Ilesa, Nigeria TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit covers teaching methodologies. There are many different approaches and methodologies that have been used throughout history to teach languages. The oldest is the Classical way or grammar/translation. This method of direct translation from L1 to L2 or vice-versa is fine for reading and writing but is not well suited toward speaking a new language. From this 17th century approach evolved a new method in the late 19th and early 20th century called audio-lingualism which stressed listening and repeating drills. Both of these methods have fallen out of favor in modern teaching institutions--although the classical method is still the most common method used throughout the world. The 20th century saw the introduction of many new methods including (but not limited to: presentation, practice and production (PPP); task-based learning; communicative language teaching; community language learning; the silent way; suggestopaedia, etc. This TEFL course, however, focuses on Engage, Study, Activate (ESA) which seems to be influenced most by PPP, communicative language teaching, task-based learning and community language learning. ESA is a great method to learn for new teachers and for early to intermediate learners. ESA stands for Engage, Study, Activate. The first stage, engage, engages a group of students by using fun and interesting methods of introducing new vocab and concepts to, essentially, prime the students for learning. The study phase gives students work to do that is either student or teacher centered that lays out these new vocabulary words and grammatical structures in their entirety. Once these tasks or lessons are complete and the new ideas are understood, students enter the activate phase. In the activate phase, students take what they have learned from both previous lessons and the current lesson to speak fluently about a given concept. An ESA method lesson plan can be organized in straight arrow, boomerang and patchwork manners. These could be ESA, EASA, EASAESA, respectively. There are many different techniques that can be used in each of the phases for successful teaching, for example: intro prompts, I spy and memory games in the engage phase; word order worksheets, tongue twisters and gap fill worksheets in the study phase; and role plays, material production and debates in the activate phase. Common thoughts regarding feedback and mistake/error correction are that feedback should be generally very positive and encouraging and corrections should be preferably more student-centered and less teacher-centered. Corrections should only be made when absolutely necessary and should really be avoided as much as possible in both the engage and activate phase; this is because the engage phase is used to get the students excited and put them at ease and the activate phase should be focused on producing as much fluent language and activation as possible--students should feel comfortable being as creative as possible in this stage. Errors in the activate phase should be noted by the teacher and used to inform future lesson plans.