TEFL Donald

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas In January, I stood in front of a class of breakthrough English students at a university in Bogotá, Colombia. I’d never taught students in an ESL classroom before, but I was pretty confident having seven years of experience under my belt and a degree in literature. I was naive. I began the lesson with the class that my co-teacher had lent me for the first time. The objective of the lesson was to practice using past tense through storytelling; five minutes into it, I called on a student with his hand in the air. “ What up, My Nigga!” He said it and I almost lost all of my composure on the first day while I should have been thinking about building rapport. This post was written by our TEFL certification...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Enjoying music is an essential part of the human experience, so it follows that incorporating the use of songs in the classroom can be an enriching part of an English learner’s journey. Songs and music can be used in a variety of EFL classrooms, across all cultures, levels of learning, and ages. The benefits of incorporating music in English language study vary from simple vocabulary learning to discover themes about cultures different than the student’s own. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Elizabeth H. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The methods of using songs in the classroom will vary across factors, a significant one...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Which ESL/EFL students should learn the formal language, and how much should they learn? How much emphasis formal language should have in different students' curriculum depends upon several factors and is an objective consideration, as we'll see below. Teaching English as a formal language, to varying degrees, is standard in virtually all ESL/EFL curricula. Most aspects of English are taught at graduated levels of complexity and at appropriate times. For example, all ESL/EFL students will learn very early on what a noun most basically is -a person, place, thing, or idea. Pronouns might be taught next, followed perhaps only eventually by what a noun adjunct is. Formal language is taught similarly, beginning perhaps...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Enjoying music is an essential part of the human experience, so it follows that incorporating the use of songs in the classroom can be an enriching part of an English learner’s journey. Songs and music can be used in a variety of EFL classrooms, across all cultures, levels of learning, and ages. The benefits of incorporating music in English language study vary from simple vocabulary learning to discover themes about cultures different than the student’s own. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Elizabeth H. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The methods of using songs in the classroom will vary across factors, a significant one...  [Read more]