Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (43 page)

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The student and teacher may not get on too well. Even with the best will in the world, lessons are hard going if you just don’t hit it off.

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Many students miss the dynamics of classroom debates, swapping speaking partners frequently and working in a team. Whereas the teacher generally takes the role of the classmate during practice sessions, it isn’t possible to engage in the same range of activities as you can in a class.

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Lessons are much more expensive compared to group classes.

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Whereas in a school, the student may have more than one teacher; with one-to-one lessons there’s less opportunity for exposure to another accent or style.

Talking pros and cons for the teacher

One-to-ones offer a lot to consider from the student’s point of view and this is no less true for the teacher. Your own experience, personality and circumstances affect your decision regarding this kind of work. I look at the advantages and disadvantages in the next sections.

On the whole, one-to-one lessons can be very rewarding as long as you and the student monitor progress regularly, but you need to find out exactly what the course entails for you before agreeing to do it.

Your students are your best advertisements. Give them a few of your business cards to distribute and ask them to mention your services to friends and colleagues. Let local people know what you do too, and try to get some ads up in universities and on other notice boards.

Appreciating the financial rewards

Firstly, the obvious plus is that you can make more money per hour, whether you work for a school or for yourself.

Most students pay at least 30 per cent more due to the increased amount of preparation and the more intense nature of the work, but don’t use this rate as the basis for charging your own private students. Remember that the school incurs overheads. So find out what the local schools charge individual students on average and then undercut them (by a considerable amount if you’re inexperienced).

Never allow a school to give you one-to-one work without establishing a higher rate of pay than class teaching.

While we’re on the subject of money, think about funds you may have to put aside for taxes, factor in the time it takes to prepare your own accounts and don’t rely on your one- to-one students always being around. It’s hard to predict exactly how much money you’ll make from month to month as students tend to stop and start according to their circumstances and finances.

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Agree a cancellation policy with your students beforehand so that you don’t waste your time. Some teachers ask for payment in advance and others are more relaxed, as long as the students gives them reasonable notice of cancellation, but it’s unwise to put up with customers who have no respect for your time.

Finding a place

You need to sort out a place to teach. If you’re teaching private lessons in addition to working for a school, and have checked that there’s no conflict of interest between you and your employer, ask to use an empty classroom out of hours. If you do this, at least you’ll have access to loads of resources nearby. Unless you’ve built up a good supply of books at home, lack of resources may limit your lesson preparation when you go it alone.

Other locations you may choose to use are your own home or a local library or café. Whilst being very convenient, using your place poses obvious risks, especially if you’ll be alone with the student. Because of this, you should think very carefully before taking this option. The same principles apply if you go to the student’s home. On the other hand, if you use a public place like a library, you’re bound by their opening hours and rules. For example, you may not be able to speak at full volume or play recordings.

One of the nice things about this kind of lesson though, is that you can more easily take the student to different locations. If you’re working in an English-speaking country, why not take a few trips to markets, auctions, courthouses or anywhere your student may find stimulating.

Forging a relationship

Your relationship with your student also presents challenges and rewards.

Luckily, the majority of students are happy, motivated souls, but if you do get a boring or obnoxious one it can be very hard work.

Private lessons sometimes resemble counselling sessions as students inevitably let off steam and talk about their day-to-day lives.

Now, if you know that you’re not the type to put on a smile and feign interest when you’re bored witless, be a bit wary of this line of work.

The most successful one-to-one teachers like making other people feel good about themselves. A nice thing about the job is that one-to-one teachers often learn something too. People often pass on information about their specialisms and particular interests, not to mention their culture and traditions.

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Enjoying the pace

In the actual lesson, you find that the student who just wants to chat saves you quite a lot of preparatory work. Of course, you should never go to a lesson unarmed but your lesson may be spread over several sessions if the student has other matters to get off his chest. Unlike in classes, students can use their time to talk if they prefer, as long as they don’t have deadlines to meet, such as looming exams (in which case try to steer them back to more structured study).

On the point of preparation though, bring along more material than usual for a one-to-one because the student needs a great deal of variety.

Planning and teaching a one-to-one lesson

Planning a one-to-one lesson is largely similar to planning a lesson with a group of students but in order to be effective, you need to keep certain points in mind.

Have clear aims for the short- and long-term. Have a detailed interview with the student before you start the course and review the aims often. This should prevent the lesson turning into a chit-chat every time (unless that’s what the client wants of course). A course book that you can dip into may help with this, if you can get your student to buy it, that is. A course book allows you to set homework and have extra material on hand without too much photocopying. Course books also show students how to develop study skills, which may be necessary for those who’ve been out of education for many years.

Although you need to make your lessons varied and bouncy, remember that your student can only absorb so much in one session. So revise previous topics a lot, after the student has had a day or two to absorb them. Even during the lesson it’s not a bad idea to leave the room for a few minutes to give the student a bit of space to think and reflect.

If you do happen to get an intensive course, 15 hours a week for example, you have to pull out all the stops to keep it interesting. I’ve found that having a running saga is good fun.

What I do is to base a series of lessons (listening, reviewing, narrating and so on) around a film that plays out over the course of the week. The student is keen to know what happens next and is therefore more motivated.

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Read a few news headlines each morning and include activities that get your student moving – sorting through cards and objects, doing library research or going on field trips.

By the way, it’s easy to stop monitoring the student’s errors while you’re playing the part of the other speaker in a role play or similar activity. I therefore suggest that you keep your pen and paper to hand all the time, so that you can have some thorough feedback and correction sessions afterwards.

Working at Teaching Business English

The answer to the question about who should teach business English, and how, revolves around
needs analysis,
in other words, finding out in detail what the client needs to do in English and where his wants and lacks are.

The following are some examples of questions for a needs analysis questionnaire, which can help you to assess the needs and lacks of the potential student and determine your own suitability for meeting those needs.

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What do you need to do in English?

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Which skills need to be involved (reading, writing, speaking, listening) and through which kind of communication – letters, emails, Skype computer software (which allows you to make free calls using the Internet) or face to face?

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What do you need to talk about? Tell me about the subject areas.

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Who are you likely to be speaking to and where are they from?

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Describe the settings you’ll use English in (conferences, lunches and so on)?

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Do you have any particular time frames? Do you need English now or for a future event?

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Why did you decide to study English?

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Is your course being sponsored by your company? What kind of budget is there?

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What is your educational background?

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Tell me about your background, culture and interests.

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Do you have a particular location in mind for the lessons?

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How often and how long do you want your lessons be?

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Can you provide a sample of your writing – a recent email for example?

When teaching business English, you do more than check the student’s overall grammar and vocabulary, you also get him ready for the particular situations he’s to face.

As the spectrum of occupations requiring a certain level of English is so wide, there may be cases where very little specialist knowledge of that industry is required.

If you can get a foothold in teaching people your own specialism in English, so much the better. In addition, for some the most difficult words in the job are similar to English ones anyway. For example, when teaching Italian surgeons I found that their lack was in everyday language for communicating with immigrant patients and for socialising, not the Greek- and Latin- based terminology of medical journals. After all, English is the international language of science and technology now but the words we use often originate elsewhere.

Fortunately, a business English class is sometimes pretty straightforward. If you’re teaching a whole class that’s enrolled at your school, you’ll probably be given a course book or a syllabus to teach from. Some classes are geared towards exams such as Cambridge BEC or LCCI qualifications which a teacher with experience of general English exams can handle with a little extra preparation. (I talk about English proficiency exams in Chapter 21.) The main difference between general and business English is
register
(formal and informal styles), and the organisation of a
functional-notional syllabus,
which means that instead of learning one piece of grammar or vocabulary after another, getting progressively more difficult, the syllabus focuses on situations and tasks. For example, the first chapter may be about making phone calls and teach whole phrases like, ‘Hold the line please. I’ll put you through’. The next chapter may cover welcoming visitors to the office and so on. So it’s still the English you’re used to, but organised in a different way.

For this reason, you need to teach chunks of language that students can memorise even if they don’t understand the grammar involved.

Use real communications like business letters, faxes and emails you’ve received and look regularly at the business pages in national newspapers.

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Look for business English resources at these websites:

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E. L. Easton at www.eleaston.com/biz/home.html

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Macmillan Business English at www.businessenglishonline.net

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Oxford University Press English Language Teaching at www.oup.com/

eltnew/teachersclub/business_english

Chapter 20

Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping

with Younger Learners

In This Chapter

▶ Focusing on young learners

▶ Telling stories

▶ Playing games

▶ Singing songs

▶ Connecting with teenagers

Teaching young learners – from toddlers to adolescents – is a somewhat different experience from the highly motivated and self-disciplined adult students of most lessons. So, in this chapter you get advice on how to make children’s lessons fun and stimulating.

Teaching Kids’ Classes –

Dream or Nightmare?

When you’re offered the opportunity to teach children you may delight at the idea of singing songs with cute little pupils or you may envisage screaming, unruly terrors paying you no heed whatsoever. To be honest, you’re probably going to encounter both situations and sometimes in the same lesson. It’s up to you to decide, but if you take the job it’s good to start off by thinking about the way youngsters learn.

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Looking at how little ones learn

Most people think that children are superb language learners and that they outstrip adult students. However, more recent research shows that this isn’t exactly true. Children have much more time to devote to learning than adults and they can often see a clear need for doing so. So, for example, most bilingual children have a parent or caregiver who speaks to them entirely in another language. Say, a family in the UK are made up of a Twi-speaking mum and a dad who’s bilingual, the child eventually speaks Twi to communicate with her mother and English to speak to everyone else. However, when the mother learns English, the child may stop speaking Twi because she doesn’t have to. Understanding Twi is sufficient for survival and so English becomes dominant.

Two good points about youngsters learning a language: