Teach English in Liujiahui Zhen - Luliang Shi

How is teaching one to one different from teaching a large class? In an one to one class, students can get more constant attention from the teacher, comparing to the situation in a large class, in which the teacher has to balance his/ her focus on each student. Thus, the strengths and weaknesses of the students can be seized by the teacher fully and consistently in one to one classes. Besides, it's easier for the teacher to grade his or her teaching language while teaching an individual student. Although there are some drawbacks of teaching one-on-one classes. Students may be lack of pressure and motivation from studying as they have no comparison with their peers in one-on-one classes. In addition, students may feel some exhaustion talking to the teacher individually and constantly and the same lesson format for every class can become monotonous. Thus, initial evaluation to get enough information about the student and sufficient preparation before the classes to assure interesting and motivating classes turn out to be rather significant. So what do teachers need to do before the class? A needs analysis before your very first class with your student is quite necessary. You can have a short conversation with the student about some personal information like name, age, job, hometown and hobby to warm up the atmosphere. Also you can have a general idea of the student's English level. Then you can ask the student's purpose of studying with prompts like, for work, for travelling, or educating children or just for a hobby. Based on that, you can elicit the goal he/ she wants to achieve - what kind of English level the student plans to have and how well he or she can apply to life. Next step can be questions about the student's previous study experiences and their opinions on that. By doing that, you can get to know what they expect from your future teaching and it's also the good time for you to introduce your own teaching method. All these can help give the student encouragement and confidence on your future classes. To end the needs analysis, a placement test can be a good way to choose the textbooks or materials to better suit the student's beginning level. Then, how can we plan an organized and interesting lesson? Here are the possible steps we can refer to: ● Set specific outcomes you expect from your student after the class. ● To begin the class, you can use some games or fun activities as warmer and then simple questions related to target language to lead the student in and get him to talk in English. This can be explained as the engage phase in the "straight arrow" ESA approach. ● Then the teacher starts to teach the target language by eliciting key points and drilling the key words, which is the start of the study phase. After that, the teacher can prepare some sentence building or gap-filling exercises to practice the target structures as the second step of the study phase. ● Next, for the activate stage, the teacher can choose to have communication activities like role-play, story-building or debates. These are all suitable activities for one-on-one classes that can be carried out by two people: the student and the student. ● A wrap-up and feedback-giving is the last step before ending a class. From this stage, you can ask your student to recall the key language points he learns in the class, which is an assessment for you to know how well your student engaged in the class and a reassurance for the student what he actually gains from the class and has a clear idea of what his strengths and areas to work on. There are some other aspects we need to focus on, like materials choosing and technology adopting, teacher talking time (TTT), task assigning, long-term progress tracking beyond the classroom. It’s suggested that more variety of materials and topics should be included, instead of just following a coursebook. Since it may be necessary to switch more quickly from activity to activity to arouse interests, especially with young learners. And online resources like videos or audios related to class contents can be applied to the class. Teachers need to be careful with controlling the quantity of TTT. Besides, a balance between silence, thinking time and and processing time should be found during a class. In terms of long-term follow up and progress tracking, after-class tasks like grammar exercises and writing practices can help students to consolidate what they learn and apply it into practice. Meanwhile, productive tasks can be a way to track students’ progress. In addition, for tracking purpose, teachers can work together with students to decide on the goals in a month, make a table and revise it at the end of the period. All in all, teaching one to one classes can be challenging to the teachers as constant attention should be paid to a single student in classes. Thus sufficient preparation need to be done and variety of activities are needed to applied into teaching to make classes more interesting and catchy. While students can actually learn English in a more effective and efficient way during individual classes since they can receive personalized teaching method and graded teaching language from the teachers who will follow up their study and make study plans together with them to achieve their goals.