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Teach English in Tuya Zhen - Bazhong Shi

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Tuya Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Bazhong Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.

Before I dive into this topic and try to answer the above question, let me quickly draw your attention and provide you some examples on how different teaching online is from teaching in person. In case you teach in person, you need to drive or travel when you have to teach. In addition, you need to bring textbooks, worksheets, activity sheets all printed out in enough numbers. In most cases your schedule is given, you do not have much control on when and where you need to deliver a lesson. Teaching English online is very, very different! You can break away from time and space constraints and limitations: you can invite students into your ‘virtual classroom’ from anywhere in the world – theoretically. It also means that you can connect to a wider audience (potential students). There are many differences in teaching English online compared to teaching it in person (or in a classroom environment). By teaching online, you can also access to an unlimited resource base (on the Internet) which is only from a couple of clicks away from your fingertips. Nevertheless, as the saying goes ‘many times less is more’, and it is true here as well. Nowadays, when nearly everything can be found online, the challenge is not to find information, but to find the relevant information. We can say - as the conclusion - that online teaching is not easier at all than classroom teaching. How to choose engaging resources from the ocean of online resources? I think the best advice is to think about your student base: who will be your audience? What can be relevant or appropriate for them? Using a Japanese resource for a Chinese student (or vice versa) would not be very professional. Similarly, showing an article about Chilean miners to a Pakistani student would not be very relevant either – I am afraid. Your student base is much wider (being an online ESL teacher), so you must be more culturally aware. Avoid topics related to politics, religion, and sexism and try to stay moderate in your manners and gestures. Since the resource for online teaching is inexhaustible, the best approach in finding the proper resource for your students is to know their needs and provide a solution for their problems or desires. Because of this, you cannot say that this or that resource is the ‘Holy Grail’ and it is good for all your students in all circumstances. It is advisable to make a need analysis at the beginning of your course with each of your student. You should level test the student, find out where are the weaknesses and provide a solution for those weaknesses. This would define (or better to say ‘restrict’) the possible resources you might use during your online teaching venues with that student. Since there are no two students are alike, the needs will always be a bit (or very) different resulting in the resource used similar or very different, too. So, what resources I may use to teach English online? In the second half of my essay, let me give you some information on the actual resources you can use. In case you want to watch videos and discuss them with your students, you can use a YouTube channel (for example EnglishAnyone: https://www.youtube.com/user/EnglishAnyone). You can listen to a video together (maybe with subtitles), and discuss what you heard. One of my favorites is EngVid (www.EngVid.com), which is actually a video library of very instructive and informative videos. Another very helpful resource can be the SimpleEnglishVideos site (https://www.simpleenglishvideos.com/). Here, you can also see and read the script of the videos, which can be very useful for learners who cannot follow the discussions without having the aid of a subtitles or a script. In case you want to improve not only the listening skills of your students, you can use the site ‘Breaking News English’ (https://breakingnewsenglish.com/index.html): you can find nearly three thousand free English lessons in seven different levels on this site. The lesson contains a podcast and a text, as well as some related tasks to the text. In this way, you can not only practice and improve listening skills, but also improve writing and reading skills as well. The tasks vary lesson by lesson, but in most cases, there are warm-ups, vocabulary builders, synonym matches, phrase matches, gap fills as well as comprehension questions. A very similar (in structure) site is English Listening Lesson Library (http://www.elllo.org), which I would very much recommend for teaching purposes. In case you want to improve writing and reading skills, the site: https://www.englishforeveryone.org can be a very good choice. As its name indicates, if you want to focus on grammar during your course, one of the best resources might be the site called ‘Perfect English Grammar’ (https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com). Not only your resources, but also the types of activities you use during your online lessons can be limitless. Basically, you can do the same things more or less than that of a personal setting (but in a virtual space). By using the video chat, you can show real objects, flashcards, and drawings. Also, you can share your screen and show pictures, lists, texts, videos etc. Eye contact, gestures and your voice are also as important as in the classroom environment. Do not forget that the chat feature of your communication device (Skype, Messenger etc.) is your ‘virtual whiteboard’, so use it whenever you would use the whiteboard in the offline setting: type out words, instructions, share links, provide page numbers or the date of the next lesson to avoid misunderstandings etc. Change the activities and resources from time to time, so the online experience for your students will be fun and diversified. Always take into account the age and level of your student and choose wisely among the myriad activities and resources you might use to help him or her.


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