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It is very important to be aware of how much time is spent during a lesson with the students listening to a teacher compared to students undertaking activities and also talking for themselves. First of all as a teacher it isn't necessarily a bad thing talking to a class because it eposes the students to the language they are learning. It also means what they are hearing is correct however you must be careful that the terminology and phrases you are using is to the level the students are speaking at otherwise is can cause confusion and if correct grammar isn't being used by the teacher bad habits can be picket up by the students. during the first lesson with the class having a higher teacher talk time isn't such a bad thing, in this lesson you will be aiming to learn more about your students and establishing a rapport with them. for example you might br briefly explaining what kinds of things the students will be covering during the term, gauging what kind of level they are at and finding out the general interests of the class to help with future lesson planning. At times teacher talk time can't be avoided for example when you are teaching new vocabulary or explaining sentence structures. To avoid this you can use visual aids such as pictures writing on the board, this allows the students to take in the information in visually which may even be a better way of learning for some students. Even if you do have to talk more than you would like to when teaching every now and then you can insert some drilling or asking questions to keep the students focused and also to make sure that all the information is being absorbed because you want to avoid repeating yourself when possible because again that will just add the amount of time you are addressing the class. This goes the same for when you are explaining an activity, say you are handing out a newspaper article that you want the students to read through and highlight all the examples of past tense being used, in your first description of the task try and carefully chose the language you are using to not confuse the students, also keep it short and concise because if you end up waffling that will just eat into the time they could be doing the activity. Another useful technique to reduce teacher talk to eliminate the idea of a teacher telling the students things but instead letting them discover things for themselves using election. Election is strategies used to get the students to prompts or questions given by the teacher. there are plenty of examples of election and many of them are easy to use and don't take many resources. For example if you are learning about farm animals you can start drawing one on the board slowly getting the students to guess as you draw, even if your not the best artist you can use flask cards or pictures printed from the internet you can just hold up infant of the class. On a whole trying to reduce teacher talk time is something that you should always be aware of when planning your lessons because the underlying reason is that the less time you spend taking the more time the students will get to tap weather this is as part of an activity or between themselves. its also important to remember a wide variety of election techniques as some work better for different age groups and levels.
