Teach English in Burlington - TEFL Courses

I approached this course with the idea that I would not learn very much since I had already taught for a year prior to beginning it. However, I find that it was not only a welcome refresher, but also taught me some things I didn't know and elicited some great teaching ideas from me. Having been restricted to the course books provided for me by Avalon during my year in Korea, I did not pay much attention to the sensible ordering of activity. While I did have an ‘Engage' phase at the beginning, the ability to work in ‘activate' phases between or after studying phases was limited. I have found many ways to work in all stages of a lesson even where the material I teach is strictly controlled. Reading races were my only ‘activate' stage at Avalon. I now see that role-playing could have been used in many instances since the book taught conversational english. Role-playing is an invaluable way to observe students putting their knowledge to work, and a great opportunity to step into individual pairs to offer support and some pointers. In addition, I learned a GREAT deal about english Grammar. I was quite the colloquial novice before I began this course, I now realize. I am now aware of the various tenses and their rules of formation (especially their rules of formation). I understood the idea of passive and active voice, but I often mistook past perfect tense as passive voice due to the use of ‘had' and I no longer do. I will put my knowledge of grammar into action as a public school teacher because at Avalon, grammar was strictly taught by the Korea teacher. As a public teacher, I can work games into the lesson to help teach tenses, such as role playing ‘have you ever', or storytelling in various forms for past tenses, or questionnaire/presentations like ‘when I grow up' for practicing future simple tense, etc. I will, as a public teacher, I can use videos and presentations (which I was unable to do as a teacher at Avalon. This course's unit on use of media materials, etc. was very helpful in identifying how to aim video material at relevant lesson content. For instance, the video I found which teaches how to get a Korean boyfriend will/would be very entertaining to my student base. For advanced levels, (if I end up teaching high school) videos of Demetri Martin's stand-up comedy, which hinges on various arrangements of words in a sentence to mean different (and humorous) things and on the picking apart of grammar structures, would be very useful for illustrating in an entertaining way why grammar structures are both crucial and relevant. Students in public school are not segregated by ability, but only by age, so I will use activities like ‘pass the ball' to ascertain various abilities and help close the gap by pairing stronger students with weaker ones, offering individual help to those falling behind by using pair work and individual work to gain observation capability and opportunity, etc.