Teach English in Gucheng Zhen - Liaocheng Shi

The role of the teacher has been changing for over years. Before the 21st century, the classes were dominated by a teacher. The teacher’s talk time used to cover almost 90% of the entire class session. But recently, the school and education curriculums are designed with the purpose to increase students’ talk time (STT) and to reduce teacher talk time (TTT). For the students to develop their communication skills in all the four aspects that is to say reading, writing, listening, and speaking,to boost their confidence, improve their creativity and learning English in a natural way, schools adopted an ESA lesson plan, where E-stands engage, S-stands for study, and A-stands for activate. To achieve this the teacher has nine different roles to play for the lesson to be successful like the controller, organizer, assessor, participant, prompter, tutor, facilitator, observer, and model. From now on, let us look at each role in details. 1. Controller or manager. For any lesson to be successful the teacher needs to take up a managing role starting from the seating arrangement. The teacher should control the flow of activities in the class. 2. Organizer, the teacher organizes the class to suit different activities like group works, games, grouping students into pairs among other organizational activities. 3. Assessor, a good teacher should be able to measure the performance of the students. By evaluating the children performance, it can be done in various ways depending on the language level or capacity. For example, assessment can be done in the form of examinations, group or individual presentation, class participation, and essay writing. Giving feedback and correction to students is another important part of the assessment. 4. Participant, a good teacher should also be a good participant. This works more effectively in situations like one-on-one class, or the situation where the students are uneven in one of the group compared to other groups. The teacher might decide to be a participant. Or if its a one on one class, and there is a phone call interview or an activity that needs to work in pairs, in such a situation, the teacher will obviously work as a participant. 5. Prompter, the teachers works as a motivator, he encourages and guides the students to improve their language usage. The teacher gives the students' clues or tips to assist them to fully develop their English language. 6. Tutor, the teacher can also work as a tutor, when he guides students in small groups or on an individual basis. In this situation, special attention is given to a particular student or a certain group of students. 7. Resource or facilitator, a teacher provides with students enough knowledge, material and time to work on the project or presentation by themselves. The teacher just sits behind the class and the students come for a consultation. 8. Observer or monitor, the teacher can work as an observer when he watches over the students. This helps the teacher to evaluate how successful the lesson has been. And for cases like the oral or speaking session, the teacher might write down the common mistakes for feedback time. This works better during group time since students will be talking to each other. 9. Model, the teacher is like a model to the students especially the native teachers, the teacher is the source of knowledge in all aspects of the language like grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. In most cases in countries where English is not an official language like Asian countries like China, Japan, and Korea, the teacher is the main source of the correct English for their students. In conclusion, the teacher plays an important role in the lives of the students and to the success of the lesson or a course unit. The teacher motivates students, models, guides, assess, organizes, manages all class activities.