, and curriculum development can set you apart as a qualified and competent English teacher. Moreover, your degree in education may have...  [Read more]

Yes, it is entirely possible to teach English abroad without any previous teaching experience. In countries across the world there is a huge demand for English language instruction and often not enough teachers to fill the available positions. Every year, tens of thousands of teachers go abroad to work in schools and language centers and as few as 10% of these will have had any form of prior classroom experience. Regardless of the country you are working in, you will almost certainly teach your students using the method known as total immersion. This worldwide teaching method simply means that English is the only language used in the classroom, from the start to the end of each lesson. The fact is, most students are unable to move to an English speaking country in order to be...  [Read more]

Greece has traditionally been one of the top destinations for teaching English abroad in Europe. Unfortunately, after the global financial crisis in 2008 the country suffered a severe economic downturn that had an adverse effect on all sectors including ESL teaching. Despite this, many people still head to Greece due to its reputation for having a warm Mediterranean climate, amazing beaches and islands, and a relaxed way of life. The biggest market for teachers is in the capital Athens, although other cities such as Thessaloniki, Larissa, Heraklion, and Corfu are also worth looking at. Teacher?s salaries have not really changed much in the last decade, although the average monthly salary for a first-time teacher of around 800 to 1,000 euro per month should still be sufficient to get...  [Read more]

Teaching English in a voluntary role is a very popular choice with TESOL course graduates. There are a wide variety of different options available, located across many countries worldwide. Below we take a closer look at some of the main questions you might have about volunteer teaching, in order to help you decide where the best places to teach English as a volunteer might be. There are plenty of great reasons to volunteer as an ESL teacher and everyone who does it has their own motivations. Some of the most common reasons include: The bottom line is that volunteer teaching programs are available on almost every continent and within dozens of individual countries. As there are too many different options to mention, the best advice is to do an online search of the countries that...  [Read more]

  This presentation is going to cover the teaching of productive skills. To start with, if we think about the way in which you learnt your first language, most of us go through a particular process. Firstly, we listen to those around us, after that first silent period of listening to other people, then we start to make utterances. Having learned to speak to a certain extent at least, we then go on to learn how to read and to write and this process that we go through is actually covering the four skills that we're trying to teach our English students. So, we have listening, speaking, reading, and writing. If we group those skills into their different types, then the two skills of reading and listening are known as receptive skills, whereas the skills of speaking and writing are...  [Read more]

If you have a TESOL qualification and have been working as an ESL teacher for a considerable time, you might be ready to change direction. There are several options available to experienced teachers and one of them is to become a TESOL course trainer. TESOL trainers are responsible for ensuring that the next generation of ESL teachers are fully prepared for everything that the classroom has in store and it can be a very rewarding career. The pay can often be good and it can also be a route into management or even starting up your own language school. But what do you need in order to become a TESOL trainer? The most important qualification required is to complete a TESOL certification course. This will ensure you have a good insight into the training involved and all the skills and...  [Read more]

  For the lesson that even takes place, there are a number of things that you need to have considered. Obviously, you need a very clear idea of what it is you're expecting the students to have to do and they need to know why. It's very important before you ask them to do an activity that they have an understanding of the purpose of that activity. You should, secondly, have had a thought about what they already know. Linked to that is, will it be necessary to do any form of pre-teaching before I can expect them to do this activity and finally, we need to make sure that we have prepared all our materials and our instructions for this particular activity. So, we'll consider a straight arrow ESA lesson, the focus of which is to be speaking skills. So, we'll start with our engage and in...  [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]

  So speaking activities will come in many different forms but we can generalize them into three basic types. Control activities tend to be used in the study phase and here, the teacher will be helping the students in terms of what they need to say and how they go about saying it. So, there's a high level of structure within a controlled activity. A guided activity has slightly less structure than this and it can be used in either the study or the activate stages themselves. The final type of activity or class of activity is called creative activity and this one would be used in the activation phase. In a creative activity, we're giving a scenario or a very small amount of structure and we're asking the students to actually create their own answers to this particular question....  [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]

  This presentation is going to have a look at the idea of receptive skills and how we can go about teaching receptive skills lessons. There are two receptive skills and they are reading and listening. If we think about first of all, why do we read or listen, then there are probably two main answers to that. Firstly, it could either be for entertainment or it could be for a specific purpose. Within the reading and listening areas there are a number of sub-skills that we can teach our students. Firstly, what we can do is to show different examples of reading. So, let's say, for example, that we have just bought ourselves a new video camera and along with that video camera came a whole book of instructions. In order to find out how to get that camera working, then we would need to...  [Read more]

  The next example of a game that we can adapt very easily for classroom use is the game of Jeopardy and in this particular game, what we can do is to have a set of levels for our questions, I'd say one through five, where one is going to be the easiest example and five is going to be the most difficult and then, in each of these sets of boxes, we can have various grammar points, such as tenses, perhaps modals, vocabulary and maybe even conditionals. So what the students can do is they can pick a particular topic first of all and within that topic, they can pick the level of the question that they want and then we can have a set of cards that have been created to fit into these slots and we can ask them that question at that level. So, a very simple adaptation of the game jeopardy...  [Read more]

  So, let's take a common game that's been played over the years, which is called Noughts and Crosses or Tic-Tac-Toe. What we're going to do is to adapt this game for classroom use. So, we've taken the normal Tic-Tac-Toe or Noughts and Crosses grid and we've just numbered out each of the particular squares. What we can then do is to form teams and those teams can then be asked a series of questions and they get to choose which question they want from 1 to 9. So, let's say, for example, they choose question 1. That could be on anything that they have studied ,the grammar or vocabulary. If they get that question correct and say they are the Noughts or the zeros then they get to put their mark here. What the next group will probably do is to try to block them in some way by choosing...  [Read more]

  Once we're satisfied that all the students have been engaged and that they've been given the opportunity to say something, we can move on to our study phase. Here, it may be necessary or useful to actually pre-teach some gaps in knowledge that have been shown from the engage phase and those gaps in knowledge may include actual grammar structures or indeed useful vocabulary and it's very important that, before we move on to doing any forms of activity, we check their understanding of this material. So, we need to do some study exercises. It's also very useful if you leave this information up on the board through all that study period. Those study activities can just be the normal types of gap fills or matching activities and, as always, we need to demonstrate those activities,...  [Read more]