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This unit focuses on teaching methodologies and the most appropriate approach for trainee and new teacher – Engage, Study and Activate (ESA) – which is applied to provide teachers flexibilities in the classroom.
There are a great number of approaches that can be applied such as grammar – translation, audio – lingualism, presentation practice and production (PPP), task-based learning, communicative language teaching (CLT), community language learning (CLL), the silent way, suggestopaedia, and the lexical approach. However, which approaches to be chosen depend on students’ culture, demand and teachers’ personalities, etc. And unfortunately, each method has its pros and cons. As a result, the teacher needs to understand the actual & individual circumstances in order to help the students’ learning effectively.
It is important to motivate, remain students’ positivity and create opportunities for students to use the language during the lessons, thus, Engage – Study and Activate (ESA) which is put forward by Jeremy Harmer is considered to be the most useful and logical approach. These three elements need to be present in most lessons. Depending on the level of the class, lesson content and other factors, teachers can vary the order of the phases, for example Engage – Study – Activate (Straight Arrow ESA), Engage – Activate 1 – Study – Activate 2 (Boomerang ESE) or Engage – Acitivate 1 – Study – Activate 2 – Activate 3 – Engage – Study – Activate 4 (Patchwork ESA). It is flexible and there is no rule for the phase order; however, whatever the order is, every ESA process has to start with Engage and finish with Activate.
Besides teaching approaches, providing on-going feedback on how the students have been doing and if they are going correctly or wrongly is useful. It is essential to give positive feedback to maintain students’ motivation. On the other hand, feedback should be clear and audible so that students can correct their own works.
Correction techniques are also a major skill which takes time and experience to be perfect. Too much correction is as not good as too little. In addition, correcting is as important as praising. Before teachers provide corrections to students, we should give them opportunities to correct by themselves or do peer-correction so that they are able to remember the mistakes and avoid it in the future. However, not all the mistakes should be corrected during the class. There are three occasions that correction is necessary: (1) mistakes related to the language point of the lesson, (2) repeated mistakes that are so risky to become ingrained, and (3) mistakes seriously impeding understanding. Correction should be kept at minimum level at Engage and Activate phase to ensure the fluency of the students’ activities.
