Teach English in Chujiang Zhen - Chengdu Shi

Teacher talk time in the classroom can have positive or negative impacts for the students. To look at the positivity of teacher talk time in the classroom, it is beneficial for the students to listen to a native speaker to pronounce words correctly and improve their listening skills as well. Conversely, the negative aspect of too much teacher talk time in the classroom will end up depriving the students of getting involved in their learning process. So, what can we do to decrease the teacher talk time in the classroom? There could be numerous ways to reduce teacher talk time in the classroom and give more opportunities for the students to talk, but the following could be utilized by any teacher to reduce it: 1. Involving students in the classroom and you take the observer role and give the student the active role. Of course, it seems difficult but it should be a deliberate decision you should make. For instance, you can always invite the students to the board and encourage them to break their fear of speaking in front of their classmates. Perhaps that is you who should create that atmosphere for the students to talk. 2. You should always avoid answering your own questions in the classroom. Your questions should be purposeful designed in a way to check for understating, to provoke students’ thinking. Have students share their ideas, or have them write and practice what they have learned so far. 3. You should act as a prompter in order to elicit much more student talk time. In order to achieve the role of a prompter, you should set up an activity clearly and with enthusiasm, design lessons where students’ inquiry and discovery are enhanced, and encourage them to discuss and elaborate more on their classmates’ answers. 4. You should be mindful of the quality or your talk. When you talk in the classroom, your talk should be effective and efficient. You should always strive to avoid long explanations, repeating what students say, avoid unnecessary paraphrasing and repeating instructions. 5. 25 % teacher talk time and 75% student talk time is the minimum goal you should strive for. 6. Make use of pair work and switch partners often within the same task thus giving each student more chances to use the target language. 7. Usage of more non-verbal cues in the classroom can reduce the teacher talk time. As teacher, you can replace the words that you repeatedly use in the classroom such as the tapping on the board and pointing to a specific word or phrases for students to read or repeat. You can use a wide variety of gestures as such to find the ones that work best for our lessons and student (of course, you have to be careful of the non-acceptable gestures in the country where you are teaching). 8. You should you give clear and objective instructions (e.g. you should not give instructions of an activity that involves so many steps at once). 9. Avoid long tangents about irrelevant topics. Teacher talk time can be the only way to communicate the lesson to the students; however, we should always be mindful of time and our students. More importantly, we should share talk time with our students and always be mindful of our talk time in the classroom. I strongly believe that if we implement the above-mentioned suggestions into our daily classroom schedule, we may notice that our classes will start running smoother and our students will be more engaged—consequently, the students will be more receptive and over time we will find a balance between our talking time and our students’ talk time. References: 1. https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/esl-teaching-techniques/ 2. https://edulearn2change.com/article-4-ways-to-reduce-teacher-talking-time/