Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Iowa? Are you interested in teaching English in Wadena, Iowa? Check out our opportunities in Wadena, 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!
Interestingly, some of the material in this lesson was already familiar to me, because my high school Japanese teacher taught us about some methods of language learning as well as the Japanese language itself. I recognized some of the methods listed: audio-lingualism, grammar-translation and the communicative method. I also know that I have used all three methods to learn at different points in my life. But I was happy to see other language-learning methods with highly organized structures (my favorite thing) introduced as well. I recognized PPP and ESA as methods other teachers I've had have used, and I think they are some of the best out there, along with the communicative method. There is a balance between teacher-student talk time in all three of these, though they are different from each other. The unit also introduced me to some stranger methods of teaching, like the silent method. That one sounded bizarre and not very useful to me, but I looked it up, and I actually think the system of teaching pronunciation is ingenious. The color-coding allows students to pronounce words without worrying about spelling, and also helps them conceptualize the number and types of phonemes in their target language, and how those differ from the ones in their native language.
After introducing all these methods, the unit moved on to the in-depth discussion of the ESA method, the easiest for inexperienced teachers and probably the most fun for students. Each of the stages of the method was discussed: Engage (getting students' attention and "warming them up" for the lesson), Study (learning new information about the language and correcting errors), and Activate (using the langauge in a realistic, communicative setting). A lot of techniques and exercises for each stage were presented: engagement can come through pictures, miming, videos, music, games, props, and more. Study involves more traditional worksheets with various types of exercises. Activate can consist of communicative games, acting out scenes, written work, presentations, debates, and more.
The final points in this unit regarded feedback for students--when and how to give it. The main take-aways were that students should be allowed to correct themselves and each other before the teacher interferes, and that you should always remain positive when correcting mistakes and errors (which are different--a mistake is an accident, something the student knows is wrong, while an error is an instance in which the student does not know or cannot use the correct language).
The information covered in this unit is the meat and potatoes of teaching, so I am sure I will keep reviewing it often to get inspiration for lessons.
