Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in New Hampshire? Are you interested in teaching English in Derry, New Hampshire? Check out our opportunities in Derry, 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've been teaching English in Japan for just over two years now, but I got quite a few new ideas from this unit! "Engage, Study, Activate" is the structure I use in all my lessons, but I realized sometimes I don't fully optimize the "engage" phase...
For example, last month, I started a mixed-level adult class by having students think about the meaning of an idiom ("weather the storm" -- because a typhoon had just come to Japan). In pairs, they discussed possible meanings, and then we discussed the answer and dove into a lesson focused on natural disaster vocab. Although students were interested in the idiom and were glad to have learned it, I noticed that ALL students weren't participating throughout the lesson, and I was a bit frustrated and puzzled by that.
Then, this week, before doing a themed "engage" lesson, I simply asked all the students "What did you do today? Tell me about your day." EVERY student told me what they did, whether it was one sentence or a whole explanation. During that class, ALL students were continuously engaged. I realized that even though that "engage" activity wasn't related to the theme of the day, it warmed everyone up in a really vital way. I'm glad this unit helped me put into words and rationalize what had happened and why.
It was also interesting reading about the different teaching strategies and thinking about how those play out in Japan. Right now, the emphasis is on grammar and drilling, and students are often shy and afraid of making mistakes. In elementary schools now, the government is pushing new curricula that focus more on communication in real-life scenarios and less on exact translation. Though that's what the government is pushing in theory, it's not really catching on in practice yet. It's really difficult to find the right balance when teaching students who come from a culture that emphasizes technical perfection and indoctrinates students with guilt and shame over mistakes. I hope to learn more (through study and through practice) about ways to help draw students out and give them the confidence to engage, study, and activate without that immobilizing fear!
