Good riddance 2020. We’ve got high hopes this next year is going to be a better prospect for the TEFL world. That’s why we’ve gone away and had a long, deep think about all the important things to know if you want to teach English as a foreign language in 2021…
Those dreaded travel restrictions
Ever heard of a thing called COVID-19? Yep? Thought you might have. Well…it put a proverbial spanner in the works of the TEFL industry to put it lightly. Major border shutdowns halted travel for lots of people around the globe. For huge stretches, it was literally illegal to cross into Thailand or China or the EU. All that does show signs of easing right about now, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about a pandemic, it’s to expect the unexpected. Our advice? Have some flexibility in your plans. Don’t set a date to hit Bangkok and start that teaching position. It might not happen. Be ready to move your departures and keep an open line of communication with your employers to update them on what’s happening and when.
Online English as a foreign language is BOOMING!
One other side effect of the whole world going into lockdown has been a major upsurge in the popularity of online teaching. It was something that was doing pretty darn well anyway, with growing cohorts of schools opening remote learning platforms for students. But it’s hard to overstate where we are now – there seems to be a new online school almost every week! It’s not all rosy, though. A whopping 80%+ of teachers are now wanting to teach online in some capacity, so there’s hefty competition. What’s more, the best employers have some steady requirements, often asking for a college degree and previous experience.
Vaccines might just be the key
With COVID-19 restrictions still in place in the vast majority of countries (at least at the time of writing – fingers crossed!), experiencing a place the way it really is will still be tricky. And that’s assuming you make it over the border in the first place (see above!). The key to unlocking that pandemic box looks likely to be the vaccine. There are now lots of jurisdictions that ask for proof that travelers have had the yellow fever vaccine or rabies injection on arrival, so there’s precedent here. Basically, be jabbed and you’re probably more likely to be able to go traveling sooner.
There could be a travel rush
Keep us avid globetrotters locked up for a year and what did ya’ think would happen when you opened the floodgates? We’ve been stewing with dreams of powdery Thai beaches and the rattling canyon railways of Mexico, with visions of jungled mountains in Taiwan and Vietnamese floating markets. As soon as travel opens there’s sure to be a rush to start checking off those lines from the bucket list. That has consequences. Namely, it means travel is likely to be a tad more expensive for a while, which is why we thought we’d play our part with 33% off all our TEFL courses.
There’s still time to get TEFL certified before the world starts working again
One of the strange upsides of the pandemic in 2020 is that a whole load of people found that they had a whole load more time on their hands. Breadmaking, weaving, gardening – all of sudden hobbies could be indulged and activities pursued. If you’re eager to become an English as a foreign language teacher somewhere exotic once borders reopen, our advice would be to use this time to spruce up your CV. The obvious place to begin is an accredited TEFL course. We’ve got two that we usually recommend: The 120-hour course (the industry standard all over the globe) and the 140-hour Master Course (especially designed for people wanting to teach online).
Can you think of any more things to know if you want to teach English as a foreign language in 2021? We’d love to hear from would-be grads and veteran teachers alike. Just drop your thoughts in the comments below.
Diving into the world of English teaching can be tricky. Yes, we’ve got some world-beating 120-hour pro courses to get you off the mark, but this is a lifelong learning curve. Pedagogical trends are always changing. Disciplinary methods are always updating. What’s more, prospective employers – whether in Vietnam, France, or Mexico – love a candidate who shows energy in staying abreast of the latest in the industry. Cue this list of TEFL books, which can help you to teach with unique insights, ideas and more…
An AZ of ELT (2006), Scott Thornbury
A great place for newbie teachers to begin, this digital and paperback publication veers away from the more academic TEFL books to deal with all the confusing terms used in the industry. You’ll get a simple and easy-to-navigate list of phrases related to tutoring English as a foreign language. They range from academic technical phrases you’ll encounter on the job, like lexicons and grammatical cases, all the way to subject areas and methodological ELT topics, like phonology and pronunciation. TL;DR: It’s a good place to start if you’re struggling with the jargon.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2011), Lynne Truss
Calling all who struggle with grammar – this one’s for you. With a tagline that proudly proclaims this manageable tome of 220 pages “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” it’s the book you’ll need to sort your past participles from your present perfect tenses. The great thing about Truss’s approach is that it effortlessly mingles humor with arcane grammatical precision. Even the title of the book is a play on a joke about a panda. We’ll let you figure out the punchline for yourself.
Practical English Usage (1989), Michael Swan
Now in its third edition, this stand-out reference resource for English learners offers a different perspective on the teaching process. It has clear and concise articles that run through the proper usage of contentious English grammar, sentence formations, and syntax. But it also deals with vocabulary and typical mistakes in day-to-day speaking and listening. It’s certainly not a whack-in-the-suitcase-while-I-fly-to-Thailand sort of book – 664 pages sees to that. But it might be worth having handy when you need to check something technical or get some good ideas about how to teach a particular subject.
700 Classroom Activities (2005), David Seymour & Maria Popova
If you’re looking for TEFL books that are uber-practical, look no further than 700 Classroom Activities. Getting straight to the point with actionable lesson plans that will help you through those tricky moments in front of the kids, it contains oodles of games and icebreakers to keep your teaching in full flow. The activities range from early beginner level all the way to upper intermediate, so it’s good for teachers across a whole cross-section of the ELT world. The best part? All activities have been designed so you won’t have to photocopy a darn thing!
Ship or Sheep? (2007), Ann Baker
Pronunciation can cause serious issues for loads of learners. It’s a very geographical thing. For example, in eastern Europe, they often struggle with ‘i’ and ‘ee’. In Asia, it’s soft consonants that usually cause the trouble. To sort your homophones from your wrong-a-phones (good, eh?), this TEFL book comes to the rescue. It’s accompanied by an audio resource CD and has a series of exercises and helpers to aid pronunciation in English.
There’s a whole wide world of TEFL books out there that can really help you up that teaching game. If you’d like to add any to this list, be sure to drop them in the comments below. Alternatively, you might want to check out our 120-hour TEFL course to see how to get started in the EFL industry yourself.
Loads is written about teaching methods, teaching games, lead-in activities, and disciplinary techniques. But what about when the time comes to actually organize your TEFL classroom? There you stand; 12 desks and umpteen chairs, a class of unruly kids waiting outside the door. Just how do you expect to place them, and will it affect the way your English tutoring comes off? Cue this guide, with five top ideas for classroom plans…
The square
If your aim is to supercharge that lesson with all-important student talk time, then you might want to consider placing your tables in a square formation. The result is a classroom that resembles a sort of debating chamber; where no student is left facing a blank wall. You’ll find that verbal activities meant for the whole group really lend themselves to this sort of blueprint. It’s easy for students to talk to other students, no matter where they are in the room. Also, it’s easy for the teacher to get involved, simply by hopping right into the middle of their self-made square.
Tables for pairs
The benefits of pair work in the TEFL classroom are well documented. From vocabulary reinforcement to peer-to-peer encouragement, there’s certainly loads to be said for matching students one on one. That’s precisely where this classroom plan comes in. It isolates single tables in different compartments of the class, cutting up the space so that your group naturally falls into a series of twos. Of course, you might want to consider designating said pairs yourself – letting friends sit next to friends can cause unwanted distractions and nullify the effects of peer-based learning.
Space for chaotic learning
Imagine never having to organize your TEFL classroom. Imagine not even thinking about who sits where and what table goes in what corner. Nice, eh? Well, it might not be the laziest approach, because there is a theory that says it’s best to keep learners active and engaged by ditching the seated lesson plan altogether. Here, you’ll shift your furniture to the side of the class and employ active, kinetic teaching strategies to keep students on the ball. As you can imagine, this works particularly well with younger kids who are forever trying to stand, shout, and play.
Constantly shifting seating plans
A top tactic for teachers involved in mixed-ability classes is to constantly change up the places where students sit. Here, the focus isn’t so much on how you organize your TEFL classroom, but more on how you organize the people sitting in your classroom. There are lots of ways of ensuring pairs rarely stick together. You can make bespoke seating plans. You can opt to put tallest with shortest, oldest with youngest. Or, you can use a starter game to designate where pupils will be based. What’s so great about this is that it really encourages peer-to-peer learning. Putting high-ability with low-ability means skills are likely to rub off. What’s more, students will surely gain in confidence if you force them into pair work with colleagues they might not know as well.
Small groups of four-six
When the pains of a mixed ability class start to bite around the middle of the term, you could consider the tried-and-tested method of divide and conquer. Cue small-group table structures that house four to six students (depending on your overall class size). Going with this will let you pick and choose what levels of English speaker go where. You could opt to drop high-achievers with those who are struggling, putting your faith in peer-assisted learning. Or, you could put your best students in one group and your lower levels in another, letting you focus on offering more teacher time to those who need it, while also affording greater freedom to those who’ve already got a handle on the Target Language.
Are you a qualified teacher with other ideas on how to organize your TEFL classroom? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Or, if you think you’re ready to get stuck into learning all about TEFL, be sure to head over to our courses page…
As if the stress of lesson planning and prepping your intros, outlining teaching goals and marking those exams isn’t enough, some schools will throw a curve ball into the mix now and then. Beware the dreaded TEFL observation class. It’s a time when the powers that be – your head of school, the higher ups, the curriculum master – decides they’d like to quality test what’s going on in their classrooms. For a session or two, you’ll be watched and weighed up, marked and analyzed. But, never fear: There are ways to ace any TEFL observation class, and turn all that extra pressure into nothing at all…
Look respectable
When there isn’t someone peering in on your lessons, it’s often possible to wear whatever makes you feel comfortable – short of a tutu or a giant banana costume and the like. But when it is observation time, things take a turn for the serious. Or, at least, that’s how it should be. So, dust down that shirt and tie, pull out the suave outfit. Looking the part can go a long way to showing that you’re professional and mean business.
Plan. Plan. Plan
It’s a good idea to focus heavily on the lesson-planning stage when it comes to TEFL observation classes. You might not normally give a single session such a high level of attention, but don’t worry about that. The real point here is that you’re showing what you can do; not what you usually do (at least from your point of view). Have activities set out in clear order, with clear time limits, and clear aims. Move between them swiftly and stick to your structure. And don’t worry if that’s not how you teach every day, because most schools will hope for you to add a little more fluency and conversation when you’re not being watched.
Set out clear learning goals
One thing that lesson observers love to see is crystal-clear learning aims. Good practice is outlining aims right at the top of the class, either before or after your lead-in activity. Some of the more creative teachers are confident enough to elicit learning goals from their students, which is especially powerful in mixed-ability classes. However, you’ll do just fine with a common target for all, so long as it’s sufficiently simple and understandable – a new selection of vocabulary, for example, or practice in a particular tense.
Always have backup activities
Every veteran teacher knows that things can get hectic during lessons. You have to remember that a TEFL observation lesson is you, the observers themselves, and a whole group of what could be fidgeting Thai kids or restless Chinese learners. The upshot? You’ll need to be on point with those backup activities and exercises. If something doesn’t go to plan and you find a solution in a jiffy, you won’t lose points. If something doesn’t go to plan and you’ve got nothing in the magic hat, expect to be marked down.
Don’t be adventurous in TEFL observation classes
If you’re mulling over a new piece of tech or using a totally different teaching style, our advice is don’t attempt it for the first time in a TEFL observation class. That’s asking for it. Not only could you encounter unforeseen issues with the whiteboard, the cables, the system – you name it – but something you’re not sure of could fall flat on its face. In short: You’ll want to choose a type of lesson format that you know plays to your strengths.
Format and proof that plan accordingly
One of the crucial aspects of a TEFL observation lesson is the fact that you have to submit your plan in writing to your higher ups before getting started. So, no rushed outlines of lessons here, please. No shorthand or rune-written directions that only you can understand. Keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it easy to interpret. And, above all, be sure that you proofread the whole document before sending it over – woe to the teacher who makes a written grammar error.
The tips above are there to help you survive and ace that TEFL observation class. If you’d like to add anything, be sure to hit up the comments below. Alternatively, if it’s time to get in the classroom, be why not head over to our courses page and take a look at what’s on offer?
Not all English classes are made equal. It’s a lesson learned by virtually every teacher who steps into an EFL school. Different learning styles, aptitude for language learning, varying use of tech, and student engagement are all reasons you might find some students are scoring straight A’s while others are still pondering their past tenses. It’s just a reality of life – one that makes part of the challenge of good TEFL getting to grips with teaching mixed-ability English classes. Some pointers, tips, and insights to help are below.
Group work and pair worked in mixed ability
A lot has been written about the power of mingling lower- and higher-ability workers in the same group. The idea about its effectiveness is based around peer-fuelled learning – essentially relying on the understanding of some pupils to encourage and aid the understanding of others. This tends to work better with some aspects of teaching mixed-ability English classes, though. It might be good not to leave the intricate grammar introductions to your class, for example. However, vocabulary sharing and writing tasks are often spot on.
Isolate different abilities
The opposite of the above can also be a useful tool, but most folk agree that it should be used rarely and in moderation when teaching mixed-ability English classes. Rather than putting struggling students with high-fliers for the lesson, you match those with similar abilities together. The way to look at this is that you’re effectively creating individual classes within a single class. It makes it easier for you to focus tasks to specific levels with ease, and to really home in on the things the folk at the bottom are having trouble with, all while still nurturing the greater demands of your whiz kids.
Use a variety of media
The question of mixed ability goes beyond the specific skills of individual students. It’s also a question of what media and tools the teacher uses. Some kids might react to and engage with audio tracks, while others might remember vocab faster from visual prompts or videos. The upshot is that effective teaching often relies on using a very wide range of materials. That makes lesson preparation and curriculum all important, because you’ll need to ensure you plan sessions that lend themselves to all sorts of people across the whole term.
Self-assessment is key
To understand how varied your mixed-ability English class is, you first have to get an appraisal on what those mixed abilities are. One great way to approach this with both older and younger learners is to require everyone to keep a running learning diary. This way, you can drop into a self-written summary of where each student feels they are and compare it to where you know each student actually is. It can throw some enlightening insight on the state of the group you’re running and reveal what particular areas need extra focus.
Stick to target language
Even when it comes to teaching mixed-ability English classes, most people agree that switching to the mother language of your learners should be a last resort. You might need to realign expectations on what sort of immersion can be expected from the group, but that doesn’t mean you need to aim your native speaking to the lowest level. In fact, it’s best not to, because you’ll find that students who don’t quite understand will quickly adapt and come up to pace with a class where others around them do.
Of course, this piece just touched the surface of the sea of intricacies that arises when teaching mixed-ability English classes. Experienced teachers might have something to add in the comments below that will help. Meanwhile, those interested in learning more can consider our online or offline TEFL courses.
There’s usually a few tricky TEFL students in every school – the ones who won’t settle, won’t participate in group work, won’t complete their homework. Knowing how to deal with them is the mark of a great English teacher, making these top five tips essential reading for all classroom hopefuls.
Set clear achievement goals
It’s been proven and proven again that many ill-disciplined TEFL students aren’t actually all that ill-disciplined at all – they’re just lacking a distinct and clear goal in each lesson. It’s the not knowing what the teacher’s after that really leads to the loss of attention, the misbehavior, the fidgeting – whatever it may be. To solve this problem, you need to return to basics. That means using the first couple of minutes of each session to identify exactly what you’re hoping to achieve that day. You can even drag your students themselves into the process, asking them to create their own lesson aims. The upshot? A definitive trajectory for the learning and activities, and no excuses when someone’s found not to be working towards that goal.
Try to stifle attention seekers
There’s a certain type of naughty TEFL student who’ll always be pining for attention. They go by various monikers: The class clown, the ringleader. If you’re dealing with one of these in your sessions, there’s a lot to be said for getting right to the root of the problem and stifling the very thing they seek. In effect, that means simply ignoring the bad behavior in the hope that it will go away. In many cases you’ll find that it works, as the learner slowly realizes that the only way to get what they’re after is to participate in activities. In time, the need for attention can even be converted from disruptive action to positive classroom energy.
Identify the cause
Some TEFL students who like to disrupt the flow of a class are doing it because there are underlying reasons. There’s one easy way to find out if that’s the case – just ask! Set aside some time before or after a session to quiz the challenging child on just why it is they’re being awkward. Teachers are often surprised with the raw honesty they’re met with, whether it reveals concentration issues, a particular learning style that you’re teaching methods aren’t covering, or distractions in other walks of the student’s life. The upshot is that talking and communicating with your class is the first step to ironing out a whole load of discipline issues.
Give incentives, not punishments
The debate between sanctions and rewards is one that’s raged in the teaching world since time immemorial. There was a time when unruly TEFL students acted at the risk of a detention or extra homework. These days, the school of thought leans much more towards positive action. That means trying to wrest control of your class back from disruptive folk by making it worth their while to behave. The results of incentivizing good behavior are said to help nurture a more trusting relationship between teacher and pupil, too, though you’ll need to be careful it doesn’t come at the expense of teamwork, creating an each-child-for-themselves sort of environment.
Talk to the parents
This over-the-head technique should surely be a last resort. It’s usually the only option left in the arsenal of a teacher that’s tried everything to quell the behavior of their worst TEFL students. Before you do approach a parent to discus their child, it’s important that you have clear and easy-to-understand complaints, evidence to support what you’re talking about, and – crucially – a suggestion on how to move forward. Doing it constructively and calmly like that will demonstrate that the success of your class and their English skills are your real priority.
If you’re a veteran teacher with more tips to add, we’d love to hear the in the comments below. If you think you’re ready to get out there and teaching TEFL students, it might be time to get signed up to a course.
So-called ‘active’ learning has long been vogue on the TEFL scene. But what does it mean? It essentially means getting your students fully engaged with the classroom experience, to have them critique their own work, to apply 100% effort in all activities and really participating in the flow of the lesson. No wonder it’s the holy grail! Here are just some ways you can promote active English learning this semester…
Get students to develop their own learning aims
Having a clear set of learning goals for every class you take is one of the central tenets of TEFL teaching. But what if you put that ball in the students’ court, instead? Try to start that next session by getting your class to write their own aims. Not only will it help you focus exercises to a specific endgame, but it should also promote active learning by including your pupils more in the process. You can even make this a physical exercise to get the energy flowing, by asking students to write their aims on the board and vote for the ones they most want to adopt.
Go for productive seating plans
Teachers have long used seating plans to separate trouble makers and help group activities flow. However, it’s also true that a cleverly thought-out table arrangement can be a ticket to productive, active English learning. That’s because you can manipulate what level of learner sits next to who, to encourage peer-to-peer criticisms and feedback in the classroom, and to allow fellow learners to nurture students who might be struggling.
Remember STT is golden
The antithesis of active English learning is the classic teacher-tells-student format. That means to really promote engagement from your pupils you’re going to need to zip it! Yep, clear the floor and plan activities that encourage Student Talk Time (STT: another of TEFL’s holy grails). It’s basically any point in the lesson when the pupils are talking, and not even necessarily with the vocab or grammar you’re aiming to teach in that particular session, either. The idea is that maximizing STT will help bring about peer-based language feedback and auto elicitation – that’s getting learners to practice English when they don’t even know they’re doing it!
Create a classroom community
If you’ve been dealt the chatty class, remember it can be both a blessing and a curse. Instead of constantly trying to shut down private conversations in the corner, it might a good idea to try and harness them. They can work wonders when it comes to promoting active English learning, by getting your students to gel and socialize, not just as classmates but as genuine friends. It’s especially important when teaching adult classes, in a situation where each person could come from a wildly different age group, background or profession as the next.
Get active – literally
While active learning is more of an academic concept, getting literally active in the classroom can help things along. It could be anything from a whiteboard sentence race to an outdoor ball game that includes new vocabulary, so long as it gets the muscles going and the blood flowing. The idea is that movement can create a sense of personal investment in an activity, promote competitiveness and a desire to hit targets. This is a particularly powerful way of achieving active English learning with youngsters – it tends to be easier to get the little ones running and jumping than the adults, after all.
If you have any more ideas on how to get active English learning up and running in the classroom, we’d love to hear them in the comments below. Or, if you’re keen to learn more about TEFL, why not check out our range of courses?
When you’re struggling to curtail the Bs on the end of ‘bomb’ or wrestling with students who can’t see the difference between ‘mud’, ‘blood’, and ‘flood’, it might just be time to focus in on speaking skills. The thing is, it’s notoriously difficult to get non-natives humming out the Queen’s, crossing their verbal Ts and dotting their verbal Is as it were. To help you through the quagmire of silent sounds and stressed consonants, we’ve put together this hit list of tips on how to teach English pronunciation. It should help you keep those speaking skills aplomb – see what we did there?
Crank up the Student Talking Time (STT)
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Student Talking Time is one of the holy grails of classroom activities. It refers to any period during a lesson that you’re schtum and the pupils are chatting – in English, of course. That could be a free-flowing practice session at the end of a vocabulary lead-in. It could be the fruits of a good pair activity. It could even be just idle gossip. If it’s in any way related to the Target Language, you’d be wise not to stop it. The reason? It helps raise confidence in speaking, yes, but can also be a cracking way to test pronunciation skills. You’ll soon find that students correct each other, learn from each other’s verbal output, and eventually forge some sort of peer-to-peer feedback loop. Now that’s how to teach English pronunciation…
Be aware of WHO you’re teaching
It’s always important for ESL teachers to remember that non-native learners of English are often approaching the lingo with knowledge of a whole different alphabetical system. That’s especially true if you’re teaching in countries like China, Thailand, Vietnam, or in places like Eastern Europe, where the scripts range from augmented characters to Cyrillic. The upshot is that a teacher in Beijing is likely to have to focus a lot more on pronunciation skills than, say, a teacher in Paris or Rome.
Use repetition. Use repetition. Use repetition
The benefits of re-covering language material are well-documented. If you’re wondering how to teach English pronunciation effectively, then taking a similar approach can really help. We’re not only talking about ensuring you repeat Target Language aims from lesson to lesson, but also repeat the same pronunciation itself several times within a lesson. In other words, literally stand there and say ‘flood’ or ‘mood’, ‘visa’ or ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ over and over again until you hear your students do it correctly. There’s really nothing like hear and repeat to drill the ins and outs of curious vowels and consonant sounds.
Isolate minimal pairs
Now we’re getting into the real nitty gritty of how to teach English pronunciation. Minimal pairs refer to any duo of words which differ in just a single phonological element. In laymen’s terms, that means something like ‘pin’ and ‘bin’, or – and this one should help you understand how a focus on these tricky little partners can help in a quest for the Queen’s – ‘ran’ and ‘rain’. See how doing exercises that home in on the particular sound changes in the latter can reveal the effect an additional vowel has on the whole word?
Rhyming and music
No matter if it’s a Romantic poem or a rambunctious rock ballad, you can always fall back on trusty rhythm to convey some seriously central aspects of speech. Think of it this way – there’s a reason why nursery rhymes, Shakespearean pentameters, and even the lyrics of ZZ Top sound good. It’s because they’ve used English in a way that works. Part of that is manipulating pronunciations to create positive and negative rhymes; rhymes which can help reveal the sounds and character of words to students approaching the language for the first time. What’s more, lyrics of songs are easier to remember than bland old teacher speak, don’t you think?
There are oodles more tips that could help you in your quest to discover how to teach English pronunciation. If you’ve any more to add, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below. Or, if you think it’s time you got TEFL qualified and traveling, be sure to head over to our courses page…
And so there dawns a new TEFL year. While the haze of all of 2017’s gerunds and past participles and late-night Chang beers or Vietnamese pho is still sitting on the mind, we thought there’s never a better time to look forward to all the joys that 2018 might bring. When it comes to teaching, you’re likely to find the TEFL classroom a more innovative and techy place than ever before. Here are just a few things you can do to embrace that new arena of grammar and vocab. Enjoy…
Use more media
It’s been proven and proven again that humans have a whole load of different ways to learn. Some folk might be better at aural exercises – that’s listening. Others may hone their vocab best by speaking orally. Others like to do things, write them down or visualize. The upshot here is that the best teachers cater to the needs of a broad spectrum of student types. That can be easily achieved in the hi-tech TEFL classroom of 2018 by ensuring you make the most of a range of media. New tech allows the use of video and film, for example. Fast internet connections mean that you can often get music on demand. Images are just a Google search away. You catch the drift.
Get tech
It might seem obvious to say it but the TEFL classroom is not the same environment it was decades ago. In this day and age of fluid communications and digital news, on-demand entertainment and multifaceted media, it pays for a teacher to stay abreast of the latest changes in tech and the like. Granted, you’re often limited by the facilities in particular schools or teaching spaces, but we’re talking anything from as small as swapping out chalkboards for a whiteboard, or as complex as linking up iPad sessions to get your students chatting with native speakers across the globe. The sky’s the limit these days.
Smartphones no longer need to be the enemy
Perhaps 2018 is the year that teachers can finally stop tut-tutting at pupils who pull out their mobiles during a session. That’s because BYOD-style lessons (that’s ‘bring your own device’) are proving all the rage in some of the most innovative EFL circles around the planet. The idea is to embrace the power of self-teaching apps and online language resources by planning tutorials where your students can discover them at their own pace. Other teachers see smartphones as an indispensable note-taking tool. Goodbye unwieldy biros and dog-eared paper pads; hello nifty digital messaging systems and shared Cloud documents.
Go digital with homework and comms
Let’s say a short and happy eulogy (read: ‘good riddance’) for the age-old dog-ate-my-homework school of excuses. The world has moved on from times when students would have to be left to their own devices in that department. In 2018, you can choose any of the many online project management tools or communication systems to offer your classes an easy-to-access network of support, language tips and task ordering. Students can message if their stuck, get notifications when a task is due, and get real-time updates on the schedule of lessons. One real bonus here is that you should never be left staring down a group of homework-less folk again; or at least you should never be left staring down a group of homework-less folk with a valid excuse again.
Of course, there are oodles more things changing in the TEFL classroom come 2018. If you’ve any tips or tricks of your own, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below. Or, if you think it’s time you got TEFL qualified and out there exploring the world, be sure to check out our offering of courses.
The use of video in the TEFL classroom has become super mainstream in the last couple of years, with more and more schools offering tech like TVs and smart whiteboards. If you’ve got the power of the audio-visual in your teaching domain, why not consider using the following methods to enhance your lessons…
What happens next scenarios
We’ve all heard the famous soccer commentary: “They think it’s all over…it is now!“. The legendary line that marked the end of the 1966 FIFA World Cup is but one example of how video can be used to reveal twists and turns in a way that text and audio can’t. Why not harness the narrative-telling power of the tape and pause it at certain moments? Then, ask your students to write a couple of lines on what they think happens next. Your material can be as varied as you like, with everything from sports vids (like in the example above) to whacky YouTube clips at hand for material. The method is great for practicing skills like tenses and verb usage.
For pinpointing specific target language
I remember it well: A new advanced class, all fresh faces, not sure what sort of teacher I was. I put up the video for The Proclaimers 500 Miles on the screen and asked them to note down every imperative, past particle and compound verb they heard. Soon, everyone was humming along and happy, but also sort of subconsciously noticing all the grammatical features I’d requested. The same sort of thing could work with all types of videos – not just music ones – and activities too. It’s essentially reverse comprehension, and forced students to exercise their ability to hear language devices in native speech.
Forcing descriptions
Using video in the TEFL classroom when teaching descriptions can be really handy. One great – and popular – way of doing this is to separate your group into pairs (two large groups also works), face one away from the screen and the other towards it. Make sure you have the video muted completely, and proceed to ask the student facing the screen to describe what’s going on to the pupil not facing it. You can use this to simply test the descriptive and vocab strengths of the pupil who’s talking, or get the student not speaking to write down what they hear to put different skills under the microscope. Of course, the wackier and crazier the action in the video, the harder the task can become.
Not the right voice
Choose a video clip that shows a quick-paced dialogue. Then, mute the sound of the TV and assign each student a character on screen. Play the clip and get your students to come up with imagined dialogue for their corresponding character. This exercise is often really fun, and great for leading into discussions of vocabulary, or topics like acting and cinema (just be sure to pick a well-known flick). You can opt to do it in pairs, getting students to write their dialogue and share it later on, or as a whole group, opting for more than just two interlocutors on screen.
Order the events
A great one for practicing the present tense and vocab at lower skill levels is this video-infused twist on the usual ordering of events exercise. Show a video in the TEFL classroom several times and then hand out a series of cut-out sentences to students. Ask your students to order the sentences in the order they saw them occur on screen. It’s simple and it’s sweet, but you can vary it too – think about getting your guys to order things in reverse, or add in an element of guessing, by getting students to write their own sentence at a cliff-hanger.
For comprehension
Classic comprehension exercises are perhaps the single most common way that teachers will use video in the TEFL classroom. You start by writing up a series of questions about what happens in your chosen video, some easy, some hard. Hand them out to your students to take a look at beforehand, and then proceed to play the video through several times. You could opt for the quieter approach and simply get your class to answer the questions after. Or, you could tie this in with another game and get team competition going while watching, perhaps by pausing and starting the video and giving extra points for those who spot the answers first.
Are you a veteran teacher and can think of several more ways to use video in the TEFL classroom? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Or, if you think you’d be great in the EFL world, be sure to head over to our courses page…