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Being a teacher is a challenging task for most people. Despite many people’s belief that this job is not as serious or hard as many others, it still takes quite a bit of talent and determination to make a good teacher. A teacher is the only true leader and authority in his or her classroom, and therefore he is completely responsible for success and failure of his students. Of course, all teachers have different personalities, some are rather extrovert and sociable, finding little difficulty in establishing a positive rapport with students and becoming their friend and hero, while others are more quiet and timid. However, in language learning classroom there should be something deeper and more fundamental, a systematic approach that will help any teacher bring his students to knowledge and success. I believe ESA is such a system, and it should be widely used in English classrooms. ‘E’ stands for engage, the first stage of any lesson. While usually new material and heavy studying exercises are not used in this shorter introductory stage to the lesson, I would say that this is actually the most important part of the lesson. Why so? In my personal experience as a teacher, first few moments of a lesson will set the tone for its whole duration. Teacher definitely has to always be positive and cheerful, but at the same time he must begin lesson with very easy-going, fun, involving warm-up activities. This should include some kind of game, for example hangman, tic-tac-toe, twenty questions, anagrams, picture description, or maybe a discussion of how students spent their weekend, or on any other topic. It does not have to be connected with the lesson’s target lesson. Our goal is to engage, to motivate. As the students get into a positive studying atmosphere, we can start moving into the ‘S’, or study stage. Here we would try to elicit new vocabulary or grammar structures from the students and put it on the board. It is important to try getting out as much information as possible from the class, rather than just putting your own ideas on board for them to copy. Teacher speak time should always be kept as short as possible. It can be a good idea to drill the words and grammar on the board with class. Then we need to practice new language and structures. This can be in form of reading texts, worksheets, word searches, gap filling, and other exercises to reinforce the new language. At this stage it would be appropriate to provide all the necessary corrections, because students need to understand the correct use of new language. Finally, we move on to the last stage, which is ‘A’ or activate. What do we need to activate? The language that was taught in the previous stage, of course. And this is done through pair-work and group activities where students get creative and try to use as much of new language as they can. These phase is usually comprised of role-plays, some kind of producing project, where students make something together, like an advertisement of some product. Also we use story-building, surveys, discussions, any many other communication activities. At this last stage teacher should take a step back, and monitor the students, allowing their creativity flow freely. ESA is a very versatile approach. It is flexible, allowing for many possible variations. And for me that is one of its main strengths. A teacher can always modify it to his needs, changing up and mixing activities, while staying within the general framework, which has proven to be very successful in the setting of TEFL classroom.
