Different Ways To Become A Teacher

  The Business Language Testing Service (BULATS) refers to one of the world’s leading providers of language assessments and examinations aimed at students, employers and job applicants in business related fields. The service offers a range of testing programs that assess an individual’s language proficiency in English, French, Spanish and German. The system is widely used by higher education providers to assess the abilities of course applicants. It is also used by private and public sector companies for testing the suitability of job applicants or existing employees for certain foreign language positions. Are you ready to live and teach abroad? Click here and get started today: https://www.teflcourse.net/?cu=YTDESCRIPTION Below you can read feedback from an ITTT...  [Read more]

The Role of the Teacher If only the role of a teacher was as easy as being a ‘medium through which students learn’. In today’s day and age, no matter what country the role takes place in, a teacher is so much more than a resource for information. When I was young, I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up, simply because I wanted to write on the chalkboard! My teachers seemed to be the greatest printers, curving their letters just so, and I wanted to do it also! Now, after ‘higher education’, and three different career paths, I have come back to wanting to be a teacher, but my reasons have changed. I was fortunate in my years of high school, to have teachers that really cared about me as an individual, and I want to give this back. This is where the difference between...  [Read more]

Motivating Students Motivating students in a language class is a perennial problem for English teachers. Motivation has become more commonly recognized as perhaps the major determining factor for successful learning in general, whether one is an adult learner taking distance education courses or a high school student pushing one’s way through the battery of required courses need to graduate. In any learning setting, the dynamics of motivation will be different. What will help a high school student sustain motivation may not apply to an adult learner or child, for example. The problem is that in many ESL/EFL learning environments, there is an attitude among educators and administrators that “it is up to the student” to be successful. When students fall behind, or are not progressing,...  [Read more]

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Building Confidence in Students Education is certainly the birthright of all people. The motivation of every nation should be to generate literate, well-educated and intelligent residents who are able to add to the proper progress and progress of the whole society. There is still mystery on how accurately a foreign language is learnt. On the subject of building confidence there are yet more theories which are even more difficult to confirm. I myself do not trust that confidence is built using one magic activity, but rather it is continuously acquired all over the learning process. That’s why, all the theories I pick to focus on three things Grammar, Drilling, and of course the role of the teacher. All of these will prepare the student for circumstances they might meet later. [1] After...  [Read more]

Cultural Sensitivity in the Classroom The topic we have decided to address is cultural sensitivity in the classroom. Living in Toronto is extremely different from living anywhere else on this earth. One reason why, is the cultural diversity of Toronto. Even in today’s workforce there is a massive amount of cultural diversity that is why having cultural sensitivity in today’s classrooms should be a huge asset. Canada is a country that is now relying on immigrants coming to our country to help run the economy. It is an extremely good thing that people from different cultures are trained to speak English before they come to Canada or having them take an English learning course once they arrive in the country. By doing this, they are given an equal opportunity in Canada. Luckily we were...  [Read more]

  Our final methodology is accredited to Jeremy Harmer and it's known by the letters ESA. Around 1998, Jeremy Harmer produced a book called "How to teach English" and basically what Harmer did, is a background to this book is to do what we have done today and to work through all of the different methodologies that have come about over the last 300 years. He highlighted for each of those methodologies what was good about it, what was positive and what didn't appear to work and then put all of the positive things into a melting pot and came out with this methodology, which he called ESA. It's a three-stage methodology, where each of the letters represents a particular phase of the lesson. The first one being called the engage phase, the second the study phase and the final one the...  [Read more]

Teaching one-to-one Teaching English as a foreign language can be done one of two ways: teaching a group of students or by teaching on a one-to-one basis. It’s estimated that up to 40% of TESOL teaching is done one-to-one, however teachers find it increasingly difficult to find relevant material, advice and assistance on the method. Nicola Meldrum argues that teaching one-to-one “unfortunately is not covered much in ELT discussion” and that ‘It is somehow assumed that teaching English as a foreign language means organizing huge groups of students, while the reality is that one to one is a normal and significant part of our teaching lives”. Teachers are in effect left to their own devices; however this doesn’t stop the concept of teaching one-to-one being an effective and...  [Read more]

  This video provides a comprehensive overview of all the future tenses in the English language: future simple, future continuous, future perfect and the future perfect continuous. This is especially helpful for ESL teachers around the globe teaching speakers of other languages. 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. I liked this unit much more than some others. I've always believed that by adding games and fun to the learning process, students absorb...  [Read more]

Teacher Self Analysis My early experiences of learning in the State education system of the UK clearly affected my career and attitude to education. In the main, I was taught by root, this had the affect of making me become bored and if I am honest, I did not take full advantage of my education. Later realising I still had some untapped potential I enrolled on a course in Higher Education. I expected the same teaching methods that I had experienced earlier in my life, but instead found a more progressive, student centered approach. My motivation was high and I achieved my Certificate in Education. I took these varied experiences with me when I entered teaching some ten years ago. I soon found that most learners at the college were I worked were poorly motivated, lacking drive and...  [Read more]

Pronunciation Problems for Chinese Students of English As a global language, English has been popularly taught as the second language in China for quite a few years. Now there are more Chinese people learning English on various purposes, such as applying for a higher paid job, studying and living abroad, or establishing business with western countries. According to my experience of learning and teaching English, it is harder to master English pronunciation than English grammar for Chinese students. Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of many highly-inflected Western languages (e.g. Russian, Latin, etc.), or even the low-scale verb conjugations, for instance, of English (e.g. "swim, swam, swum") because of the lack of inflections. Even though there are similarities...  [Read more]

Classroom Management The meaning of classroom management is the skill of organizing and managing a class whilst maintaining a friendly relaxed manner and maintaining discipline. I am going to begin by sharing my experiences of being on the receiving end of classroom management and stating what I found effective and what I didn't find effective. I think as a teacher you have to adapt to the level and age of the students you are teaching. When I was in first school I was treated very differently to when I was in high school. During middle school and high school especially, we could analyze and estimate what our limits would be with certain teachers. I found that the teachers who maintained discipline from the beginning had a lot more control over a class as opposed to a teacher who didn't....  [Read more]

  ITTT offers three ways of earning your TEFL certificate. These are in-class, online and a combination of the two. But how do they differ and which course is the right one for you? The first option is the in-class course. The next option is the online courses. These courses represent outstanding value for money with prices starting as low as US$ 190. The final choice is our combined course. This offers trainees the best of both worlds and is a combination online and in-class courses. Are you ready to live and teach abroad? Click here and get started today: https://www.teflcourse.net/?cu=YTDESCRIPTION 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...  [Read more]

  Then, we have a set of objectives and aims. Here, the learner objectives relate to what we're hoping the students are going to be able to do by the end of your lesson and quite often, that can be a useful way of writing out what the objectives are. So, we would start the sentence "By the end of the lesson, students should be able to?" and then a list of two, three or four items that we're expecting the students to be able to do by completing this lesson. The learner objectives are different to the teacher aims the teacher aims are what you are expecting from that lesson itself. Now, when you first start teaching, quite a normal aim might be to complete the lesson successfully, to get through the whole thing without having any problems. As time goes on and you become more...  [Read more]

ESA: A Teaching Methodology For many years Teachers of English have used the PPP model of Presentation, Practice and Production for the preferred model of teaching. It has worked well. The PPP model falls short however, in that it does not work well when teaching more complex language problems beyond the sentence level or when teaching communicative skills. Jeremy Harmer in How to Teach English (Longman Publishing 1998) proposed an alternative to PPP called ESA: Engage, Study, and Activate. In an article written in The Guardian Weekend, March 15 1997, Bridget Riley complained about the treatment she and her fellow students received at the Royal College of Art. “We were abandoned when what we needed and what we hoped for was help toward independence in teaching rather than having...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our video series on "Evaluation and Testing of Students". In this video, we look at some of the most common general English exams students of English take around the world. EFL teachers often hold classes to prepare the students for these international proficiency exams. 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. What i can understand from this unit is that the roles of both, the teacher and the student, are equally important.I...  [Read more]

  Our next consideration is going to be how we actually group our students. There are perhaps three types of grouping arrangements that we can consider and within those we'll have a look at the potential positive and negatives of those particular arrangements. So firstly, what arrangements can we use? We could arrange our group as a whole class so all of their activities will be done as a whole class. They could be working as individuals and the final grouping arrangement we'll consider is that of small groups or indeed the use of pair work. So for each of these types of arrangements what are the potential positive and negatives with that type of arrangement? For the whole class certainly one of the main positive features is that it gives that class a sense of belonging. Secondly...  [Read more]

British english vs american English With English being recognised as the global language of choice, which one is considered the official language? So just how did American English diverge from British English in the first place? American English roots back to the early colonial days of the late 16th century, were a whole gamut of cultures converged into a single society. In some colonies English wasn’t even a spoken language and in those colonies that did speak English it was quite different from the English we know today. The Elizabethan English of the day consisted of many varieties of regional English dialects. All these different dialects, intermingled with a multitude of cultures formed one big boiling pot, of which over time, a new variant was produced – American English. And...  [Read more]

  In this episode, we cover the pronunciation of the word "phreaker". This word is a noun and refers to someone who one who gains illegal access to the telephone system. The word become widely popular in the mid-1980s and is likely a combination of the words "phone" and "freak". Modern phreakers are very specialized hackers breaking into the phone system of large companies and corporations. 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. In this lesson I...  [Read more]

Common Linguistic problems Contronyms, Heteronyms, Idioms, Oh my! English is an extremely complex language. Before a student can be considered truly proficient, he/she must not only master a variety of tenses and irregular verbs, sentence structure and parts of speech, but he/she must also work to understand and master lexical and structural ambiguities. Lexical ambiguities are very common and have a variety of names and definitions depending on the level of ambiguity. Homonyms are words that have the same spelling, but two or more meanings. An example of this is: mean. Is it describing an unkind person? Is it an average? Is someone talking about the definition of a word? Another type of lexical ambiguity is the heteronym. These are words that are spelled the same, but have different...  [Read more]