Elicit Information

  This video covers the difference between 'discreet' and 'discrete'. Their similar spelling and pronunciation makes them a word pair that is often confused. The word 'discreet' describes something that is unnoticeable and/or modest, whereas 'discrete' refers to something that is separate and distinct. Watch the video for detailed examples on the two words. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. This unit has cleared out some mistakes that I do...  [Read more]

Federico Riva TEFL Information Teaching Ideas Here we're going to consider the use of visual aids in the classroom. Visual aids can include examples such as, real objects (which we call realia), the use of pictures and photographs and also the use of models. So let's consider some of the ideas surrounding the use of visual aids. First of all the use of a visual aid can reduce teacher talk time (TTT) which is always desirable. It is much simpler to just show a real object than to try to describe it, so that we could just ask the students, “what is this”? and they would say, “that is a pen” rather than trying to actually describe the pen. Again if we were eliciting names of fruit and vegetables, rather than to try and...  [Read more]

  The first part of my study phase is going to be the board work and I'm going to use the information that I generated in the elicitation part of my engage phase to move on to the actual board work. What I'm going to do is to show the structure of this particular tense. So, the phase study I'm expecting to take about ten minutes on this particular part and, again, the interaction will mainly be the students talking to me. So, how am I going to achieve that with this information? Well, we could ask the students to have a look at the sentences themselves and to tell us what they can see. If we look at each of the first words in here, then at this level, I should hopefully be able to elicit from my students what each of these words have in common and they may well give an answer that...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our ESA Methodology series. The ESA methodology consists of three stages. In this series, we look at the individual purposes of each stage and typical activities for each stage. This second video introduces the study phase of ESA. The purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check the understanding of that material.The second stage or phase of the lesson is known as the study phase and really the purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check understanding of that material. Typically in an ESA lesson, the study phase will have two parts. The first phase of the study is to cover the actual teaching component in what's known as the board work and what we try to do in the board work phase is to...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas I think of a teacher I had back in junior high in South Africa that made my learning experience memorable and that in turn earned me a diploma for achieving honors in my year-end examinations. He spoke little and allowed us as the students to discover and solve problems partially by ourselves. So, my aspiration is to apply the same or similar principals in teaching. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Candice F. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. When teachers talk too much, students lose their concentration, they become bored and find the tedious explanations hard to follow sometimes. Teachers should give students time to answer,...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas Teaching can be a gratifying career, but with it comes great responsibility. Possessing a high grasp of grammar, teaching theories, techniques, etc., will hold you in good stead. However, there are many other wide-ranging characteristics required to be a great teacher. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Elicia B. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. A great teacher needs to be adaptable as they are not just a teacher. They are a motivator, organizer, entertainer, prompter, corrector, and participator, to name only a few. It is essential that the teacher can...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Over the course of this certification program, I learned an abundance of information and methodologies, but none as important as the ESA outline; the ESA methodology is, undoubtedly, the best thing I’ve learned from my TEFL course. The ESA procedure provides a myriad of benefits, engaging learners in a series of dynamic activities aimed to create a seamless and effective educational environment. Due to the adept and fluid nature of the ESA methodology, it is easily the most important tool taught to me throughout this program and something I foresee utilizing often in the near future. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Richard H. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences When I think of my earliest childhood memories, I remember that I used to love to play games in the classroom (charades, 7-up/head down-thumb up, categories, bingo, etc.). Going from a boring ‘copy from the board’ type of class to a competitive, fun and activity-filled class gave me the ability to open my mind, so I could find the subject being taught more interesting and made it easier for me to absorb the information. Young learners may not have an interest in studying because they don’t yet have any motivation from learning, so they are only interested in games, songs, and other fun activities. When playing most of the games in the classroom, young learners are compelled to communicate with each other...  [Read more]

  The next idea we're going to consider is the use of visual aids and visual aids can include some examples such as real, objects, which we call realia, the use of pictures and photographs and also the use of models. So let's consider some of the ideas surrounding the use of visual aids. Well, why are they useful? Well, first of all the use of a visual aid can reduce teacher talk time. It's very much more simple just to show a real object than to try to describe it so that we could just ask the students ?what is this,? and they would say ?this is a pen,? rather than trying to actually describe it. Again if we were trying to show examples of fruit and vegetables rather than to try and describe them why not use an actual model and this is going to be much more visually stimulating...  [Read more]

  So, for the study phase what we're going to do is to show them the idea of the cartoon strip. In the cartoon strip what there's going to be are some people with speech bubbles and this is going to represent where dialogue will appear and in the bottom, there are these rectangular boxes, where there will be descriptive things happening. So, it will explain the actual situation that these people are in. So, we get across the idea, first of all, that these are speech and these are for description and we can then show them a blank one of these cartoon strips and try to elicit from our students what could possibly the people be saying and in what actual situation are they in, in order for them to say that. Once we've gone through that, we can move on to our first study activity and in...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas The previous teaching method in Malaysia used to be chalk and talk. Chalk and talk method are much more on teacher talking rather the students. The teacher will be the one who talks and students just to listen or receive the information from the teacher. In this case, it will become a problem for those students with shorter attention spans and the other students will lose attention easily as well. This method also cannot evaluate a student’s understanding of the lessons that have been taught. The teacher should plan a lesson that includes explanations/elicits, activities to strengthen student’s understanding and evaluate student’s understanding. Usually, students with shorter attention spans easily get...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas For this task, I have selected the course structure. As a teacher, a lot goes into the daily operation of the classroom. They need to consider their classroom setup, their management style, and the students they will teach. However, one very important facet of teaching is lesson design and teaching students appropriate standards to help them in their English acquisition. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Heejeong K. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Even though there are lots of teaching methodologies such as grammar-translation, audio-lingual approaches, task-based learning and PPP (presentation, practice, and production), it...  [Read more]

Federico Riva TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas In this blog post, we will take a look at a typical example of a boomerang lesson. First we will recap the structure E  A1  S  A2 Here the students are just going to have a discussion about jobs, what happens at interviews and so on and so forth. During that engage phase what we would hope to do is to elicit some useful language about, jobs, interviews and the types of questions that are being asked in interviews. Some of this information can be put on the board. We do no teaching in this phase, we do not correct any mistakes either, just let the students talk freely. Next, we're going to move immediately into an activate...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Out of all the methods of Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language, the ESA-structured lessons are the most productive with a balance of teacher instruction and student practice time. This method often includes others such as audio-bilingualism (drilling techniques), PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production), and task-based learning; but offering a wide variety of techniques within one method is the beauty of the Engage-Study-Activate lesson model. This lesson model has many benefits for students of English. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Sarah Y. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The first part of this lesson model is the...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Out of all the methods of Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language, the ESA-structured lessons are the most productive with a balance of teacher instruction and student practice time. This method often includes others such as audio-lingualism (drilling techniques), PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production), and task-based learning; but offering a wide variety of techniques within one method is the beauty of the Engage-Study-Activate lesson model. This lesson model has many benefits for students of English. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Sarah Y. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The first part of this lesson model is the...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas We all remember our favorite stories and tales as children; Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things. Are, Stella Luna, and others more advanced like The Hardy Boys and The Magic Tree House. Simply mentioning those titles elicits some of my earliest memories. It's rooted in the foundation of my learning. Oftentimes, stories are read or told to children from infancy throughout their most formative and impressionable years. Children, from a very early age, are exposed to wide ranges of concepts and dialogue. At such a young age, a child typically does not have a grasp on the lexicon of the language being spoken to them, but ideas begin to form. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Stephanie T....  [Read more]

  So, let's have a look at a typical receptive skills lesson. The main focus of this lesson is going to be reading, although there will be some listening involved as well and it?s going to be a patchwork ESA lesson. As a patchwork lesson, it will start off with an engage and this engage what we're going to do is to play an extract about Elvis Presley and it's going to be an Elvis Presley song and we can ask the students if they know who it is and if they know anything about him can help generate the interest in this. We can also ask them what they'd like to know about it. What we can then do is just to introduce them to the text but they're going to read the detail later on but just at this stage we'll do a quick skimming or scanning exercise to find some information from that...  [Read more]

  Once we're satisfied that all the students have been engaged and that they've been given the opportunity to say something, we can move on to our study phase. Here, it may be necessary or useful to actually pre-teach some gaps in knowledge that have been shown from the engage phase and those gaps in knowledge may include actual grammar structures or indeed useful vocabulary and it's very important that, before we move on to doing any forms of activity, we check their understanding of this material. So, we need to do some study exercises. It's also very useful if you leave this information up on the board through all that study period. Those study activities can just be the normal types of gap fills or matching activities and, as always, we need to demonstrate those activities,...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas I am a South African who has worked in South Korea for more than eight years and one of the most important tools as an ESL teacher from a whole different nationality and culture has been the knowledge and awareness of cultural sensitivity in the classroom. When I meet a new ESL teacher and they ask me for advice this is usually the first thing I recommend: become an expert in the culture. It helps you meet the needs of your students and it creates a comfortable environment in which your students want to learn. In this essay we will look at what is culture, strategies for culture learning and how to assess your level of cultural competence. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Amy B. Please note...  [Read more]

  The final stage of the lesson will be the activate and the activate phase is going to form the main speaking activity within the lesson. So, it's very very important that here, we do a good demonstration of what it is that we're expecting them to do, that we elicit the type of target language we're expecting them to produce from the activity. So, one way we could go around it is to, firstly, form pairs. Each pair is going to be given a card and onto that card they're going to write the country and a month. What the teacher can then do, just to add a little bit of spice to it, is to collect all of the cards and shuffle them around and then redistribute them to the pairs so that they get a card that doesn't have their country or their month on it. What they're then going to do is...  [Read more]

Federico Riva TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas In this blog post, we will look at an actual example of an ESA straight arrow lesson plan. We will include examples of the activities used and their purpose. You can adapt this plan to a variety of other uses and levels. Straight arrow ESA Lesson Plan Class level: Elementary Number of students: 8 Lesson aim: After the lesson the students should be able to look at an animal and make sentences to say what it “can and can’t” do. Sample sentences when looking at the picture of an elephant. It can walk. It can’t fly. Show the students a video of animals and they are going to say what they like about those animals and try to create a list of...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas The ESA lesson structure is a useful method for formatting lessons. It has a high level of in-built flexibility and a logical sequence beneficial for both students and teachers alike. It consists of three distinct phases - Engage, Study and Activate - each meant to serve a particular function but working together to ensure effective communication and application of new information. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Jason T. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The first stage of an ESA lesson format is the Engage phase. The goal of this part of the lesson is to get the students thinking and speaking in English. At the beginning of a...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Let’s remember the latest class you’ve had. What were you doing? Were you explaining a new rule? Were you answering your students’ questions? Were you telling a story from your life? Weren’t you talking too much? Let’s discuss how to decrease teacher speaking time (TST) and increase student speaking time (SST). This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate DALER R. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. According to the communicative approach, TST shouldn’t be greater than SST, moreover, it must be much less than the last one. Why? There are several reasons. First of all, we have to mention that the more a teacher talks the less...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas When entering the realm of teaching, lesson planning is a very beneficial skill to have. Lesson planning is done in many different ways; many educators create their format over the years that cater to their teaching styles. However, the typical lesson planning methodologies include ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) and PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production). For this task, we will be diving into the ESA methodology. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Gabrielle R. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The first stage of the ESA format is ‘Engage’. In this stage of the lesson, the focus should be on getting your students as interested...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Visual images aids can add interest and often add meaning in a way that words can’t. This is especially true for ESL students who don’t have sufficient words to understand detailed spoken explanations. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate JunCui Z. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. People learn in different ways. For example, some people learn well by listening, some by movement and touch and many people respond well to seeing things. There are many different learning styles, so having variety in your presentations gives attention to these different styles and helps everyone succeed. Bringing something of interest in the...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Knowing an additional language goes beyond the ability to speak it. It connects people, helps in understanding different cultures and has also been identified as a boost to brain function and increase intelligence. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Nagashree C. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. In the present age of expanding businesses, capturing markets across the globe, establishing offices far and wide, more and more business are following the model of ‘following the sun’ by having their businesses and services available at all times of the day irrespective of the location the clients are in. For this, one of the...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Storytelling is used in the African culture to teach morals, values, historical lessons, and to communicate truths to all ages. Because words are highly valued by Africans, a skilled storyteller is viewed as an influential leader in a community, able to give wise advice. Since the method of storytelling is so widely used in African cultures for instruction, why not integrate it into teaching English to African students as a foreign language? This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Stanislav T. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Storytelling is an effective way to reach both the heart and mind. When a teacher tells her students a story...  [Read more]

  Now an example of a straight arrow ESA lesson for our engage phase. What we're going to do is to show the students a video of animals and they are going to say what they like about those animals and try to create a list of some more. So, remember what we're trying to do here is to get the students talking and thinking in English. We're using a typical engage activity, which is to create a list and we try to make sure that all the students have been involved in some way in creating those lists. Moving on to the study phase, the first part is going to be the board work and the teacher is going to try to elicit from the students what each of those animals can and can't do. Typically, what the students will say is just single words, so "run," "jump," "fly," etc. What we would then...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Thom P. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Lesson Objectives: Students will practice recognizing homophones and practice the correct, indefinite, and zero articles. Summary of tasks/actions Warm-Up: Vocabulary Review (10 minutes) Tell students that they will play a game to review some of the words that they talked about last week. Divide the class into two teams. One person from each team stands at the back of the room, and one person from each stands by the board. Divide the board into four parts. Label each piece the...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Every teacher in his/her career is faced with the first lesson in a new class. This lesson is vital for the teacher to establish rapport and set the tone for the rest of the course. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Irina B. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. First of all the teacher should introduce her/himself and write her/his name on the board, in case the students forget it. After that, ask the students to make a card with their names and put it on the desks. From this time the teacher should call her/his students only by their names. It is a pleasure for every person to hear his/her name. So the teacher and the students have...  [Read more]