Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Michigan? Are you interested in teaching English in Fredonia, Michigan? Check out our opportunities in Fredonia, 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!
This unit introduced the different methods of teaching. There are a lot of different methods, and many should be used during the lessons. Some of my favorites included task-based learning. I believe that if you focus on the task instead of the language you can learn better. I think this is because the focus on grammar for too long can be frustrating and unproductive. The students need to go out and learn! This task-based learning can be helpful as a teaching tool. When I was in France, we were focused on a task like creating our own song or ordering from a menu. We made mistakes in grammar, but it was more important just to start speaking. You did not know what your weaknesses were until you just began to speak. I also love the audio way of learning. Hearing the language spoken is huge to help in the learning process! If a student does not hear the language they will feel less confident in speaking because they will not know how words are pronounced. A combination of audio and lexical approaches (learning phrases and sentences) will help engage their mind. Repeating key phrases over and over can help a student know what phrases they can use. These phrases might not be able to have a direct translation into L1, but they will be phrases that can be used. For example 'ja ne' in Japanese literally means "then, right?" However, that phrases is used when leaving to say bye. Learning the phrase without direct translation can help students learn what to say even though they might not understand the grammatical structure of that phrase. (The phrases used and the structure can be different. We use short-hand greeting and goodbyes often).
In planning a lesson, ESA is used for the structure of the activities. This stands for engage, study, activate. The first thing you should do is engage the class. Get the students to start thinking in English to warm themselves up from whatever activity they just came from. For example, a teacher can greet students at the door and have them greet her back. Another example can be having them listen to an English song. There are lots of specific activities that can be used for engage that are listen in the chapter. Study phase is used to learn the new material. This can be new vocab or grammar. This new material can be taught with cross word puzzles, word searches, and other worksheets. Activate is the most important phase. It is where the students take the language that they have and apply it to their conversations. All three phases of ESA should be used in each classroom time, but they can come in a variety of different orders. For example the lesson could be a patchwork of different phases like ESASAE. Do what works best for your class, but remember to keep the class engaging. Do not just have the teacher talk the entire time- have the students speak and participate in a variety of activities that are appropriate for their age level.
