Teach English in Louziying Zhen - Xinzhou Shi

Why would I ever get a teaching certification? That thought lingered in my mind while one of my older co-teachers gave me career advice. I considered my 2 year-younger self one of the hardest working and dedicated online teachers in our small company. I tried my best applying everything I learned from company training: Be energetic. Smile the entire time. Correct their grammar mistakes immediately after they made it so they can remember next time. The result was having more classes compared to my other co-teachers and being praised as a good teacher. Yet, I was unhappy. I never felt I was a competent teacher no matter how much effort I put into teaching. Lucas, my Chinese teenage student, would make the same grammatical mistakes from the day he started learning with me even if I corrected a specific mistake fifty times throughout the year and a half we were together (unfortunately a realistic number). There were lessons I taught to my students with language points that I couldn’t help them remember. This hurt my confidence overall in teaching. As I look back, I realized that I was just passionate and hard-working with no effectiveness in teaching other than being a model in pronunciation and intonation. While studying my TESOL course, all the reasons for the failed results of teaching became clearer. I realize now that when I was teaching my students a tense, I only gave them controlled practice of the tense without an activity to help them practice it fluently (Activate stage). I don’t remember using any form of an elicitation technique. I could have elicited the past simple by showing a picture of a boy on the floor from falling down and asking my student, “What happened to the boy?” Before I expected my student to start saying a tense correctly after giving him/her some controlled practice and then I would just correct them right after they made a mistake or error. Instead of correcting a student right away when they made a mistake or error, I know better now. I can ask them “What did you say?”, or “hmm?” with a tone and look that would make them think about what they said. The last resort would be to eventually correct them if they can’t get what they said right. The reason why Lucas never learned from his errors in grammar was because I never gave him time to think about his grammatically incorrect responses. I was basically spoon feeding him. Correcting someone right away after they made a mistake or an error is like giving a man a fish and feeding him for a day over teaching a man to fish to eat for a lifetime. Indeed, I did feed my students every single class. I understand that being enthusiastic and encouraging can help motivate a student. But if they themselves can’t feel that they have learned and have improved, how can they truly feel motivated to study long-term? Great teaching skills are vital for students to improve their English and have steady progress which will give them fulfillment and devote their time in studying more seriously. Moving to the present year, I made the decision in May to invest in an online TEFL course that ITTT provided. A couple weeks later I applied a teaching tip I learned from a unit: making lessons unpredictable. Working in my second teaching job and current company (I teach Kindergarten classes online), I noticed that a smart class of mine were getting bored with the supposed uniform way of teaching that all of my co-teachers are instructed to follow: Warm up for 5 minutes, 10 minutes of teaching the PowerPoint and then production time for the remainder amount of time. This worked well for the first few lessons, but eventually they would get bored. No matter how energetic and passionate I taught, they either daydreamed or talked to their classmates. I had to make it different. I made sure that they had a good 3 minute engage activity that was not related to the lesson so that they could warm up and then be more inclined to listening. I didn’t want to make the engage activity lesson-related because these students already memorized each of the key words and I didn’t want them to see these key words for the whole 25 minutes to prevent boredom (it also wasn't really necessary). After that, I proceeded to the PowerPoint and made elicitation techniques to make them identify past key words learned from previous lessons that were in the PowerPoint instead of repeating to them the words of the pictures. I gave them a couple of different activities that made them more attentive and interactive throughout the lesson. Later on that day I was praised by my co-teachers. My senior manager actually recorded that very class I taught and posted a clip of it in our work group chat as an example of adjusting to your students and their level. What I really got from it was that I taught that regular class of mine more effectively than before from a simple tip and that I could continue to keep them attentive if I made my lessons unpredictable which was done by varying it. I don’t believe company training can give you all the essential concepts and techniques for teaching effectively. That’s why ESL companies either prefer or require teachers with teaching degrees or teaching certifications. No matter how much experience you have in teaching, you won’t be an effective teacher if you don’t know the techniques, methodologies and concepts to help students gain new language and improve their English. From being unsure of teaching, I now am excited to implement what I’ve learned from my TESOL course. Unlike before, I actually am looking forward to teaching grammar and improving my student’s language skills in English. I am ready to grow and learn to become the effective teacher I never thought I was capable of being.