Teaching The Teacher To Improve Their English Lessons
Are you a teacher who regularly sees their students’ eyes glaze over with boredom? It is not you personally that they find boring; it is the material that. Think about a hockey game. It is not likely you will find someone struggling to stay awake at a hockey game. Why is that? It is because the people are excited and engaged by the activity. While few things are as exciting as an overtime goal, you can wake your students up to the course material by making your teaching methods more exciting and relevant to the student so that they will become more eager to learn. In this article, we have some ideas for English language teaching that will encourage learners to embrace the language.
Your job as an educator begins before you even meet your students. As you plan your curriculum, think of ways to make the students want to learn English. Make your lessons exciting, visual and fun. This will engage your students. You should also consider who the English as a second language (ESL) students are and the unique challenges that they face. When you meet them they may initially look at you like you have grown a second head. Don’t worry! You may be the first English speaking schoolteacher they have ever met. Give them time to get to know you.
As a teacher, the toughest challenge you can face is getting your students excited about the course material. For your purposes, you want the learners to find English interesting and fun. The best way to do that is to show them how their newfound vocabulary can be used. Perhaps they can visit an online English chat room to speak to people with common interests. Have the students perform skits of common situations like ordering a meal in a restaurant. Anything that will put the English lessons into real life situations will help the students.
As you are going through a lesson, check periodically to make sure that your students are in fact comprehending the material. Don’t just ask them, as they may be afraid or embarrassed to admit that they are struggling with the lesson or language proficiency. Ask some friendly but pointed questions to make sure they are absorbing the lesson. For instance, if you are learning the names of animals, ask someone if they’ve ever seen a lion or a tiger in the zoo before. If you are learning colors, go around the group and ask them to say what their favorite color is. Personalize the question so that it is relevant to each individual. This often encourages group discussions which is a wonderful atmosphere for learning.
Part of your job as a teacher is to find new and interesting ways to engage the learner and make the course material more interesting. Learning English can be daunting, so encouraging the students to have fun with the language will help them overcome any fears they may be experiencing. In time, you will see that enjoying the lessons will help students to learn faster.
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