Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Georgia? Are you interested in teaching English in Lawrenceville, Georgia? Check out our opportunities in Lawrenceville, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
Wrapping up the course, we get into some of the more challenging problem spots one encounters in ESL. This includes starting up a new class, motivating the unmotivated, level gap within a class, oversized classes, and native language use.
New classes need an exploratory first lesson to break into the mold (or to form it, in cases of a class where students are new to each other as well). Low pressure rapport builders (which tie into some good warm-ups) as well as a simple needs analysis to find out how one needs to adjust are good here.
As an extension of needs analysis work, designating appropriate activities for classes with varying levels and sizes is necessary, as well as unmotivated students. Pairwork, pairwork, and more pairwork. This helps in almost all of these cases, whether to help weak students by pairing them with stronger ones, shy students gain confidence in a smaller setting without a big spotlight on them, and of course large, distractable classes too.
As for native language use and appropriate listening materials, the solutions are centered around similar needs. The students require appropriate challenge and well-established rules and supplementary vocabulary to help them jump into either pursuit and either hear or use English consistently. As always, slow and steady wins the race, and providing helpful vocabulary and phrases early on will benefit the students later.
On a personal note, I was glad to see some tips for coaxing students out of native language use (this has come up before, but it's relevant to my current work so I take away new things each time), particularly with combining new vocabulary provisions to build up their
English while feigning knowledge of it. This doesn't always work for me, since I rotate schools almost every day and cannot build up that key fundamental English with them, but using that strategy to a lesser degree and keeping tasks simpler while using English alone as much as I can seems like a good strategy. I also want to try and implement a clear designation of no English (possibly using a board magnet sign) in the future for Activate phase activities.
This was a great course, and I learned a lot of useful tips and methods that from here I'll be working to implement in my own lessons and future jobs in the field. I am so excited to raise the bar for myself to help my learners!
