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Teaching beginners can be a daunting prospect, especially when it’s a monolingual group and you know nothing of their language, or it’s a multilingual group and the only common language is the English you’ve been tasked with teaching them. Nevertheless, not only is it possible to teach beginners only through English, but it can also be one of the most rewarding levels to teach. More than likely, your students will want to start practising speaking pretty much from the get-go. However, it takes a while for one’s ear to acclimatise to the sounds of a new language, and not everyone will be so keen; don’t pressure students into speaking before they’ve had lots of opportunities to listen to you using it (which doesn’t mean you should just be rambling on at the front of the classroom – with beginners more so than with other levels, you really have to consider what you say and grade your language accordingly). Beginners need lots of repetition and drilling, especially as they get to grips with the sounds of their new language. It might seem boring to go over the same sentences again and again, but it is necessary. When practising a new sentence, try back-drilling, breaking the sentence down into manageable units and then building it back up, working backwards from the end of the sentence to the beginning; this helps to ensure that your intonation is natural and that you get elements of connected speech right. Even though teaching beginners entails progressing slowly and recycling and repeating language many times, that doesn’t mean recycling the same activities, especially not during one lesson. Ensure you have a range of activities to use, and don’t go into class without having first carefully thought through how you are going to introduce new language, how you will check that the students have understood it, how you will practise it, and how you will deal with potential misunderstandings. The possibility for confusion at this level is much greater than at higher levels, and sometimes even harder to disentangle. Also bear in mind that, unlike with higher levels, you can’t rely on conversations developing simply because the students don’t yet have the linguistic resources to engage in anything other than simple exchanges (though in time they will). This means that the onus will largely be on you to keep them talking.Although in many ways the hardest level to teach, it can also be one of the most satisfying. Seeing your learners go from knowing nothing to knowing a few words to knowing a few sentences and structures to being able to hold rudimentary conversations can be incredibly rewarding, and if they enjoy their initial exposure to the language, and feel confident and inspired to continue, then you will have helped pave the way to their further success.A rookie mistake many persons teaching English to complete beginners make is assuming that the students have understood the lesson or classroom instructions. In your first lesson for beginners, adults or kids, your students may not be accustomed to the Western way of schooling where students raise their hands if they don’t understand. Instead, they may be feel embarrassed to admit ignorance in front of the class and prefer to remain silent. When teaching beginners English, you need to read your students’ body language to gauge whether they’ve understood and keep checking whether they've understood by asking.
