Inexpensive TESOL Cities

I have really enjoyed this course. It’s helped me substantially more than I’d initially expected it to. Right from Unit 1, Teachers and Learners, with the discussion on various roles of the Teacher, I started to recognize how much I needed to learn. The Worksheets are also well designed to help in isolating, developing and expressing the central ideas, but also to help me to think of practical ways I could apply what I was learning in my own ESL classes. The lesson on classroom management gave me a lot of insight regarding advantages/disadvantages of different student groupings. I will try to include a wider purposeful variety in future classes. Units 11 and 12 on receptive and productive skills will be useful as I make progress in developing balanced lessons. The courses’ alternating of units between grammar and teaching techniques was a good application of the principle to spend adequate time teaching language fundamentals. As it’s often more difficult to keep students interested during lessons on grammar or language functions there is always the temptation to skip them, hoping they’ll learn them by osmosis during other lessons. Now, with my confidence in grammar increased and having learned some interesting ways to teach and practice it, I’ll work at developing more balanced lessons by incorporating more grammar in my teaching. And then there are the lesson plans, with the stress on the ‘s’. As much as I resented the time they were taking at first, I slowly recognized, and now have to admit, that learning about and practicing Lesson Planning was probably the most valuable aspect of the entire course for me. It will force me to actually have an Objective for each class and to think about how it fits in with the long term learning goals of individual students and the class as a whole. It will help me with my time management as well. With good record keeping Lesson Plans can be recycled and revised to make things quicker me for me too.