Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Delaware? Are you interested in teaching English in Faulkland Heights, Delaware? Check out our opportunities in Faulkland Heights, 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!
In this unit, I learned about teaching methodologies used in the past and the present, Engage, Study, and Activate (ESA) methodology, elicitation, and correction. I find that the flexibility that the ESA method allows is highly desirable and can be very useful to new teachers. As I’ve come to learn, lessons plans don’t always go the way you plan them to, so flexibility in a lesson plan is important. This methodology is very effective and easy to use since ESA allows one to also plan the lesson in a variety of styles: “straight arrow”, “boomerang”, and “patchwork”. I very much enjoy the different activities that were included in this lesson because I have a hard time creating activities that are both fun and effective. I really like some of the ideas for the Engage stage. I believe the Engage stage is the hardest stage to plan because some days it’s even hard to motivate myself to work, so to get students, who may or may not want to be there, engaged and motivated can be a challenge. I particularly gravitate towards “fun” games, such as sevens, the box game, and word linking, because I believe that learning should be fun, or at least as fun as possible, and when learning is fun the students are then more motivated to learn.
Elicitation is a very practical and effective tool to get students to speak. I know, as once a student in a foreign language classroom myself, that speaking in a foreign language in front of your peers can be very scary, so one will try to avoid it as much as possible rather than embrace the mistakes. Over the years I’ve come to embrace my mistakes and see it as an advantage rather than a disadvantage, but I still remember the feeling of not want to speak out loud. Elicitation is necessary in a language classroom in order for the students to practice the language and to also become comfortable with using it. As a teacher, I would stress the importance of trying and making mistakes that will permit students to learn and eventually improve their ability to use the language.
Since I have been interested in teaching English as a foreign language for a long time, I have observed my own language teachers’ methods of teaching and specifically their method of feedback. It is some of the same methods mentioned in this unit, and I remember them to be very effective in helping me to learn from my mistakes. What I found to be really effective was repeating what the student said, mistake included, back to them in a question form because then, one, they realize a mistake was made, two, everyone else can also learn from this mistake, and three, if the correct utterance isn’t made by the student then the teacher can address the mistake with the student or even the entire class and correct it because maybe everyone doesn’t know it’s a mistake.
