Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Dajiao Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yuncheng Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Is it normal to praise students? Is it normal to praise students? Yes, surely praise is normal in most language lessons. The open questions are: what kinds of praise are there and can they be used more effectively, and can I learn how? It runs all through the course’s study materials (CSM) that praise is normal. But what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘praise’. ‘Normal’ can have many meanings, e.g. costumery, habitual, usual, accustomed, familiar, conventional, traditional, routine, regular, common, frequent and daily1. In the following, I shall use ‘normal’ in the meaning of usual, conventional and traditional. For ‘praise’ I shall use Merriam-Webster’s definition: to express a favorable judgment of, commend2. Looking at the functions and consequences of praise, Brophy3 has some very interesting remarks about teachers’ motives and frequency of praise: ‘Much teacher praise is determined more by teachers’ perceptions of student needs than by the quality of student conduct or performance.’ and ‘... probable student response to teachers’ attempts at social reinforcement suggest that teacher praise should remain infrequent, but that it could be made much more effective.’ The first statement made me start thinking: Do I just praise automatically without thinking of why I praise and the possible effect on the student. Sad to say, the answer is yes. The second statement also hit deeply, as one of my one-to-one students had advanced to an intermediate level considerably faster than any other of my 250 students so far, and I told her. Since then she has been doing less homework and booked less frequent lessons. Only one event but thinking more about it I found other occasions where thoughtless praise had an undesirable effect. But what can I do in order to learn using praise in a better way? Formerly I thought I could not praise too much and did follow the simple rule ‘praising the effort, never the student’, but watching the CSM’s videos of a ‘bad’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher I see the good teacher praise by his mere attitude, body language and mimics, not so frequently orally. I watch a real successful lesson partly because of this. I can try to copy his behavior, but where can I get help to learn his techniques? Teacher Praise: An efficient Tool to Motivate Students, a research result presented by Jim Wright on the website www.interventioncentral.org, suggests4: ‘Describe Noteworthy Student Behavior’, ‘Praise Effort and Accomplishment, Not Ability.’, ‘Match the Method of Praise Delivery to Student Preferences’, meaning: specify exactly what the praise is for, praise the effort or result only and consider how the student may react to the praise. These advise I can relate to from my experience, it would have made a lot of my lessons better, if I had known them before and learned how to execute them when praising my student(s). The website www.thoughtco.com offers 7 practical advice5 in ‘Steps to Effective Praise’. From these 7 advise I choose ‘Make eye contact with the student(s)’, ‘Smile. Be sincere and enthusiastic’ and ‘Prepare for praise by deciding what to say that is specific to the task’. The first and second seem to be worthwhile and possible to learn performing in my lessons. The third suggestion may take a little longer to apply to my teaching but occurs to me to be the most important, something to go for, deliberate praise. Both Jim Wright and Colette Marie Bennett refer to J. Brophy’s ‘Teacher praise: A functional analysis’, so I choose to apply some of their suggestions to my teaching. Without giving special priority to any of the advice I shall try to improve these capacities: Use eye contact, smile, be sincere and enthusiastic and think before I praise, particularly when teaching mature students. Footnotes: 1 customary, habitual, usual, accustomed, familiar, normal, conventional, traditional; routine, regular, common, frequent, daily Ref.: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+'normal'?&oq=what+is+'normal'?&aqs=chrome..69i57.29370j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#dobs=wonted 2 to express a favorable judgment of : COMMEND Ref.: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/praise 3 Abstract – Brophy: Teacher praise: A functional analysis https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543051001005 4 Praise: What the Research Says https://www.interventioncentral.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pdfs_interventions/wright_using_praise_in_the_classroom_April_2012.pdf 5 https://www.thoughtco.com/effective-praise-8161 Steps to Effective Praise by Colette Marie Bennett
