TEFL Guiping

I have gained a great deal from this course. First, I have reviewed a lot of the grammar that I learned a rather long time ago, as well as learning some new grammar points. Actually, I don't think I learned grammar in english class. Rather, I learned english grammar in 5 years of Latin class, as well as Latin grammar. More than any other language I've been exposed to, Latin was taught by grammar translation, and so one needed to know some english grammar. This course focused on the teaching of grammar, so I expect this new knowledge will be invaluable in the near future. An adjunct of this learning was the realization of how little formal knowledge of english I have. One of my teachers had a plaque on his desk that said, 'Knowledge is the discovery of ignorance'. So it is. Secondly, I learned the about several different methods of language teaching. I've experienced several language courses over the years, and am interested in the way that languages are taught, so it was interesting to compare these techniques to my experience and try to match them to it. The ESA technique seems to be very reasonable, and I'm keen to try it out. I recently completed my second year of chinese classes, and much of what I've learned in this course seems very familiar. I wonder if my teacher has been exposed to Harner's work. Her area is teaching chinese as a second language, so perhaps the answer is 'yes'. The mechanics of lesson planning is another skill that I've learned in the course. I am a teacher, recognize the need for lesson plans, and have made lots of them, but never heard of ESA. Of course, my field is computer science, so perhaps ESA isn't the best fit. I learned that students' attention span is 15—20 minutes at best, so my basic lesson plan looked more like a patchwork S-A-S-A-S-A... I believe my teaching there would have been helped by the inclusion of an Engage phase at the start of class. Or maybe there was one, although I didn't recognize it as such. I intend to apply the ESA paradigm to my english teaching, and I intend to periodically review the unit files over the next year and check my teaching against what I read there. I'm sure there will be things that I've forgotten, and more than one thing that I've overlooked during the course. Overall, I would give both the course and my tutor full marks. If asked if there was anything I would change about the course, I would suggest that a library of MPEG files similar to the one for Lesson 10 be constructed and put on line somewhere. I found that one video to be very enlightening. Yes, I could point out many of the errors in the 'bad' lesson, but it was very helpful just to see them played out on the screen. Thank you.