Esl Skills

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

  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]

Check out Tesolcourse.com about TESOL Certification United States Cedar Rapids 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: Unit 12 is all about teaching productive skills; speaking and writing skills. These two are as equally important as the receptive skills; reading and listening skills. Is it indeed true that many of the esl students focus on improving their speaking skills as they think this is the most practical skill of a language to learn. However Unit 12 is all about teaching productive skills; speaking and writing skills. These two are as equally important as the receptive skills; reading and...  [Read more]

Check out Tesolcourse.com about TESOL Certification Turkey Adana 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: I found this Unit useful as it discussed the productive skills reading and writing. It was interesting to note that writing is the most neglected skill in esl as the teachers and students tend to focus on the spoken english rather than focusing on the written english I found this Unit useful as it discussed the productive skills reading and writing. It was interesting to note that writing is the most neglected skill in esl as the teachers and students tend to focus on the spoken english rather than...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences In my opinion, it was very resourceful to learn and have vast knowledge that comes up with a major aim of mastering the teaching skills. As a teacher, changing someone's life permanently for the better is their personality and mind is the driving force. Every good teacher should make sure that the students are progressively understanding and learning. Teaching is a rewarding thing to do and it requires different skills to be successful in this career. These skills include: This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Tumusiime J. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Technical fundamental skills to operate electronic equipment in the study environment. equipment like overhead...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Throughout the course of this TEFL course, many factors were discussed that can lead to potential success or failure within the ESL classroom. One factor that was constantly highlighted was the teacher’s attitude and ability to build a good rapport with their students. Student engagement skills are vital for motivating students. Teachers in a classroom should develop a relationship with their students where the students can be comfortable in his or her classroom environment. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Jheanelle M. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. For that relationship to happen a teacher needs to possess the right attitude. To successfully impart knowledge to...  [Read more]

Federico Riva TEFL Information Teaching Ideas With the advent of online teaching making such a large part of the ESL market, we need to be aware of some teaching skills for that area. The first skill to consider which is absolutely important for ESL teachers, both native and non-native is that of pronunciation. This is a problem for most students coming from non-native English-speaking countries. They suffer by not understanding the teacher’s speech, which can be most stressful. The first skill relates to the teacher developing neutral pronunciation. There are a lot of self-study training courses that help ESL teachers to practice pronunciation skills and these are strongly recommended. Some native ESL teachers have really strong accents, for example some parts of the British Isles or...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas In our everyday life we try to teach someone something, as in life we use different methods to explain something to someone, it is the same for a teacher. We spend every day as teachers and learners. We don't have to be students to learn and we don't have to be teachers to teach. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Medha R. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The source of learning doesn't have to be one human giving a lesson to another; it can be something new we learned from a book, the internet, a newspaper, etc. However, we owe it to another human being that we have within us the capacity to teach, it can vary from a life skill to a life lesson. The way we deal with a...  [Read more]

  Neda took the 120-hour online TEFL course with tutor support and videos from ITTT. Neda tells us in this TEFL review video that she really enjoyed the course and found the units to be well organized. She thought the videos were very useful especially when completing the tests and tasks throughout the course but she would have liked to make more use of the tutor support. 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 12 covers the productive skills of speaking...  [Read more]

Lourien Prinsloo TEFL Information Alumni Experiences This article focuses on the topic of teacher burnout. What is it and how can you avoid it? Lourien Prinsloo TEFL Information Alumni Experiences To be proficient in English is perhaps the most essential skill through which one can become truly empowered to communicate. Many countries require more English teachers with the necessary skill and passion for enabling learners to make a difference socially and economically. Lourien Prinsloo TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas The majority of battles we face in life can only be fought effectively if we have a clear understanding of the enemy. In this post, I will explain favouritism and offer guidance for preventing favouritism in the classroom. Elaheh Rezvani ...  [Read more]

Hoàng Minh Huy TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) is a challenging yet rewarding task that requires a set of essential skills. Pronunciation, grammar knowledge, and teaching method are three crucial elements that every teacher needs to possess in order to be effective in their role. From developing a neutral pronunciation to understanding grammatical rules and exploring different teaching methodologies, these skills are necessary for both native and non-native English teachers. In this blog post, we'll delve into each of these skills, highlighting their importance and providing practical tips for improvement. Whether you're a seasoned teacher or just starting out, this guide will provide you with the tools you need to succeed in the...  [Read more]

ITTT has recently opened a TEFL & TESOL training center in Ann Arbor Michigan. If you wish to be TEFL/TESOL-certified and would love to take a course in Ann Arbor Michigan, this is an opportunity you cannot miss. Check out course details and fees for ITTT's Ann Arbor Michigan. TEFL/TESOL center here! Check out Tesolcourse.com about TEFL Atlas Michigan 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: The face of the average learner in an esl classroom is changing. In previous decades mainly college-bound students studied foreign languages; however, today a great mix of students with a range of needs, ability...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Beizhouzhuang Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Shuozhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT 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. As we know course materials are a huge part of any ESL class. They provide the teacher and the students with a sense of security. Preparing a good collection of course materials can be a challenge, especially for less experienced teacher. They can be time and energy consuming but, they should be prepared nonetheless. Many aspects should be considered when...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas There is no doubt that most people have no idea what is involved in becoming a teacher. I think this is particularly true of native English speakers imagining they can teach English to foreign students. I fell into this category until I started the course. What became apparent straight away is that teaching techniques have varied greatly over time, with some methods being more successful than others. The relatively recent ESL method incorporates some previous teaching strategies but succeeds above them all in effectiveness because it gives teachers the best chance to teach, whilst giving students the desired motivation to learn. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Fiona M. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas I have been working as an English teacher for almost five years and I have a lot of experience in teaching children and adults. Therefore, after learning these units, I can gain a better understanding of class management. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Wenyi L. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. When it comes to teaching children, class management is essential. Children have an innate curiosity, which is a big motivation. They like looking for something new and learning it. Studying when you were a child has many advantages. However, it is not easy for children to focus on what they learn for a long time, even less than fifteen minutes. If they lost their attention...  [Read more]