Brandon, Michigan TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

I learned how to structure a lesson through the engage, study, activate approach. In the engage portion, I learned about various activities I can use to get students involved and interested in the lesson and get them thinking and speaking in English as much as possible. I learned how to use the study stage as a means to get students to focus on the language and learn about a specific language point. In the activate phase, I learned how to structure activities to allow students to freely and openly use the language concepts they recently acquired. I also learned that lessons can be structured through the ESA method in the 'straight arrow' way, which is a more direct engage-study-activate structure, or patchwork or boomerang methods, which allow for more flexibility in using the ESA steps. In correcting students, I learned how to differentiate between mistakes and errors and that sometimes praising students can be as important as correcting them. I learned that it is really important to choose when to correct students and that letting students figure out their own mistakes is a far better way to learn. In this lesson, I learned about the various teaching methodologies that I can use in an ESL classroom. I studied many methods including: grammer-translation, which promotes language learning through finding equivalents in the students' own language, audio-lingualism, which helps forms language habits through conditioning, Presentation Practice and Production (PPP), task-based learning, which focuses on task completion, communicative language teaching, which stresses language functions over grammar and vocabulary, community language learning, which allows students to control their own discussions, the silent way, which removes the teacher as much as possible, suggestopaedia, which focuses on creating comfortable environments for students, and the lexical approach, which argues that words and phrases are more important than learning grammar structures.