The Student Becomes The Teacher

English is one of the most commonly used second languages across much of the world and it is currently being studied by tens of millions of people from all backgrounds and cultures. How and where they choose to study can vary considerably, but one thing that most English language students have in common is that their studies are led by a tutor known as a TESOL teacher (or something similar such as ESL teacher, TEFL teacher, etc). The role of a TESOL teacher is to slowly build up their student's abilities in the four language skills; reading, writing, speaking, and listening, to enable them to reach their individual study goals, which could be for work, study, travel, or a variety of other reasons. Please note: the acronym TESOL stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. ...  [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]

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]

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]

Teacher Career Development Wikipedia® states that the study of career development looks at how individuals manage their careers within and between organizations and how the organizations structure the career progress of their members. This is alluding to the fact that professionals and organizations are in a partnership. This definition fails to mention the importance and influence of colleagues throughout the lifetime of a career. It is the freedom and support that is given to the teacher by her employer and colleagues throughout the lifetime of her career that can create the feelings of happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment, to not have this can lead to a career that is discarded only to search for something that may not be as rewarding. So what happens to teachers when the...  [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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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]

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]

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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]

Discipline in the Classroom Eight out of ten TESOL teachers who do not return after their first year of teaching drop out because they are unable to control their problem in the classroom. According to the researches, that have done recently, discipline ranked as the number one problem in the schools. What is discipline? According to the Webster’s dictionary discipline is the “training that corrects, molds, or perfect the mental faculties or moral character.” How can a teacher maintain discipline in a classroom? There will be many ideas to maintain discipline in the classroom. For sure those suggestions will be helpful, but first of all, teacher should know the main reasons for students’ misbehavior. The students have not learned the behaviors that are expected of them Good...  [Read more]

Establishing Rapport I remember back to my early days of academic progression through the Australian public school system with mixed emotions. In the main, English (and other subjects for that matter) were laboriously taught “strictly by the book”, by uninteresting individuals in droning monotone, that failed to instill any ongoing interest in either the subject matter, or the lesson as a whole. My attention unerringly moved to watching the second hand on the clock excruciatingly slowly, rotate through three hundred and sixty degrees, marking the completion of that minute and the start of the next, that would eventually culminate in the required number of minutes being completed to conclude the lesson and the hasty, mass exodus from the classroom, at great risk to life and limb, by...  [Read more]

Classes of Mixed Ability You walk into your first class in a new school. You begin with introductions and to your dismay you find a great disparity in the students’ English skills. There are students who have spent time abroad and others who are struggling with Basic English sentence structure. The focus of this article will be to weigh the advantages of 2 teaching strategies for classes of mixed ability introduced in the International TESOL Teacher Training (ITTT) course: grouping similar ability levels and pairing strong with weak students. The first strategy is to separate students within the class so that they have similar levels as the students they do activities with. The main advantages of this strategy are the ability to separate material and to focus on needs separately. When...  [Read more]

  Absolutely YES! Large numbers of non-native English speakers complete our TEFL courses each year and go on to have successful careers teaching English either in their home country or further afield. In order to successfully complete the course you will need to demonstrate a high standard of English, but it is certainly not a barrier that will stop you from becoming a fully qualified EFL teacher. In many cases being a non-native English speaker can actually be an advantage in the classroom as you have already been through the same experience that your students are currently facing. This can help to build a good rapport between the students and the teacher as they are often less afraid of making mistakes in this situation. It can also provide the students with a real incentive to...  [Read more]

  So now we'll consider the actual classroom arrangements themselves in terms of the physical desk layout. There are possibly three main types of arrangements that are used within classrooms and we're going to indicate the desks here as being boxes and the arrangements of the students within those desks will be blue crosses. So here we have the desks ranged in rows and the students sitting within those rows. The second arrangement could be the use of horseshoes or semi circles and finally the use of individual desks. So for each of these arrangements what are the potential advantages and disadvantages of arranging our seating in this way? Let's take the rows first of all. One of the potential advantages is that it does give the teacher the opportunity, if it's arranged correctly,...  [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]

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  http://www.teflonline.net This video looks at the structure of the positive form of the Present Simple tense. The negative form and the question form will be covered in other videos. The Present Simple talks about facts, habits and routines. Positive structure: subject + base form of the verb I/You/We/They teach English. He /She/It teaches English. There are a number of rules associated with the formation of the base verb. For most verbs add s to the base form of the verb -- plays, works... Verbs ending in o, s, z, ch, sh add es -- does, goes, washes... Verbs ending in a consonant plus y, change the y to i and add es -- cries, flies tries.... The verb be becomes am/is/are. The verb have becomes have/has. As a certified TEFL graduate you could gain a teaching position in...  [Read more]