How to get started as an online teacher of English
Have you thought about teaching English online? Emma Segev gives some practical tips and useful websites for getting started in one of our top five articles of all time, illustrated by artist Jamie Johnson. When I first started teaching in 2004, I was sceptical about the effectiveness of online teaching, but since then I have accumulated a lot of experience. I'd like to share with you a few things I've learned along the way.
Grouping students
Do you think about whether you’ve got a balance between pairs, groups, whole class and individual work? If you have activities for pairs and groups, do you let the students decide who they’re going to work with or do you decide? This tip looks at the advantages and disadvantages of the three main ways of grouping students. They are, giving students the choice, random grouping and selecting the groups yourself. You’ll probably find that no one way will always be the best choice for a particular group, but that you’ll use all three ways at different times depending on your students and the activities you plan to do.
Checking Understanding
Analysis of the language consists of two sub-stages, often known as highlighting and concept checking. Highlighting is taking the model sentence and showing, telling or eliciting what the problems are in terms of form, function, and phonology. Concept checking is checking the understanding of difficult aspects of the target structure in terms of function and meaning.
Working in pairs and groups
The advantages of pair work and small group work Gives learners more speaking time Changes the pace of the lesson Takes the spotlight off you and puts it onto the children Allows them to mix with everyone in the group Gives them a sense of achievement when reaching a team goal Teaches them how to lead and be led by someone other than the teacher Allows you to monitor, move around the class and really listen to the language they are producing Pitfalls and how to avoid them You could lose control of the class. Set up a signal before you start, like a visual time out with your hands, so that they know when to stop. Don’t shout for them to stop as they will just shout louder!
Connected speech
Recently however, there has been a shift of focus towards the other systems operating within phonology, which may be more important in terms of overall intelligibility. What connected speech is How this affects native and non-native speakers Aspects of connected speech Working on weak forms Conclusion What connected speech is "English people speak so fast" is a complaint I often hear from my students, and often from those at an advanced level, where ignorance of the vocabulary used is not the reason for their lack of comprehension. When students see a spoken sentence in its written form, they have no trouble comprehending. Why is this?
Error Correction 1
Therefore the aim of this article is not to be prescriptive, but to highlight some key areas. It is in 2 parts. In the first part we look at ... Attitudes to error correction Categorising errors A model for correcting writing The role of planning Practical techniques / ideas for correcting writing Attitudes to error correction Attitudes to error correction vary not only among teachers but also among students. A teacher may be influenced by:
Richard Smith, Amol Padwad - English teaching in difficult circumstances
About the webinar This presentation aims to address the usually neglected needs of teachers working in ‘difficult circumstances’ (i.e. in low-resource classrooms, with large class sizes, in developing country contexts) and to help such teachers realise that they have the potential to take charge of their own development via collaboration with others in similar settings, locally and internationally. Another aim is to show teacher educators how they can support colleagues to take the first steps in this process, despite constraints. The presentation is structured around two practical training tasks used successfully in a Hornby Regional School in Kathmandu on 'The Low-resource Classroom', which we illustrate using brief excerpts from video-recordings. We begin by defining 'difficult circumstances' and establishing the nature of participants' own classroom settings. About the speakers
Listening Maze
Words such as 'hard' and 'heart' are distinguished by the final consonant being voiced or devoiced (but note that the vowel sound is affected, so that it is longer before the voiced consonant eg in 'hard'). Learners from many language backgrounds tend to devoice final consonants so 'hard' is pronounced like 'heart'. This activity is to raise awareness and provide practice of this point.
Using students' first languages in the classroom
Summary: Using students' first languages in the classroom Whether it is better to use the students' first language (L1) in class or have an English-only policy is something that has been much debated and that has seen many changes of fashion over the years. It seems, therefore, that the only sensible reaction an individual teacher can take to this controversial subject is to neither accept nor reject the use of L1, but simply to search for an ideal level of its use in each individual class- maybe changing its use as the class progresses in level or changes in other ways. Here are some tips to help you spot if you have found your own perfect level of L1 use in your classes and how to adjust the level if you haven't reached that point yet.
Fun with Pronunciation Drills!
Now, I’m not suggesting that the infamous audio-lingual method should make its comeback – far from it! Luckily, the days of de-contextualised, lesson-long, teacher-led chants are well and truly behind us (apart from the Callan method), but surely we can make some room for pronunciation drills? Many teachers today avoid drills at all costs! But I’ve actually become quite the superfan. What better way to get students familiar with new sounds, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, lexical chunks and connected speech, than with pronunciation drills.
Asking questions
Questioning is crucial to the way teachers manage the class, engage students with content, encourage participation and increase understanding. Typically, teachers ask between 300-400 questions per day, however the quality and value of questions varies. While questioning can be an effective tool, there is both an art and science to asking questions. Every question demands a response (except in the case of requests and suggestions), so that questions inevitably generate communication.
Integrating pronunciation into classroom activities
In my work as a teacher trainer I have been surprised at how often experienced teachers are reluctant to tackle pronunciation issues in class. I can think of at least two reasons why pronunciation tends to be neglected: firstly, the lack of clear guidelines and rules available in course books, and secondly the fact that isolated exercises once a month do not seem to have much of an effect. This is not surprising, however; like all other areas of language teaching, pronunciation needs constant attention for it to have a lasting effect on students, which means integrating it into daily classroom procedures.
