Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Montana? Are you interested in teaching English in Fairfield, Montana? Check out our opportunities in Fairfield, 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!
After reading the document containing the information about the first unit, here is what I learned.
Good teachers will possess the following qualities : they’re kind and patient, they love teaching, they’re lively and entertaining and they’re able to motivate the learners. They also have a good subject knowledge, have a good rapport with the class and are able to involve all students equally throughout the lessons. Finally, they’re able to correct the students without offending them or affecting their motivation and they know their weaknesses and will provide help and individual attention when it’s necessary.
Following my reading, I became able to understand the different roles of teachers. Some of them are more centered on the teachers and some others on the students. There is a total of nine : manager or controller, organizer, assessor, prompter, participant, tutor, resource or facilitator and model. The role they employ mostly depends on the type of activity and good teachers know which role to take and when.
I also read that, when looking at learning, we need to consider these factors : the students age, their culture, their language level and their motivation for learning.
I learned, as well, that the following factors have an impact on a the students ability to succeed : their age, their previous learning experiences, their motivation, their nervousness, their language awareness, their life experience, their culture and first language, their language level and, in some cases, their behavior problems. On the other hand, I am now knowledgeable about the general characteristics that successful students possess. They are the following : the willingness to listen to the language, the desire to experiment with it, the ability to think about their own learning process, their acceptance of error corrections and their desire to learn.
In regards to the students age more specifically, the differences between adults and young learners reside in the fact that adults are influenced by their previous learning experiences, that they often made the decision to attend the course themselves, that they’re more nervous about their learning process, that they are more prone to match the new language to their native and that they have bigger attention spans along with more life experience.
Throughout this unit, I also found out that there are three categories of young learners : the first one is called post-puberty or teen age, the second is referred to as primary school and includes eight to twelve years old students and the third one is called preschoolers and includes children who are seven years old or less.
Regarding language levels, I now know that the most common breakdown involves the following categories : beginner, low or pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced. The European Framework’s classification is the following an equates the levels listed above : breakthrough, waystage, threshold, vantage, effective and mastery.
Finally, I learned that the students common reasons for attending an English class are : for future career prospects, for travel purposes, to improve their grades or achieve success in exams, to study or live in an English speaking country, to communicate with colleagues, friends or partners or simply out of interest in languages.
