Speaking Activity

  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 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]

  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]

  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]

A communicative speaking (and reading) activity where students are presented with incomplete information, which they must complete by interacting with others who do have that information. Typically undertaken as a milling activity with all students interacting with all others.  [Read more]

  The next example is going to be that of a boomerang lesson and remember the structure is like this. So, again, we're going to start with an engage phase and for our engage, the students are just going to have a discussion about jobs. What happens at interviews and so on and so forth. So, during that engage phase, what we'd hope to do is to elicit some useful language about jobs and interviews and the types of questions that are being asked. Then, we're going to move immediately into an activate activity and this is going to involve a role-play. So, we'll break the students into pairs. One will be an interviewer, the other will be an interviewee and they'll generate the language that that role-play will produce. What the teacher can do whilst that is taking place is to go around...  [Read more]

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  Now here are some teaching ideas for the future continuous tense. Here, we have an activity where we'll be asking students to spontaneously make some excuses based upon some invitations. We can do this in pairs or small groups. The teacher will have cut these cards up and the students will place them into a pile, randomly picking up a card. So one student might pick this card up and say 'Would you like to play tennis with me tomorrow?' The other student will be challenged to come up with an excuse as quickly as possible, which might be 'No, I'm sorry I'll be working.' Then, we have the next student pick up the next card and we challenge an additional student to make an excuse. Here we have another teaching idea for the future continuous tense and this involves two students trying...  [Read more]

  This episode of Chantelle’s TEFL video diary looks unit 12 of her online course. Unit 12 focuses on the two productive skills speaking and writing. The unit looks at the difference between accuracy and fluency and also discusses activities that can be used to encourage speaking and writing in both controlled and more creative situations. The unit discusses issues specific to writing such as handwriting, spelling, punctuation etc. It also looks at how games can be used in the classroom and encourages you to think about how to adapt different games for different language points. 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...  [Read more]

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  This presentation is going to focus on the use of course books, materials and teaching aids. There are many materials that we can bring to our classroom that will help with the teaching of our lessons and these include, though they're not limited to, things such as the wipe board, similar to the one that we're using here, various types of visual aids, created or bought worksheets, the use of cassettes CDs and DVDs and the use of video and in these classroom materials, we can also include things such as dictionaries and course books, various types of resource books that we'll have a look at and other materials such as photo copiers, computers, OHPs. So what we'd like to do is just to take a general look at some of the issues relating to each of these types of materials. Below you...  [Read more]

  And now we'll have a look at the present perfect continuous tense. As its name suggests, what we're going to do is combine the present continuous usages and the present perfect usages into a tense that basically expresses the fact that we've got an action continuing up until the present point in time. For the form of this tense, again, we're going to combine into various aspects of both the perfect and the continuous tenses. If we have a look we always begin with our subjects, then we have our, two now, helping verbs. The helping verb 'to have' for the perfect tenses, as well as the helping verb 'be' for the continuous tenses. For our subjects 'I', 'you', 'we' and 'they', we leave 'have' as 'have' and for 'he', 'she' and 'it', we conjugate it to 'has'. Because it's a continuous...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our video series on "Evaluation and Testing of Students". In this video, we look at placement tests. This type of test is also referred to as a level test. Its goal is to find out the current level of the student tested. A placement test generally tests all four skills (reading, listening, writing and speaking) and progresses from easy to hard questions. 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 find the engage activate and...  [Read more]

Teaching Grammar The acquisition of new grammar presents interesting challenges for both the student and the teacher. There are factors that need to be considered from the student's point of view, as well as the teacher's point of view. Grammar should be taught and learned a natural form. Teacher should avoid using technical terms related to grammar. The aforementioned factors can cause other difficulties that will be discussed in this article. Learning grammar in a natural form depends mostly on the way on which the teacher presents the grammar. The teacher must present the grammar using natural situations and examples that the students can relate to. In order to achieve this it is necessary, that the teacher plan ahead, know his students well, have a firm grasp of the grammar topic and...  [Read more]

Songs in the Classroom The use of songs in the ESL classroom can be a fun and innovative way of covering a range of English language topics. Songs can be used for vocabulary, grammar, dictation, pronunciation (stress and intonation), phonetics, speaking, writing, listening, integrative skills, and many other ESL points. Furthermore, songs can invite the non-native speaker into the English speaking culture. For instance, pop music gives the learner a taste of what is trendy at the moment. Meanwhile, the lyrics to classic rock songs can give a sense of history and the attitude of the country at the time of recording (for example, “Give Peace a Chance,” John Lennon, 1969). Additionally, children’s songs are crucially important for the young learner as they are an easy way to encourage...  [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]

  http://www.teflcourse.net The teaching idea for the future continuous covered in this video involves students picking a card with a picture of an activity on it and inviting their partner to join them. The other student then has to think up an excuse not to as quickly as possible in the future continuous tense. For example: Student A: Would you like to see a movie at the weekend? Student B: Sorry I can't, I'll be washing my hair. Ideas such as this are a great way for ESOL students to put the language they are learning to use in the classroom. Teaching ESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) is a fascinating and highly rewarding career choice and one which has a growing number of opportunities at the moment. One of the best ways to become an ESOL teacher is...  [Read more]

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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]