TEFL Changsha

Before taking this course I had been working with students learning english for over two years, and I was pretty positive that the lesson plans I was writing and the activities that I planned for students were effective. After taking this course I have learned so much more about working with students who are learning english and have been taught many improvements that I could implement to make myself a more engaging, effective, and helpful teacher. Before I took this course I spent a lot of time lesson planning, but had very little formal training about how to organize a lesson plan in a way that helps students stay interested in the lesson and get the most out of it. I wasn’t aware that there were different ways to lay out a lesson plan/ different names for types of lesson plans, and I have now practiced writing lesson plans using all of them. After taking this course and spending quite a bit of time writing lesson plans, I feel much more confident in these skills and think I will do a much better job in the future implementing lesson plans that will encourage my students to get the most out of a lesson. I think one of the most important things I have gained from this course is a refresher of some of the intricacies of english that new students will need to learn. It has been a very long time since I have studied grammar or tenses, and I found all of those lessons very useful. I think that when someone speaks a language fluently and is a teacher, it can be easy to take some of the things you understand in that language for granted and not think about how difficult it might be for someone learning english. This course allowed me to revisit some of the more difficult topics for language learners and think about how I would want to teach them to students I might be working with. This was an invaluable opportunity to gain some perspective about what students I would be working with might be experiencing as they learn the language. In the future I will be continuing to work with students who are beginning to learn the english language, and I will bring much of what I have learned in this class with me. I plan to be more thoughtful about my lesson planning, and I will be implementing many of the games and activities that I have read about in this course. In addition I plan to revisit some of the material from this class to help with explanations about more difficult english skills. In addition to leading classroom lessons with a larger number of students, I hope to find time to work individually with students from my class on perfecting skills they might have difficulty with. In the past I have mainly worked with students in large groups, but feel more confident in my abilities to work with small groups/ individual students after taking this course and know that would be beneficial for students.