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In this summative task I will explain why punishment isn't always the answer when teaching english as a foreign language. Classroom management is extremely important as an ESL teacher but punishment isn't always the answer because it can discourage students from trying at all. For example: you have a star chart and all the children are singing and dancing to a song but there is one kid that doesn't stand up at all, the teacher could say I'm taking one star away from you for not joining in. If you do this then the chances are you are going to discourage him and maybe he won't try again in the rest of the tasks during the lesson. Instead of discouraging your students you should encourage them instead. Learning english as a second language requires a lot of encouragement from the teacher and also the fellow classmates. Now ill take the last scenario and do something different. All kids are singing and dancing to a song but there is one kids that doesn't stand up at all. Teacher: “wow student A is doing so well, student B is singing very loudly, student C is following the actions etc, you can all get one star.” Teacher then goes up to student that doesn't want to join in with the singing and dancing “do you want a star too ? Why don't you stand up and try, just follow the actions and i will give you one star” If the student still doesn't join in then you can say “we will sing another song later, maybe you can join in with us then.” This is an example of using positive encouragement as throughout the scenario the teacher is constantly trying to encourage the student to join in. Even at the end when the student might not have joined in with the song she still encouraged him to join in with the next song later on in the class. Now i will give another example that doesn't involve using your class reward system. When drilling words one by one for small classes you can play mini games. For this example i will use a class on colors. I have 4 flashcards of the colors green, blue, yellow and red. Hit the flashcard and say green, keep the flashcard arms length away from the student and when the student. 'Can you say green ?' 'wow super now you can hit the flashcard.' you get the a student that won't speak but really wants to play the game. 'do you want to hit it ? Can you say green ? Great now you can hit the flashcard.' Even if the students pronunciation isn't great as long as the student tries it is the main thing. This is another example of an alternative to punishment by using positive encouragement. You can then get them to do other actions with the other colors such as catch the flashcard, jump on the flashcard and kick the flashcard. You can use the same method for a lot of lessons. Overall i think that with ESL learners punishment should be an absolute last resort as usually when a student doesn't want to join in it is down to them being uncomfortable or shy. There are many alternatives to punishment and i just listed a couple but positive encouragement is in my opinion the most important thing.
