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There are many types of teachers in the world of ESL. This also means that there are many various types of teaching styles. Although, some teachers tend to lean on their most comfortable style, it’s important to remember your students personalities and the way they take in the information. Over the past 17 year of teaching ESL in Japan, I’ve had the chance to focus on 4 various teaching styles that work for me. I’ll discuss 4 types of teaching styles in this paper. They consist of student’s physical reaction, using targets and themes relevant to the students, using real or authentic materials, and using short video clips to elicit a response, description. First, let’s take a look at using the student reaction method or style. This method is good when teaching young children or teaching students activities and sports. For example, when you are teaching young children and you say, “sit down” or “stand up”. The students then react physically to the command. The become familiar with one or two words while staying active. Another example, would be teaching students how to play a sport. For example when teaching basketball you might say, , “dribble, dibble, pass, screen, cut, catch, and shoot. You’ve just described a play while the team was reacting. This is a simple but effective way of teaching beginners or active students. Next, we’ll discuss the idea of talking about items that are relevant to the students. This important to increase students vocabulary that is relevant to them. It’s also a way to learn about your students, all while building a rapport with them. For example, if you were teaching a group of teenage girls, you might want to talk about music and bands. This would be good to do in the warm-up or the first 5-7 minutes of class. Students get excited with realizing they were talking in English. You could vocabulary that came up on the whiteboard. This is a way of building vocabulary that would come up in the students everyday lives. Of course, every student and every class can be diverse so the challenge is to keep everyone included. Let’s move on to using real or authentic materials. I try to use this for every level, but the lower levels can be challenging. Grab a local advertisement and create a role play. For example, with a group of elementary school students, you might grab an advertisement displaying different colors of backpacks or shoes. I usually use converse because everyone loves them. I’d ask them, “Which color do you like?”, and they would respond, “I like blue” or “I like the blue ones”. It’s very simple and could be modified a number of ways. Another example would be getting a number of pamphlets and planning a vacation with a group of university students. The final style or method to use in the classroom would be to use short video clips to elicit a response, description, or prediction. I usually use short 15 second clips. You can ask what happened, what was happening, or what do you think will happen. You can stope the video clip to create suspense or rewind the clip to check the students response. This method works well for all ages, but teenagers pick up the language and grammar quickly using this method. I think it is best to incorporate all these methods into a teaching style. The more methods that are used, means that more students will be reached due to there personalities an learning styles.
