Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Maine? Are you interested in teaching English in Westmanland, Maine? Check out our opportunities in Westmanland, 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 we looked at the history of teaching language (specifically English) from the classical method (grammar translation: involves direct translation via written text) to audio lingualism (methodology based on behaviourist theories of the time pertaining to the belief that learning comes about through conditioning and therefore they use drills to facilitate language acquisition) to more 'controversial' ways of learning like the Silent Way (based on the theory of constructivism and abstracting the language into separate visual components). We also saw the benefits and issues that come with all approaches. Some are too 'teacher centered' while others are not attentive enough. For example, in the Community Language Learning method, students take full control of the class direction and discussion topics while the teacher helps only when problems arise. One may ask why a teacher is there at all. And then there are other methods, like Grammar Translation, that does not help a student build their speaking skills and you could question what use there is for the student to only learn about reading and writing. We also looked deeply into the ESA structure and how this method tries to take many good points from the history of english language teaching. E stands for Engage. This is the part of the class where we get students talking and thinking in English through fun games, discussions, vocab lists etc. S stands for Study, and this part of the class has boardwork (where the teacher elicits as much information as possible from the students first) and then worksheets are handed out to test to see if the students fully understood the introduced concepts. A stands for Activate. This phase is the time to explore the language fully and freely through role plays, situational discussions, and communication games. This type of lesson is called a Straight Arrow. This is better for lower language level learners because it gives them a firm base and structure to build their knowledge on. Whereas for higher level students, there are two other forms that lessons can take; Boomerang and Patchwork. Boomerang puts students into an Engage phase and then immediately into an Activate. This leads into a Study section where they go over mistakes they made in the Activate, and then they get another chance at it for the last part of the class. The Patchwork lesson can take any form as long as it starts with Engage and ends with Activate. This type of class has many little segments so that classes don't become too predictable.
