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Teach English in Anchor Point - TEFL Courses

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Newfoundland and Labrador? Are you interested in teaching English in Anchor Point, Newfoundland and Labrador? Check out our opportunities in Anchor Point, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net 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.
Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!

Building Confidence in Students (76) I have been teaching english in South Korea for the past two and a half years. While taking this course, I have been teaching kindergarten and elementary students. In general, the course lessons made me reflect a lot on my teaching style and how it could be improved. One way that I feel my teaching has improved as a result of this tefl course is discovering more methods for building students' confidence. I have always felt that the most important ways to build students' confidence are encouragement, patience and constructive feedback. What I hadn't realized was that the way that I taught the material could also help build students' confidence, which would result in noticeable improvements in their language skills. While taking this course, I started to implement various techniques that I learned, especially in one of my elementary classes. The students are eight to ten years old, and are at an intermediate level. When I first started teaching them, only one of the students was confident in their english skills. The other five students were very shy and hesitant. The course book for the class contains reading sections and comprehension questions in various formats (fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, cause and effect, etc). When I tried to talk with them about the readings, I found that they weren't confident in their speaking ability. It was difficult for them to express their answers in complete sentences. The tefl course helped me realize three ways to help build their confidence in this area. One way was through developing their understanding of grammar with lots of revision. I realized that in order to improve their speaking, they first needed to gain confidence in their grammar skills. I taught them to first think of the subject, then the verb and then the rest of the sentence. In the beginning it was still a little difficult, but over time they greatly improved at speaking in complete sentences. By breaking it down in to steps, making a sentence didn't seem so daunting anymore. As a result, they became more comfortable with forming sentences to express their thoughts and their confidence grew. The second way I built their confidence in speaking was using controlled and guided practice of the language. At first, I started out by writing a sentence on the board that they could plug the answers into (ex: ____________ is the opposite of ____________.). This, in combination with their increasing understanding of grammar concepts, helped give them confidence with saying the answer in a sentence. Later on, I asked them to tell me the sentence formula (like the example above) for the exercise and I would write it on the board. Eventually, I didn't need to write it on the board anymore because answering in a sentence came naturally to them. Lastly, as an Activate activity, I would have them try to summarize the reading. In this part of the lesson, I encouraged fluency rather than accuracy. I would only give guidance if they were really struggling to express their thoughts. With gentle encouragement and lots of praise for their effort, all of the students became much more confident with describing the story. I am amazed at how much these simple teaching techniques boosted the students' confidence levels. Now all of the students are outgoing and talkative. They love sharing their thoughts about the reading and are much more comfortable with expressing themselves in english. This has shown me that teaching techniques are an effective way to build confidence in students.


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