Esl Classroom

  Throughout section on the teaching of productive skills and the teaching of receptive skills our activate activities will usually involve some form of game and our final consideration here will be the use of games in the classroom. We can start with a definition of what we actually mean by a game and it basically has three components. A game is an activity that has rules it should have for its purpose in the classroom a teaching point and by nature to the fact that it's a game it should also include an element of fun. So that will be our working definition for a game that we're going to use in the classroom. There are many different types of games and they range between the competitive and those will require cooperation and there are all sorts of games that involve both of these...  [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]

  This presentation is going to cover the teaching of productive skills. To start with, if we think about the way in which you learnt your first language, most of us go through a particular process. Firstly, we listen to those around us, after that first silent period of listening to other people, then we start to make utterances. Having learned to speak to a certain extent at least, we then go on to learn how to read and to write and this process that we go through is actually covering the four skills that we're trying to teach our English students. So, we have listening, speaking, reading, and writing. If we group those skills into their different types, then the two skills of reading and listening are known as receptive skills, whereas the skills of speaking and writing are...  [Read more]

  So speaking activities will come in many different forms but we can generalize them into three basic types. Control activities tend to be used in the study phase and here, the teacher will be helping the students in terms of what they need to say and how they go about saying it. So, there's a high level of structure within a controlled activity. A guided activity has slightly less structure than this and it can be used in either the study or the activate stages themselves. The final type of activity or class of activity is called creative activity and this one would be used in the activation phase. In a creative activity, we're giving a scenario or a very small amount of structure and we're asking the students to actually create their own answers to this particular question....  [Read more]

  Here are helpful tips how to identify the various future tenses in the English language and complete worksheets successfully. The video also helps you to structure an effective lesson around the future tenses in an EFL classroom around the world. 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. Unit # 4 discusses the types of material available, how they can be created or adapted, and put to use. The unit also discusses some of the factors germane to designing the...  [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]

  For the lesson that even takes place, there are a number of things that you need to have considered. Obviously, you need a very clear idea of what it is you're expecting the students to have to do and they need to know why. It's very important before you ask them to do an activity that they have an understanding of the purpose of that activity. You should, secondly, have had a thought about what they already know. Linked to that is, will it be necessary to do any form of pre-teaching before I can expect them to do this activity and finally, we need to make sure that we have prepared all our materials and our instructions for this particular activity. So, we'll consider a straight arrow ESA lesson, the focus of which is to be speaking skills. So, we'll start with our engage and in...  [Read more]

  This presentation is going to have a look at the idea of receptive skills and how we can go about teaching receptive skills lessons. There are two receptive skills and they are reading and listening. If we think about first of all, why do we read or listen, then there are probably two main answers to that. Firstly, it could either be for entertainment or it could be for a specific purpose. Within the reading and listening areas there are a number of sub-skills that we can teach our students. Firstly, what we can do is to show different examples of reading. So, let's say, for example, that we have just bought ourselves a new video camera and along with that video camera came a whole book of instructions. In order to find out how to get that camera working, then we would need to...  [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]

  So, let's take a common game that's been played over the years, which is called Noughts and Crosses or Tic-Tac-Toe. What we're going to do is to adapt this game for classroom use. So, we've taken the normal Tic-Tac-Toe or Noughts and Crosses grid and we've just numbered out each of the particular squares. What we can then do is to form teams and those teams can then be asked a series of questions and they get to choose which question they want from 1 to 9. So, let's say, for example, they choose question 1. That could be on anything that they have studied ,the grammar or vocabulary. If they get that question correct and say they are the Noughts or the zeros then they get to put their mark here. What the next group will probably do is to try to block them in some way by choosing...  [Read more]

  Before we go into looking at the actual receptive skills lesson, if we were thinking about what potential problems there could be in these lessons. So, what things could go wrong in a reading lesson? Well, firstly the students when they are reading in a language that is not their native language, they tend to read every word as a separate piece and by reading word to word it?s very difficult to get an overall impression of what that particular text is saying. Secondly, the sentence length in a lot of articles that we will get will be very long and many of our students will not be used to that structure of language. So, here it's important to have a think about the way in which the text has actually been written and will it be fairly easy to read. The final thing is the actual...  [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]

  So let's have a look now what might take place in a typical writing lesson and, again, we're going to use the format of a straight arrow ESA lesson. Our first stage is to the go to the engage stage and, if we think back to what we said before, what we need to do is try to generate interest. So, an example here could be we show a picture first of all taken from a newspaper or magazine and then we can ask the students some questions. From looking at the picture we can ask them if they can tell us what is actually happening now as shown by the picture. Then, we can generate a bit more interest by asking them to give us ideas about what they thought was happening before this picture took place and what happened after. So, here we're just trying to build up the idea of a sequence of...  [Read more]

  Before we move on to the planning of a lesson for speaking skills, something that we need to look at first is the idea of the accuracy versus the fluency of speaking. Accuracy relates to the correct usage of grammar and vocabulary, whereas fluency relates to our ability to continue speaking without any interruption. Now, ultimately within a whole ESA lesson or within language learning itself fluency and accuracy are equally important. Within an ESA lesson, however, depending upon which stage we're at in that lesson, then we're either focusing on accuracy or we're focusing on fluency. Remember in the ESA lesson, in the study phase, this is where we're looking at the target language where we're doing our language learning, so it's very important in this stage that we focus on the...  [Read more]

  We are going to move on to the second of the productive skills, which is writing and, again, we'll have look at the background, too, and create a typical lesson for a writing skills session. One of the things to be aware of in a writing skills lesson is that writing tends to be more formal than spoken English. So, there will be some differences between the two, such as writing very often uses less contracted forms and so on, but having said that there are many similarities between the two particular skills. So, many of the considerations that we had for a speaking skills lesson will also apply here to a writing skills lesson. Within writing skills itself there are some sub-skills that we may want to teach and those sub-skills could include, but are not limited to, hand writing...  [Read more]

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  So, some of the ways in which we can avoid these problems occurring in the first place is to reteach the vocabulary that's going to be required in the particular activity and the grammar. Now, having said this, it doesn't mean that if we think about a particular article that they're going to read or a listening activity that they're going to listen to. They don't have to know every single word in there but they do need to know a certain number of words in order to actually make sense out of it. Secondly, most of the materials that we'll be using for both reading and possibly for listening will be what's called an authentic material. In other words, it's a real piece of material from a newspaper or magazine that hasn't been created for a particular class and so we need a very...  [Read more]

  The next example of a game that we can adapt very easily for classroom use is the game of Jeopardy and in this particular game, what we can do is to have a set of levels for our questions, I'd say one through five, where one is going to be the easiest example and five is going to be the most difficult and then, in each of these sets of boxes, we can have various grammar points, such as tenses, perhaps modals, vocabulary and maybe even conditionals. So what the students can do is they can pick a particular topic first of all and within that topic, they can pick the level of the question that they want and then we can have a set of cards that have been created to fit into these slots and we can ask them that question at that level. So, a very simple adaptation of the game jeopardy...  [Read more]

  So, we'll focus first of all on a speaking skills lesson and perhaps a starting point for this would be to ask a question which is: Why do we speak to each other? The reason that it's important to ask ourselves this question is that whatever answers there are to this should be present in our lessons. So, why do we speak to each other? Well, there are a multitude of answers to that but when you boil them all down to their essence, they probably actually come down to one or two things. We communicate to each other by speaking because of either a need. We need something. We want something or a desire to achieve something. 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...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas It’s the first day at school, and the students are excited yet little nervous to meet their new teacher as he or she will determine how school life and daily routine will look like for the next six months. The teacher might experience the same feeling depending on her or his experience and personality. As a teacher, you should give a good impression on the first day of school. The clothes you choose to wear; the attitude you show in class, and tone of voice when speaking could play a determinant role in students’ judgment of you and their future behavior. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Youssef M. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. To gain student’s will to...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Newfoundland and Labrador? Are you interested in teaching English in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador? Check out our opportunities in Pouch Cove, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT! There are currently piloted learning studies being conducted in north america to determine the benefits of new technology being integrated in to the classroom. Although new...  [Read more]

Check out Tesolcourse.com about TEFL Richmond Vermont and apply today to be certified to teach English abroad. You could also be interested in: This is how our TEFL graduates feel they have gained from their course, and how they plan to put into action what they learned: said: It is clear in the titles “english as a Second Language” and “english as a Foreign Language” that there is a difference between the two english learners. Christina Lynne Renoud notes the difference in her book english as a Second Language Listeners' Perceptions of Different Varieties of english on pages four and five. Renoud describes esl students as “non-native english speakers who are residing in an english using country.” Renoud goes on to describe efl as an “adult/youth english-language...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences The terms ESL and EFL are often used interchangeably because at their root they both mean the same thing; English for people who are not native to the language. However, there are many possible differences between learners. Typically EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language whereas ESL means English as a Second Language. This means that generally speaking, those who fall into the ESL category live in a country where English is a primary language. EFL teachers are typically teaching to students in their home country where English is not typically a widely used language. For these reasons, ESL and EFL classrooms differ greatly. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Randi B. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Most of the teachers in my school would say that the purpose of flashcards is to simply introduce grammar points, concepts, review vocabulary; and most likely, they would mention the joylessness of flashcards when teaching unmotivated students. In truth, flashcards are known for being one of the most boring ways to study. Nevertheless, there are reasons why teachers still choose flashcards for conducting lessons. Russian people say: “Repetition is a mother of learning.” I can not argue with the Russians. Indeed, repetition is crucial, but it often changes the mood of the classroom to "boring." Normally, it happens when the activities with flashcards are poorly organized, or when there are no other activities except for regular ones that were used for...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas One of the fulfilling thoughts on teaching English as a foreign language is that generally, the students are very self-motivated as most of the students have taken up learning English as a second or foreign language due to personal requirements; either they need to up-skill themselves for work opportunities or a possible relocation to an English speaking country, or possibly purely for personal fulfillment. Whatever the reason, the students will be eager and self-motivated to learn. The students understand the purpose of their work and have a sense of responsibility for their learning and achievement. However, that should not stop a teacher from doing their best to encourage and motivate his or her students, so that they not only have a good and...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Storytelling can be useful to enhance students’ imaginations as well as improve a wide variety of skills such as listening, comprehension, order, memory, and vocabulary. It is targeted for all ages, but best to start earliest possible to allow students to develop a liking towards reading. Storytelling can come with different forms of follow-up activities to further increase teaching efficiency as well as to check understanding of the students through elicitation. This essay will be focused on mainly storytelling activities for young learners in schools. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Jin K. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Reading stories and create a cliffhanger,...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas There are many reasons that using songs in the classroom is important. The first, music speeds up learning. The 1960s was the moment when scholars began to examine the possibility of increasing memory abilities with music. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Huong T. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. A series of creative experiments performed by Dr. Georgi Lozanov and Evelyna Gateva and their findings revolutionized teaching methodology. It initiated the whole brain learning method called Accelerated Learning. Knowledge about human learning processes gained during the trial sessions of the method is of great interest to teachers looking for ways of introducing music to...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Classroom management is a term teachers use to describe the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly without disruptive behavior from students compromising the delivery of instruction. The term also implies the prevention of disruptive behavior preemptively, as well as effectively responding to it after it happens. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Miaomiao H. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Classroom management is a term teachers use to describe the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly without disruptive behavior from students compromising the delivery of instruction. The term also implies the prevention of disruptive behavior...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Social, political and economic transformations in all areas of our society have led to significant changes in education as well. The status of a foreign language as a teaching subject has also changed. The state and society began to feel the need for people who practically speak a foreign language. In this regard, the foreign language within the secondary school has firmly taken the place of compulsory study, the teaching of which begins with the second grade for all students. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Anna O. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Teaching a foreign language at the initial stage is met with many difficulties along the way, as in most cases children...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas Games are great tools to motivate students and encourage them to learn things informally. However, ESL classroom games must have a purpose and support the learning process and not distract from it. In this blog post, our ITTT TEFL expert shares seven steps to gamify your ESL classroom effectively. Before starting a game with your students, ask yourself what you want your students to achieve by the end of the game. Do you want them to learn a linguistic point or some particular behavior pattern? If you know your students' needs, then it's easier to choose an appropriate activity that will be purposeful to the learners. Also Read: Playing Games in the Classroom to Create a Friendly Atmosphere Achieving a more prominent...  [Read more]