Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Zhongbu Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Zibo 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.
Upon first glance, my answer to the above-captioned question is clear, obvious even: yes, of course. As an ESL teacher, my priority is to help my students succeed by providing them a thorough, well-rounded orientation to the English language. The purpose of language is of course to communicate with others, to connect. Familiarity with slang and idioms strikes me as an essential component of this feat. How can my students connect with English speakers if they stare blankly at them every time they hear a well-known idiom? However, despite this predilection, my opinion is that teaching slang and idioms should not be a priority for ESL teachers. My second year of college, I embarked on a yearlong study abroad program to Paris, France. Learning French was perhaps my greatest priority while abroad. I dove into my vocabulary books and made great strides as a student, but constantly felt as if I was hitting a wall every time I had to communicate with a French university student or tried my hand conversing at a bar. I became a little disheartened with my studies, feeling that my time would be better spent learning how people ‘actually’ talk rather than spending my time conjugating verbs and learning obscure tenses. I mentioned this to my French teacher one day who, ironically, recounted the French version of one of my favorite proverbs: “if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.” I was not quite sure what she meant at the time, but resolved to reapply myself to my studies. What I found was that while my studies never did teach me the slang or idioms I had wanted to learn, they did give me the tools I needed to learn them for myself. In effect, my French teacher helped me build a strong linguistic foundation to broaden my skills and develop fluency. I was able to learn a greater number of slang and idiom by focusing on the more structural elements of French. Admittedly, understanding slang and idioms would go a long way towards helping my students connect with native English speakers. Furthermore, it is something that I am uniquely well suited to provide them for two reasons: (i) I am a native English speaker; and (ii) they are not very likely to encounter these terms of English courses. But I am of the opinion that spending time on material other than slang and idioms is a more effective use of my students’ time because it will give them the skills to learn these terms on their own. Emphasizing the more formal aspect of the English language will also better prepare my students to interact with a wider array of English speakers. For example, they will be able to communicate with waiters at a nice restaurant or make a good first impression at a job interview. Teaching them slang and idioms does not necessarily mean they will exclusively use such terms when speaking English, or even that their knowledge of the more formal elements of English will suffer. Nonetheless, it would take away time they could otherwise spend learning those formal elements that would better serve their interests in the long run as they develop a greater capacity to communicate and to learn such terms on their own.
