TESOL Tips
A lot of the lessons that I observe don't turn out as well as the teachers had hoped. In many cases this is not because the teacher is incompetent, or because the lesson content is inappropriate, or because there is anything wrong with the materials being used. The problem is often just that the teacher lacked some basic class management and/or ESOL teaching techniques; for example, she wasn't able to give really clear directions for an activity, or she didn't know an effective way to check the students' understanding of vocabulary.
The entries below contain simple tips on how to improve your class management and TESOL techniques so that your lessons run more smoothly.
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The Importance of Wait Time
When most ESOL teachers ask their students a question, they allow students very little time to answer. Typically, if a student does not answer within 1.5 seconds, the teacher either jumps in to answer the question herself or repeats the question or asks a follow-up question.
This obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense because it ignores the fact that ESOL students need more than a second or two to process a question and then to formulate and produce a response.
Research shows that a lot of good things happen when a teacher allows more response time. When students are allowed 3 or more seconds to answer:
- The number of “I don’t know” and no answer replies drops
- Students produce longer and more correct answers
- The length and correctness of their responses increase.
- More students volunteer answers, and the latter are significantly more appropriate.
So when you ask your ESOL students a question, try to wait patiently for at least 3 seconds to see if the student(s) can answer.
Note: “Wait time” is even more important in classes from cultures (e.g., Japan) where it is impolite to answer a question immediately even if you know the answer!
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This obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense because it ignores the fact that ESOL students need more than a second or two to process a question and then to formulate and produce a response.
Research shows that a lot of good things happen when a teacher allows more response time. When students are allowed 3 or more seconds to answer:
- The number of “I don’t know” and no answer replies drops
- Students produce longer and more correct answers
- The length and correctness of their responses increase.
- More students volunteer answers, and the latter are significantly more appropriate.
So when you ask your ESOL students a question, try to wait patiently for at least 3 seconds to see if the student(s) can answer.
Note: “Wait time” is even more important in classes from cultures (e.g., Japan) where it is impolite to answer a question immediately even if you know the answer!
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Words: Friends or Acquaintances?
In any language that we know, we all recognize and
understand many more words than we can actually use in our speech or writing. Somebody
once said that, like people, the vocabulary items that we know in any language can
be divided into “friends” and “acquaintances”. Most of the words you have met are
only acquaintances: You tend to forget them (although you may recall some if
you see or hear them again). You don’t have so many word friends – but those
that you have, you can always remember.
When it comes to teaching and learning vocabulary, the problem is how you can turn students’ word acquaintances into word friends.
The answer is basically very simple: Teach and practice them, and then recycle them again and again over a period of time. If you recycle new words often enough, the students will remember and be able to use them.
Unfortunately, a lot of modern ESL coursebooks are not constructed so as to facilitate vocabulary recycling. They often devote each unit to a different topic and therefore the vocabulary that is introduced in one unit does not recur in the following unit(s).
So, if you want to help your students to build up their active vocabularies, remember to recycle new words and phrases some time after the lesson in which the items first appear. A good rule of thumb is to recycle the items after one day, after one week, after two weeks, after one month and after three months.
Note: Recycling doesn’t have to take up a lot of class time. Each recycling of a set of words may involve just a 5-minute practice activity or exercise or game, perhaps used as an icebreaker at the start of a later lesson.
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When it comes to teaching and learning vocabulary, the problem is how you can turn students’ word acquaintances into word friends.
The answer is basically very simple: Teach and practice them, and then recycle them again and again over a period of time. If you recycle new words often enough, the students will remember and be able to use them.
Unfortunately, a lot of modern ESL coursebooks are not constructed so as to facilitate vocabulary recycling. They often devote each unit to a different topic and therefore the vocabulary that is introduced in one unit does not recur in the following unit(s).
So, if you want to help your students to build up their active vocabularies, remember to recycle new words and phrases some time after the lesson in which the items first appear. A good rule of thumb is to recycle the items after one day, after one week, after two weeks, after one month and after three months.
Note: Recycling doesn’t have to take up a lot of class time. Each recycling of a set of words may involve just a 5-minute practice activity or exercise or game, perhaps used as an icebreaker at the start of a later lesson.
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Focus on Consonants
You’ve probably already noticed that, when it comes to written texts, comprehension depends more on recognizing the consonant letters than the vowels.
I have omitted the vowels from the brief text below and yet I think you’ll agree that it is still perfectly comprehensible:
Whr r y lvng nw? Pls snd m yr pstl ddrss whn y hv tm. wld lk t snd y cpy f bk tht jst bght.
By contrast, the same text with the consonants omitted is impossible to decipher:
ee ae ou ii o? eae e e ou oa ae e ou ae ie. I ou ie o e ou a o o a oo I u ou.
What you may not have realized is that the comprehension of spoken English also depends largely on the recognition of consonant sounds as opposed to vowel sounds. If you’re not sure about this, think of how regional accents work.
The differences between accents are almost entirely differences in the ways we pronounce vowels; the consonant sounds hardly vary. In my British accent, the vowel sounds in “proud” and “died” are totally different, while in some Texas accents the vowels sounds are exactly the same and so the two words can be rhymed. In spite of this, I have no significant difficulty in understanding these Texan speakers. In the same way, my accent uses three different and distinct vowel sounds in “Mary,” “marry” and “merry” while most Americans use the same one vowel sound in all three words. Does this make it difficult for me to understand spoken American English? Not at all – because Americans use almost exactly the same consonant sounds as Brits use.
Is there any implication for ESOL teachers in all of this? I think so. It is that when we work on improving students’ pronunciation, we shouldn’t spend much time on improving the way they produce vowel sounds. Instead we should focus on helping them to improve their production of consonant sounds.
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Numbers Count
Let’s say you want students to do some free speaking or some oral practice of a grammar form. So you put them into pairs and tell them either to talk about a topic or about a picture that you’ve given them. What normally happens then is that, although a few pairs talk a lot, most students stop after saying just one or two sentences to each other.
So what can you do to insure that all the students talk a lot rather than a little?
I find the easiest way is to include specific numbers in your instructions. So instead of saying “Talk about your home country,” say “Tell your partner 6 things about your home country”. Instead of saying “Make some sentences from this picture,” say “Tell each other 5 sentences from the picture”.
It really works. Why? I think it’s simply that students usually try to do what you ask them to do. So if you say “Tell your partner some things,” they may stop after saying two things. But if you ask them to say 4 or 6 things, they will usually not stop until they have said 4 or 6 things!
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Eating Elephants
We all know how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
Well, I learned long ago that the same applies to teaching grammar.
This occurred to me recently when I was talking to a teacher friend. She was complaining that she’d always found it impossible to teach countables and uncountables (e.g., some sugar and some beans, many children but much noise) without getting her students totally confused. Then a colleague suggested that she shouldn’t try to teach them all in one or two lessons, even though the textbook she’s using presents and practices them all in one unit. Instead, she should break them into chunks and teach the chunks in separate lessons days or weeks apart.
I remarked to my friend that this is certainly the way I teach grammar and that I couldn’t imagine trying to teach all the different countable and uncountable forms in one lesson. It would be as impossible (and as confusing to students) as trying to teach several parts of one verb tense in one lesson.
So next time you have to teach a complicated chunk of grammar (such as a verb tense), I'd suggest that you ignore the way your textbook organizes the grammar. Instead, teach and practice only one digestible chunk in the first lesson. Then, in a later lesson, review the first chunk, and introduce and practice a second chunk. And so on in later lessons until you have covered all of the different forms.
P.S.
My friend was very indignant : “I thought textbook writers were experts on teaching. If they are, why do they put all the different forms in one unit then? Don’t they know that this misleads teachers into trying to teach all the different forms at once?” Good questions!
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Setting up Role-plays
Role-playing is an excellent way of providing students with oral practice of many different types of language. Students usually like role-plays, too, because they see that they reflect the ways that language is used in life outside of the classroom.
However, it can be difficult to organize role-plays so that they go really smoothly, particularly with lower level students or if your class includes several quiet students. What often happens is that students are too insecure to do a role-play without writing and then reading from a script; unfortunately, what results is practice in reading aloud rather than truly oral practice. On the other hand, if you don't allow the students to use prepared scripts, the students often cannot complete the role-play.
One solution is to provide students with a series of written prompts, organized in the form of a flowchart. This gives the students something physical to hold on to and it reminds them of what they have to express without telling them the exact words to use.
If you click on the link below, you will see a sample flowchart role-play, together with detailed directions on how to use it.
| role_play_-_flowchart.pdf |
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"E" is for "Eliciting"
Many years ago, a colleague completely changed my attitude towards teaching by suggesting that the teacher's role is to do and say only what his/her students can't do or say for themselves.
When he made his suggestion, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He gave me two examples of techniques that exemplified his approach.
Example 1: Eliciting Vocabulary
You want to teach a new vocabulary item, such as the noun " book". You could just hold up a book and tell the students, "It's a book". My colleague didn't do this. Instead, he would hold up a book and ask, "What's this?" In other words, he would elicit the word from the students.
Why do this? There's usually someone in the class who already knows whatever "new" word you want to teach. Letting this student display his/her knowledge is psychologically good for him/her. Also, if nobody knows the word, the students tend to be curious and want to know it; so they pay attention. And this alerts you to the fact that "book" really is a new word and so you need to deal with it thoroughly. On the other hand, if all the students shout out, "Book," you know that you won't need to spend much time teaching the word!
Example 2: Eliciting Corrections
You ask a student to repeat an example sentence during a drill. He makes a mistake. You can jump in and spoonfeed the correction. Or you can try to elicit it from the student by, for example, shaking your head and saying, "Try again." One benefit of this is that students' mistakes are often just slips; given a chance, students often produce the sentence correctly the second time they try. (Again, this is psychologically good for him.) But what if he makes a mistake when trying the second time? Try saying, for example, "Not quite" and asking another student to help: "Anna, help him." If you choose the right student, he/she will say the sentence. One thing to be careful with here, though: Be sure to go back to the original student so that he can show that he can now say the sentence correctly. correctly.
Why do this? One argument in favor of eliciting (rather than spoon-feeding) corrections is that it trains students to do something that they need to do when they're talking with someone in English outside class: Observe from the listener's reaction that they've made some kind of mistake; rethink what they said; and try to say it more appropriately. Other points in its favor are that it builds class harmony and that it promotes learner autonomy.
If your tendency in class is to "tell" students new words and to supply corrections, try eliciting instead. I'm sure that you'll like it. I'm sure your students will, too!
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Don't Explain Grammar
Of all the lessons I see, the least effective and engaging are usually those dealing with grammar. I think one reason for this is that teachers believe English grammar is difficult and so they over-complicate their lessons.
Whatever the reason, the grammar lessons I see are typically very teacher-centered and involve lots and lots of explanation by the teacher. The explanation is often so complex and full of grammatical terminology that it confuses the students. It also tends to focus on the form of the target grammar, sometimes not even mentioning its meaning and/or use. And when examples are given, they are often very unnatural. (Can you imagine anyone really saying e.g., “The door was opened by John”?)
Not all lessons are like this, of course! I see some explanation-focused lessons where the students are not confused and where they take an active part in the explanation. This is certainly less teacher-centered but it is still essentially ineffective because the students talk about the grammar rather than talk using the grammar.
Grammar lessons really don’t have to include lots of explanation. If you want to see an example of the kind of approach that I personally use when teaching grammar, go to the “Lessons” page of this site. There you will find a detailed plan of a lesson introducing and practicing the Past Simple Passive. Like most grammar lessons, it isn’t very exciting. However, I think it’s clear, it’s reasonably student-centered, and it includes plenty of oral practice.
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Use Info Gaps
I love information gaps. You know what they are, right? They're activities where one student has some information, his/her partner has other information, and they have to exchange the information so that they both end up with all of it.
(In case you're not familiar with info gaps, there is an example below, in the pdf file called "how much info gap". In this example, each student has to find out from his/her partner the price of a number of things shown on his/her worksheet.)
The reason I like these activities is that they at least partly reflect the way language is used in real life - to transfer information (in its broadest sense) from someone who already knows it to someone who doesn't.
BTW, students love info gaps, too. They see the link with real language use, and they usually like the challenge that the activities pose. They also like the fact that they don't have to rely on the teacher to evaluate their performance. When the students compare their worksheets at the end of an info gap, they can see exactly how they did - and this enables them to judge their own communicative abilities.
Note:
Info gaps only work if the students cannot cheat by looking at each other's paper. So it is usually best to move all the students' seats so that the two students in each pair are sitting back-to-back and cannot possibly look at each other's paper.
| how_much_info_gap.pdf |
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Speakee Pidgin?
When trying to grade your language in class so that lower-level students can understand you, it's easy to stray into Pidgin English. You want to ask the students, "Is that okay?" and you simplify it to "Is okay?" As I'm sure you'll agree, this is a problem. After all, we're supposed to be modeling "good" English to our students, not modeling unnatural and ungrammatical language that no native English speaker would use with other native English speakers.
I suppose there may be cases where using pidgin in class is unavoidable but such cases are few and far between, if they exist at all. It is usually possible to phrase directions etc. in such a way that they are easy to understand but are still English. It's just a matter of thinking carefully about how to phrase them. Take the example of "Is that okay?" It's already very simple but, if you want to simplify it further, you could say, "That okay?" (It may be ungrammatical but it's something we all use.) Or you could be even simpler and still totally natural by saying just, "Okay?"
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Don't Block The Board
Teachers tend to turn their backs to their students when they write on the board. This usually has the effect of disrupting class harmony and temporarily breaking the link between teacher and students. The latter aren't able to see what is been written, they don't feel engaged in the lesson and so they may start chatting, checking their text messages, etc.
To avoid this problem, try standing at right-angles to the board while you write on it. You will be able to maintain the link with your students; and and they will feel more engaged because they can see what you're writing.
If possible, engage the students in the boardwork by eliciting some of the words from them or asking them to spell some of the words.
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Learn Your Students' Names
To me this is an absolute prerequisite for effective teaching. This is for two reasons.
1. If you don't know students' names, you will not be able to manage the class effectively because you will not be able to, for example, nominate students to answer questions or ask students to help each other. (Well, you will be able to but you're going to sound pretty rude constantly saying e.g., "You, answer number 3" and "You, help her.")
2. Most of us agree that students learn best when their teachers care about them - or rather, when they feel that their teachers care about them. I really don't see how you can convince your students that you care about them if you don't even know their names!
Note:
When I raise this issue with the trainee teachers on my Cambridge CELTA courses, they often try to fob me off with one or both of two excuses: "I'm really bad with names" and "It's difficult to learn and remember so many names". I refuse to accept either of these excuses. I point out that everyone is bad at remembering names - unless and until they make an effort to do so. I also point out that good bartenders can recall the names and preferred drinks of literally hundreds of regular customers, so any teacher should be able to remember the names of a few dozen students.
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Use and Teach Contractions
Teachers of lower level classes are always telling me that they don't use or teach spoken contractions in their lessons. In other words, they use and teach e.g., "It is" rather than "It's" and "do not" rather than "don't". They say they do this because they feel contractions are difficult and they are not as correct as non-contracted forms. (Some teachers even say that contractions are "slang".)
I think these teachers are making a big mistake.
Contractions such as "It's" and "don't" are certainly not slang. ("Gonna" is a different matter.) All native speakers - except Queen Elizabeth - use these forms much more often in speech than they use the non-contracted forms. Contractions are, if you like, our default settings. In normal speech the only time we opt for the non-contracted form is when we have a specific reason for doing so. So, for example, we may use a non-contracted form for emphasis, as in "You cheated" "No, I did not".
If you don't at least expose your students to contractions, they are really going to struggle with comprehension when they leave class and hear native speakers talking. Your students are also going to sound very stilted and unnatural when they themselves speak.
So I would strongly recommend that you introduce contractions from your very first lesson, even with Beginners. It isn't difficult, for them or for you. For example, I introduce common nouns on Day 1 with Beginner classes. I show a picture of e.g., a pen and I say "It's a pen" a couple of times. Then I say "It is a pen," pointing to one of my fingers as I saw each word. Then I say "It is," pull together the two fingers representing these words, and say "It's". I repeat "It's a pen" a couple more times, before having students repeat it. I've never known students find the difference between "It's" and "It is" puzzling or confusing.
When I eventually write the sentence on the board, I first write "It is a pen". Then I write "It's" under "It is". Via mime I explain that we use "It is" when we write but "It's" when we speak.
Note:
When I raise this issue on the CELTA training courses that I teach, there is always one participant who objects and claims that he/she doesn't use contractions. . However, their objection is easy to deal with because they invariably object by saying "I don't agree" and/or "I don't use contractions"!
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Make Groupwork the Norm
When I first started teaching ESOL, my lessons consisted mainly of open-class activities: I would stand at the front and interact with the class as a whole. I thought this was what teachers did; after all, it was the way I'd been taught all the way through high school and university. Then a colleague came in to watch one of my lessons, which I was giving to a class of about 16 students. After the lesson, he pointed out that the way I was teaching was very inefficient because each individual student was able to speak for a very few minutes in an hour's lesson. This clearly was not ideal, given that the students were trying to learn a language. He also pointed out - very gently - that my approach was very teacher-centered and didn't allow the students any of what he called "learning space".
It didn't take much reflection on my part to realize that my colleague was right. So I started including in my lessons activities that the students could do in pairs or small groups, while I walked around monitoring them. This dramatically increased the amount of speaking that each student was able to do in my lessons.
Over time I kept expanding the amount of lesson time devoted to activities where the students worked together in pairs or small groups rather than as a whole class. It didn't take very long before I realized that my view of teaching had totally changed. In my early days as a teacher, I had assumed that the open-class format was the norm but that you could sometimes vary lessons by including pair or group activities. Now I had changed to believing that lessons should have pair and group activities as their basis, and that teacher-led open-class work activities should be inserted only when these are necessary.
If you teach mainly in an open-class format, you might want to try using more pair and small group work. You will find that this will greatly increase the amount of speaking practice that each student gets per lesson. It will also help your students to become less dependent on you, the teacher. And perhaps you, too, will end up believing that pair and groupwork should be the norm for language lessons.
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How to Improve Your Teaching
There are lots of things that you can do to improve your teaching: study English grammar, read methodology books, participate in workshops and so on. Most of these require a significant amount of effort on your part and they often don't produce significant results in the short term.
If you want to find a simple yet effective way to improve your teaching, try this: Record your next lesson. Then sit down at home with a class list in front of you and listen to the recording. Listen to how much of the lesson was you talking vs. how much was your students talking. (Note this down in minutes and then as a percentages of class time.) Put a check beside each student's name each time he/she spoke. And listen to how clear your directions and explanations were.
I guarantee that you will be shocked. So shocked that you will almost inevitably reduce your talking and will improve the clarity of your directions and explanations in your very next lesson. You may even remember to insure that all students get a reasonably fair amount of talking time.
Note:
If you decide to record a lesson, don't use a camcorder. Use some sort of audio-recorder instead. Using video is much more distracting during lessons and during self-reflection on lessons.
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The Most Useful Words in TESOL
If teachers want to elicit sentences from students, they normally try to do this by asking questions, such as "What did you do last night?" or "What are you going to have for lunch?" Unfortunately, the students tend to reply with single words or short phrases: "Watched TV"or "Pasta". When this happens, teachers can't fairly object because native speakers often/usually reply to questions with short answers. So what teachers tend to do is to follow up by saying "Could you say that in a sentence, please?" This will produce a sentence from the student - but in a very artificial way and at the cost of extra teacher talking time.
So how can you prompt students into responding naturally but with full sentences? Start your prompt with the three most useful words in TESOL: "Tell me about ..." If you say to native speakers "Tell me about what you did last night?" or "Tell me about what you're going to have for lunch?" they will virtually always reply with full sentences. So will students.
Note:
If a student responds to a "Tell me about ..." prompt with a single word or short phrase, I think it is fair to point out to them that this does not reflect the way that native speakers generally respond. Once you have done this a few times, your students will slip naturally into the habit of responding with full sentences.
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Checking Answers
You give your class a written exercise and the students complete it. They naturally want to know how they did – and you probably want to comment on some of the sentences that students found difficult. So you elicit the answers, one by one, confirming the correct ones and commenting on the problem ones.
This is what I used to do until I realized that this is a very inefficient way of checking answers.
If the exercise is appropriate for the class, all the students will have answered most of the questions correctly, showing that they have mastered the points covered by these questions. So if they have mastered these points, why waste time on them? Wouldn’t this time be better spent on the questions/points that students had problems with?
What I do now is monitor the students as they work on the exercise. I make a note (mental or written) of the questions they all answer correctly. Then, in feedback, I say: “Okay. All of you had the correct answer for sentences 1 through 6. Good! Now let’s look at sentence 7.”
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Learn Something about Your Students' Countries
I find that one of the quickest ways of creating a bond with students is to show them that you know something about their home countries. They particularly appreciate this when their teacher is American - presumably because Americans are stereotypically ignorant about other countries!
You don't have to know much about their countries. Often just mentioning one fact is enough. So when I meet a new student from Peru, I might say "Oh, I've always wanted to visit Machu Picchu!" If a new student says she's from Mexico, I may ask "Which city? Mexico City? Cuernavaca? Monterrey?"
I've always done this with students but the importance of doing it was really brought home to me in the early 1990s when I was teaching in San Francisco. Most of my students were from Eastern Europe. When I would ask them where they were from, they would always say "Russia". I would say "Really?" and they would repeat "Russia". I'd refuse to accept this and I'd say "Come on, where are you really from?" Nine times out of ten they would then say they were from Ukraine or Georgia or some other part of the old USSR. Whenever I asked them why they were so reluctant to tell me their country, they always gave the same reason: If they told Americans where they were from, the Americans would look puzzled and say "Where?" So the students learned it was easier just to say they were from Russia.
I'm sure you can imagine how delighted they were when they said e.g., "Ukraine" and I would say something like "Ukraine? Oh, where they filmed Battleship Potemkin" or "Ukraine? Isn't it Odessa that has the most beautiful opera house in the world?"
Note:
BTW, if I don't know anything about a new student's country, I just take a quick look at the country's Wikipedia page to find a couple of things that I can mention in the next lesson.
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Adding an Oral Element to Exercises
ESOL textbooks include a lot of written exercises, and many of these are quite useful. However, in normal everyday life most people speak much more than they write. To me, this means that much more of our lesson time should be spent on oral rather than written practice. It doesn't mean that I don't include written exercises in my lessons, though. I do. But I try to adapt them so that they provide more oral practice.
Adapting written exercises to provide oral practice can be difficult and time-consuming, so I often leave the exercises as they are but ask my students to work in pairs to complete them. This at least means that the students discuss how to complete each part of the exercise and it thereby adds an oral element to the activity.
Note:
As with all my pairwork activities, I initially hand out only one worksheet per pair, to insure that the students really do talk and cooperate with each other.
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Spoon-feeding Corrections
One way to handle the correction of students' mistakes is to provide the correction yourself. However, this isn't a very student-centered approach, and I don't think it really helps students to improve their English. If this is how you usually deal with correction, try out the approach described below. I think you'll find it engages and helps students more.
Student A makes a mistake: He says "Yesterday I go to the bank".
You shake your head to indicate something is wrong, and you say "Try again".
Student A repeats the incorrect sentence.
You shake your head again and prompt the student by saying "Yesterday you?" (Or by saying "Go or went?" or "Go in the past?")
Student A says "Yesterday I went to the bank."
So why might this be a better way of correcting than just supplying the correction yourself? After all, doesn't this way take longer? Well, it doesn't always take longer. Students' mistakes are often just slips in concentration rather than real errors. In these cases, the students will often correct themselves as soon as you start shaking your head. And, even if the correction does take longer, you are encouraging your students to do what they need to do outside the classroom: to monitor their own speech and to repair it when necessary. You are boosting their confidence, too, by demonstrating that they are often capable of correcting their own mistakes.
Note:
But what if Student A can't correct himself? What you do then is go to another student and say "Help him". If you choose the right student, he/she will provide the correction. Of course, you should then return to Student A to give him a chance to repeat the correct version.
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Student A makes a mistake: He says "Yesterday I go to the bank".
You shake your head to indicate something is wrong, and you say "Try again".
Student A repeats the incorrect sentence.
You shake your head again and prompt the student by saying "Yesterday you?" (Or by saying "Go or went?" or "Go in the past?")
Student A says "Yesterday I went to the bank."
So why might this be a better way of correcting than just supplying the correction yourself? After all, doesn't this way take longer? Well, it doesn't always take longer. Students' mistakes are often just slips in concentration rather than real errors. In these cases, the students will often correct themselves as soon as you start shaking your head. And, even if the correction does take longer, you are encouraging your students to do what they need to do outside the classroom: to monitor their own speech and to repair it when necessary. You are boosting their confidence, too, by demonstrating that they are often capable of correcting their own mistakes.
Note:
But what if Student A can't correct himself? What you do then is go to another student and say "Help him". If you choose the right student, he/she will provide the correction. Of course, you should then return to Student A to give him a chance to repeat the correct version.
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Adjust Your Tasks
One problem faced by all teachers is that students have different abilities and work at different speeds. So if you give your students a task – such as an exercise – some students will have finished the task before others are halfway through it. Teachers then face a difficult choice. Should they risk boring the faster students by letting the class continue with the activity until everyone has completed it? Or should they stop the activity even though not everyone has finished it? I find that teachers typically do the latter.
I normally don’t like stopping an activity before everyone has completed the assigned work. I think it’s very demoralizing for the students who don’t get to finish it. (And, let’s face it, these students tend to be the same ones in every lesson.)
So what’s the solution?
Let’s say that I’m going to give my class an exercise that contains 15 sentences. I know that it will take the slowest students as much time to work through 8 sentences as it will for the fastest students to complete all 15 of them. So what I do is tell the class to work through only sentences 1-8. Then I walk around, monitoring the students’ progress. When I find students who have completed the first 8 sentences, I quietly tell them to start working on sentences 9-15. I then stop the activity when everyone has finished sentences 1-8.
This approach seems to work well. The faster students have enough work to keep them busy, while the slower students derive satisfaction from having completed the assigned task.
Note :
In feedback on the exercise, I stop after we have checked the answers for sentences 1-8. Then, of course, the faster students ask me about the other sentences. I “reluctantly” go through the other answers but I do so very quickly, as if they’re not at all important.
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Check Your Students' Copying
In most lessons you will write something important on the whiteboard; for example, a list of new words or a table showing a grammar pattern. You will probably ask the students to copy this down.
I think it is really important to spend a couple of minutes walking around the class to check the accuracy of the students' copying. I guarantee that - whatever the level of the class - you will find mistakes in what some of the students have written. Some students will have spelled new vocabulary items wrongly or will have omitted an essential part of a grammar pattern.
If you don't check their copying, these students will take home and review/practice examples of incorrect English!
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Two Crucial Words
I don't know how anyone can cope with living in the USA if they don't know the words "thing" and "stuff". In my experience, Americans hear and use these words all the time. So I am amazed that they are rarely if ever included in ESOL textbooks.
Personally, I always make sure that all my students at least understand both words. I have them practice using them, too. Why? Because they're so useful to people with limited English. For example, let's say a student wants to borrow or buy some glue. Unless she is at a fairly high, she probably won't know the word "glue". But if she knows "stuff" and "thing," she can say "Do you have any of that stuff you use to stick things together?"
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Give Students Time to Think
At a recent TESOL workshop that I was leading, one of the teachers asked for advice on how to get active participation from more students in her classes. She explained that she tries to involve the students by asking questions but that the same two or three students always answer.
In my experience, this is one of the most common problems in ESOL classes, and it’s certainly one which I encountered when I was a new(er) teacher.
The root of the problem is that teachers tend to throw out questions to the whole class and then accept responses from whoever tries to answer first. This approach favors the stronger (or perhaps just the more extrovert) students over the students who need a little time to process the teacher’s question and to prepare their answer to it.
So what’s the solution? Let me outline the way I handle it.
1. I ask the class a question and say “Think about”.
2. When some students start answering, I tell them to think not speak. I am very firm about this!
3. When they’ve all had a few seconds of thinking time, I nominate a student to answer.
Note 1:
If the student that I nominate can’t answer, I just move on and nominate another student. As I initially gave them all some time to think about my question, I can be reasonably sure that they all prepared an answer.
Note 2:
It is important that you don't nominate a student before you ask the question. If you do this, the other students will naturally assume the question is not for them and most of them will not prepare an answer to it.
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Be Honest
I believe that one of our duties as teachers is to give our students honest feedback on their performance. (If we don’t give them such feedback, how can they know their areas of strength and weakness in English, and how will they know which aspects of the language to focus their efforts on?)
So I am dismayed when I see how many teachers bend over backwards to avoid pointing out that a student has made a mistake. Let me give you an example of the sort of teacher behavior that I see a lot and that drives me crazy.
The teacher holds up a pen and asks: “What’s this?” A student says: “It’s a hippopotamus.” Or maybe the student says: “It’s a banana.” It doesn’t matter because the teacher’s response is virtually almost the same: “Close.”
Well, I’m sorry but the student’s answer isn’t anywhere close to being right, and the teacher isn’t doing him/her any favors by lying about it.
I know, I know. The teacher is trying to be supportive and doesn’t want to damage the student’s ego. However, the reality is that our students have the right to expect honest and accurate feedback on their performance. Also, in my experience, students rarely if ever curl up and die if we tell them they’ve made a mistake. In fact, they like to be corrected, provided this is done in a pleasant way.
So next time one of your students gives a wrong answer, don’t patronize them by lying. Instead, just say “No” or shake your head and say “Try again”. As long as you have established good rapport with the class, this won’t damage your student’s ego – and it may help him/her to improve in English.
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Jump Around in Class
No, I don’t mean this literally!
What I’m talking about is the way you call on students to answer questions, to give examples, etc.
The way a lot of teachers do this is to go around the class calling on students in order according to where they are sitting. This may be logical but it is almost always a mistake, because the students quickly work out the order the teacher is using. Then the students at the end of the “line” think: “The teacher won’t reach me for another 4 minutes, so I’ll have a quick nap (or check my text messages or whatever).”
You can avoid this by calling on students in arbitrary order. As they don’t know who you’re going to call on next, they all tend to pay attention and stay engaged in what is happening!
Note:
No matter which order you use, the students normally assume that you will not call on the same person twice. So once a student has responded, he/she will tend to switch off. You can prevent this by occasionally calling on a student whom you already called on earlier.
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Work from Meaning to Word
As teachers, we often need to check whether students understand a word that is going to feature in one of our lessons. It might be word that occurs in an exercise we’re going to give the students, or it could be one that features in a listening or reading text we’re going to use.
One way to check – and it seems to be the most common way – is to ask the students to explain the word: “Can anyone tell me what ‘thin’ means?” I see this as being working from a word to its meaning.
Now, working from word to meaning can provide students with useful practice in defining and explaining – but it’s a very ineffective way of checking if they understand the word.
Why?
Well, firstly, students may understand a word but may not be able to define or explain it in English. (You don’t agree? Would it really be so easy for you to explain, for example, “soul” or “thing” in another language or even in simple English?)
There is another problem with going word to meaning. Students often mishear or misinterpret when you ask them about a word. So when you ask about “chicken,” one student may hear “checking,” another may hear “check-in” and a third may hear “kitchen”. You then have to spend valuable class time clarifying which word you are asking about.
I find that it is much clearer and more efficient to work from meaning to word. So if you want to check “chicken”, just ask: “What’s the bird/animal that gives us eggs?” If the students know, they will say “chicken”. If they don’t know, they’ll say so.
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One Paper per Pair
When teachers want students to work in pairs to complete a worksheet, they usually give each student a copy of the worksheet. What often happens then is that the students all work individually and the teacher walks around vainly pleading for them to cooperate.
There is a very simple way to avoid this problem: Give out only one worksheet to each pair. The students then have no choice but to work together.
Note:
Towards the end of the pairwork, remember to give a copy of the worksheet to the students who don’t already have one. If you don’t do this, these students will almost certainly feel aggrieved!
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