TEFL Frontenac Kansas

Before I started this course, I was just a university graduate whose native language was english. I had some experience moderating leadership and teambuilding workshops, but not much real experience in a classroom environment. Now, I feel like I am equipped with the necessary tools for delivering english lessons to efl students and am eager to get into the classroom and start teaching. While I have found that all 20 lessons have added to my learning, the most important gain for me has been in the area of lesson planning. Creating ESA lesson plans and using the formats presented throughout the course to develop them, will most likely be my number one area of action going forward. Not only have I realized the potential power of these lesson plans for the students, but they are also crucial for my personal ease and development as well. The advantages of effective lesson planning are endless and have changed my perspective on how I will approach teaching. This being said, I would also like to point out the following learning points I have found to be quite significant: - Grammar: I had pretty much never learned grammar the way it was taught to me in this course and the way I am expected to teach it to students. While I knew about verbs, nouns, some tenses, and a few other grammatical structures and parts of speech, I really didn't know much about how these were so very important to distinguish in order to teach effectively. I now feel like I have a decent foundation with respect to english grammar and can teach efl students quite effectively. This is a very important gain for someone who couldn't distinguish a possessive adjective from a pronoun when the course had first begun. - ESA Phase Activities: Throughout the course, I was given many examples of activities that could be used during “engage,” “study,” and “activate” phases of an english lesson. Nevertheless, I was constantly challenged with coming up with new ones of my own. This whole process has given me a vast amount of preparedness for my upcoming english teaching experiences. Not only do I have many tried and true examples to choose from using material from the lessons, but now I have many activities that have been confirmed by my tutor as “go ahead” ideas of my own. - General Teaching Abilities: While I need a lot of practice to build a stronger understanding, the various lessons about managing classes, troubleshooting, and a plethora of how different needs can be met, has built a strong foundation for my teaching future. From teaching kids to teaching adults, business english to monolingual classes, group work to individual activity setting… I feel I have many tools at my disposal and am ready for a variety of different teaching conditions and settings.