Parker, Arizona TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

In this lesson I learned about some theories, methods and techniques of teaching in the classroom. The first section was about the different methodologies that could be used effectively when teaching. A few examples that I thought were the most critical were the silent way where the teacher tries to say as little as possible so the students can discover the language themselves. Another one was Presentation, Practice and Production in which the teacher presents the language by explaining the meaning and context. Then the students practice the language. The next topic was engage, study and activate which started off with Elicitation. This is very important in that it helps with getting a response from your students. Some examples of ways to do this would be through flashcards/pictures, drawings and real life objects. All of these are good techniques but it is definitely a good idea to mix things up so you aren't too predictable. After this section I moved on to Engage which in a nutshell is trying to get the students interested and involved with the lesson. This can be done with activities to motivate them. The next part of ESA is study which focuses on the language and how to construct it. This is often demonstrated with worksheets given to the students to check their understanding and to be able to review it. Lastly, activate is the stage where students are encouraged to use what they have learned about the language as freely as possible. The next part of the unit are examples of ESA lesson types. The first one is the Straight Arrow which the teacher engages the student, helps them study and then guides them to use the information by creating an activity to do. The next example is a Boomerang lesson which the order of the lesson is engage, activate, study and activate. Lastly, there is the Patchwork lesson which allows for a little bit more flexibility. As long as you start with Engage and end with Activate you can have engage, study and activate as many times as you want in between. The next section was ideas for the engage phase which gave good examples of ways to get students involved. There were a few that that were really neat such as fizz buzz, I spy, memory games and slow pictionary. After this was ideas for the study phase which included eliciation, pronunciation, spelling, meaning word order and analysis. I really liked the idea of having students do tongue twisters, hangman or even word searches. This gets them involved and having fun while learning. The last phase is for activate which suggested to use role play, surveys, communication games and story building to allow students to freely use what they have learned. The last few things in this unit that was very significant was giving feedback, correction techniques and who should correct. Giving feedback is important for both the student and the teacher. It allows students to have an idea of how they are progressing and their success. It is also important for the teacher to have feedback from the student to know if their lesson was a success. It is important to know that praising a student is good but correction is also key. It needs to be done in the right way so that the student knows it is constructive and meant to help them get better. Lastly with who corrects there is self correction, student correction and teacher correction. Self correction allows the student to reflect on their mistakes. Student correction is peers helping each other if they are not aware of their mistakes. The last resort is teacher correction which is self explanatory.