Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Michigan? Are you interested in teaching English in Oscoda, Michigan? Check out our opportunities in Oscoda, 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!
I have learnt from this unit about teaching the two productive skills, speaking and writing. Though they both are used for the same purpose - to communicate, writing is the more difficult skill, requiring a greater degree of accuracy, while speaking requires a greater degree of fluency as the speaker rarely have time to think and plan words to say.
If teachers wish to introduce a communicative activity to their students, they must create the need and desire to communicate in the students.
Accuracy and fluency are equally important in language communication: accuracy activities are concentrated on producing correct language; and fluency activities are concentrated on allowing the students to experiment and be creative with language.
Students can be reluctant to speak in the classroom for various reasons. Teachers need to overcome these hurdles and encourage student interaction by creating a comfortable atmosphere in the class, where students are not afraid to speak or make mistakes, and enjoy communicating with the teacher and their classmates.
The teacher can encourage students to speak and interact during a lesson by:
- Using pair-works/group-works for students to do tasks and activities
- Drill words and phrases, and model dialogues before asking the students to have free role-play
- Change the classroom dynamics
- Allow the students time to think and plan what they are going to say.
This unit also provide detailed guidelines for a free/creative speaking activity which I find very helpful and practical. I especially like the ones about how to provide feedback after the activity like indicating how well the class communicated, focusing on what they were able to do rather than on what they couldn't do, and correcting individual mistakes privately.
Though speaking and writing lessons have many common factors to be considered and incorporated, there are additional issues the teacher has to take into account for a writing activity: handwriting, spelling, layout and punctuation, and some difference in grammar and vocabulary from those used in speaking.
This unit also gives an introduction and recommendation to using games (competitive and co-operative ones) in language classes. I totally agree with this point since games promote student interactions and also provide language practice in many skills.
