Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (21 page)

• Have them transform all the verbs into a different tense.

• Have them retell the story without using particular ‘taboo’ words.

These exercises stretch their grammar and vocabulary respectively.

For weaker students, you can:

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Supplement the book by offering extra information. Plan additional presentations on points that the students find difficult and prepare glossaries of the vocabulary in a particular lesson for easy reference.

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Make the activities easier than the ones in the book. For example, where the book has a fill-in-the-gap exercise, you can give the students a multiple choice option.

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Make greater use of the images as these are less threatening to the student than words. Ask easier questions about what is in a picture and get students to label it.

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Split up a unit to make the content more manageable and less stressful.

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For both weak and strong students, include more competitions and games with the same language aims as the syllabus in the book. When the students work together in mixed ability groups they support each other and the group can establish its own pace, whereas exercises in a course book are less fluid.

Dealing with mixed age groups

In a class with different age groups, think about what the task or exercise in the book is aiming to achieve and keep this focus while changing the setting.

In a personal example, in a lesson about expressing figures, the course book presented a graph about profit and loss in a construction company. The teenage students were ready to switch off before they even read the instructions.

So, I encouraged them to change the setting to one based on music. Instead of a construction company, their graph was now about a rock star’s record sales. The students could come up with reasons for the sales performance, whether based on the serious economic factors or on music trends and concert performances. Once they’d analysed the graph in their own way, I mixed the students up again to summarise their findings because the basic language remained the same – increase, decrease, peak, slump and so on.

There isn’t that much difference in the language you teach students of different ages, especially at lower levels. It’s the setting in which you put the language that really makes the difference.

Setting tasks

Sometimes students don’t engage with the material or feel that it’s not relevant to them. In this case, set students tasks based on the book. Get students role-playing characters in the book, and having debates about points made in the text. They can also read a passage aloud in the manner of a particular adverb (quickly, snobbishly and so on) or dictate short sections to each other to practise pronunciation.

When you plan your lesson, include a warm-up activity and maybe a cool-down one too, which have nothing to do with the book. And don’t open the book until it’s absolutely necessary. Insist that students close the book during the stages of the lesson when it’s not needed so that they focus on what you’re saying, or so that they try hard to use their own words instead of reading.

Chapter 8: Being Materialistic! Using Course Books and Other Materials
121

Making Use of Authentic Materials

If you’re not using a course book for a particular lesson, or at all for that matter, you can make use of
realia,
real objects you take into the classroom to help you teach – anything from a banana to an old shoe. Apart from objects, realia can also be some form of text that wasn’t designed for TEFL, such as an article from
The Guardian
or a recording of a sitcom.

When you use realia, often the object sparks the idea for the lesson rather than the other way round. If you have an item that’s quintessentially British (or from your culture) that your students may find intriguing, you may wonder how you can use it in the classroom. So, a Dr Martens boot and a Clarks sandal are great props for a lesson on comparisons (
This boot looks
much stronger than that shoe,
for example) and since, more than likely, everyone in the classroom has their own shoes you’ll find great opportunities to expand the theme.

When it comes to the banana, the obvious lesson to bring it in for is one on fruit and veg, but you can also start a more general discussion on healthy eating, recipes, or idioms (‘Don’t be such a banana!’, a banana republic and so on).

Although the realia won’t give you a lesson, it can give you an air of mystery and amusing eccentricity as your students anticipate what you’ll turn up with next.

Don’t let the desire to show off the realia be the main point of your lesson. If anyone should run into one of your students on the way home and ask what they learnt today, the answer should never be, ‘I don’t know, but she was carrying a boot the whole time!’

With the advent of the Internet, you can harness an endless supply of material in English for your lessons. Hurrah! English speakers also have the advantage of being able to call upon Hollywood movies, decades of famous tunes from the Beatles to the Scissor Sisters and all the science and technology papers conveniently written in English. So it makes sense to use authentic materials like these in the classroom.

Using text other than course books has a few drawbacks though, such as these:

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It’s hard to find materials just the right length for your lesson.

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Material designed for native speakers is often too difficult for learners in terms of grammar and vocabulary.

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The text may contain too much slang or irrelevant vocabulary.

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Students may become overwhelmed by the variety of accents and vocabulary in the English-speaking world.

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

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Authentic materials are so ‘of the moment’ that you need some knowledge of current affairs and culture to really appreciate them and they soon become out of date.

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It takes time to select, adapt and/or prepare them.

However, using authentic materials really motivates students because it gives them a glimpse of what they’ll be able to access in English when their language skills improve.

In my case, I learned a foreign language with the help of children’s programmes. They were authentic shows at the right level for me and they actually gave me an insight into the culture. I gradually moved on to daytime TV

and finally the news. I found that, unlike the lessons in my student’s books, the language I learned from TV shows was exactly what ‘real people’ said. My expressions and pronunciation were not as dry and stilted as friends who’d only studied in the classroom. I’m not suggesting that you take recordings of children’s TV shows into your classroom but the principle remains that if your students want to learn to speak like natives, expose them to authentic speech and texts.

Designing Your Own Materials

If you happen to be in a situation where there are few, if any, published materials, or if you’re just a creative soul, you can have a stab at designing your own materials to keep and re-use. I say re-use, because it’s easy to spend hours preparing the perfect lesson and then forget to file a copy away for another class, effectively loosing the benefit of your work.

To combat this I offer a few tips to help you:

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Use cards and laminating so that you won’t have to cut things up again next time.

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You don’t have to make one for each student. Group and pair work encourages speaking so just make enough to share.

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To get full use of your materials, build your whole lesson around the theme.

I’ve seen some beautifully designed materials used for just three minutes in a lesson and then forgotten because the teacher didn’t consider how to exploit their design. So, if you’ve recorded a conversation that you want to use as a listening activity, ask the students to predict what the conversation is going to be about, compare their ideas, analyse the tape-script, imagine the characters who are speaking, describe them, extend the conversation themselves, role play it and so on.

Chapter 8: Being Materialistic! Using Course Books and Other Materials
123

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Separate visuals from exercises so that you can use the same visual image in many different ways.

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Keep your worksheets and re-use them but make little changes each time so that the examples are more personalised.

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Make sure that you present and lay out your material well. Even if your ideas are great, students are put off by anything dull, cluttered or unclear.

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Use famous names and brands in your examples as students are likely to use them in real life anyway.

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Make sure that your worksheet instructions unfold step by step. So, don’t give out all the instructions at once. Give the students what they need to complete one stage at a time.

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If you design materials for a school you work in, you should agree beforehand on the future use of this work even after you leave the company.

Using What’s at Hand

In training sessions with aspiring teachers, I very often reject published materials in order to demonstrate that you can grab students’ attention with just the basic classroom equipment.

Even an atrocious artist can manage the occasional stick figure – witness the one in Figure 8-1. Poor drawings are actually rather good for raising a smile among your students. You may occasionally create confusion when your stick figure horse looks more like a giraffe but your students still have fun guessing what it’s supposed to be. It makes a change for them to be laughing at your failings for a change.

Figure 8-1:

A stick fig-

ure can be a

helpful and

amusing

visual.

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From a simple stick figure you can create an entire back story in collaboration with your students. For example, a class can practice the past simple using a stick man on the board:

Teacher: What’s his name?

Student A: His name is David.

Student B: His name is Abdul.

Student C: No, it’s Ramon.

Teacher: Okay, it’s Ramon. Where’s he from, class?

Students: Colombia!

Teacher: How’s he feeling today?

Students: He’s happy.

Teacher: I think he’s happy because something good happened yesterday.

What happened?

Student A: I think he’s happy because he met a girl!

The lesson can continue with students drawing their own additions to the story on the board, while their classmates guess what happened. The pictures, along with some key vocabulary that you write up, can serve as the basis for a writing or speaking activity with students telling each other the story.

When you’re teaching grammar, a nice clear layout on the board is the best substitute for a worksheet. Use columns and boxes so that everything is clear. Lists and mind maps are also easy to copy down. Mind maps are diagrams which look a bit like spiders because you put the main idea in the centre and then have ‘legs’ coming out from the middle that point to related ideas and information.

Beyond the use of the board, your most effective tool is your own body. Use your voice well by varying pace and power as much as possible. Use good volume and gestures (Chapter 7 has a section on body language). Acting and mime are great fun and keep the lesson lively.

Chapter 9

Who’s The Boss around Here?

Managing Your Classroom

In This Chapter

▶ Managing your students

▶ Getting your classroom organised

▶ Setting rules of behaviour

▶ Maintaining control in your class

▶ Taking care of problems

When you’re in the classroom, you do more than just teach. You’re the manager and your students look to you for professional handling of their course and the people on it.

In this chapter, I explain how you can deal with problems relating to students and your teaching environment. I also offer suggestions and advice for running your classes and handling difficulties too.

Running Your Classes Effectively

As the teacher, it’s your responsibility to maintain order during the course.

First, you need to be aware of the time and location of the classes. It may be up to the school to decide this but you should think ahead about your avail-ability to complete the job and be on time. The premises should be suitable for teaching but you may need to make some adjustments. Find out who the students are and how to record their attendance and progress. You need a course syllabus and individual lessons plans but while the lesson is in progress you have to manage your students too. Everyone in the classroom, including you, should behave appropriately, which means being friendly, maintaining a sense of fun but being disciplined at the same time. If students are out of line you need a strategy for dealing with this too.

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Some general points of good practice I find very helpful in almost all teaching situations include:

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Plan ahead.
As far as possible, think about where your course is heading and what possible pitfalls you may encounter along the way. This means knowing where you’re teaching, what equipment and resources are available, as much about your students as possible and any personal considerations that may affect your teaching (planned absences, for example). In other words, try to prevent problems before they happen.

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Ask for and welcome feedback.
The students have their own opinions about how well you teach, but many teachers are too proud or scared to hear them. One of the dangers for teachers is that they can become over-confident because the students appear happy in your class but, to be honest, students don’t always have a measure of comparison. You can encourage constructive criticism though by designing feedback forms that ask for specific information. The results of the feedback guide you on changes necessary to make your teaching of the course, the course materials, or any other area under your control more effective. If you invite a colleague to watch you occasionally, his advice can help you to stay on track professionally and avoid getting stuck in a rut.