If I Was The Student Would You Be The Teacher

Things I wish I'd known before beginning my TESOL course Looking back over the past few months I can say it’s been a learning curve and not just in teaching English. In many ways this course has turned my life upside down. I would have saved a lot time if I had been more computer literate before starting and would advise others to make friends with their computer beforehand. Another practical point was how I would have to reorganize my day many times to find the best study time, my best time did not always suit everyone else. As a homeschooling mum I never dreamed how helpful the course would be in my general teaching skills with the children. During the course I became more and more interested in English grammar, with a growing realization of how bad mine was and a desire to study...  [Read more]

  This video covers the difference between 'affected' and 'effected'. As these two words have a similar pronunciation and spelling, their usage is often confused. 'Effected' means executed, produced, or brought about. On the other hand, 'affected' refers to the action of making an impact on something. Some example sentences would be: "The BP oil spill adversely affected marine wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding areas." or "After the BP oil spill, the government effected sweeping environmental regulation." Both words are used in the past tense in these examples but can also be used in the same way in the present tense as 'affect' and 'effected'. They are also often used as a passive, such as 'was affected by...'. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate...  [Read more]

  http://www.teflcourse.net In this video we look at a teaching idea for the 'going to' future tense. This tense is often used to make predictions based on evidence and the idea covered here focuses on this usage. As you can see in the video, this idea is suitable for low level students as it uses pictures and verb prompts. Students choose a verb and one of the pictures that best match the verb. For example the student might choose "wash" and the picture of the shampoo bottle: "He is going to wash his hair". If you are thinking about teaching English abroad the best way to improve your job opportunities is to get a teaching certificate. Not only will a certificate open up more doors to you but it will also improve your chances of getting a higher English Teacher salary. By taking...  [Read more]

  This video is the first video of our series on conditionals and reported speech. The conditionals are commonly referred to as "if" sentence structure speaking about if this happens then that happens. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. this unit was too useful for the teachers or anyone would like to make a professional C.V as well the cover letter .also the general rules that everyone bear in mind wherever work.it shows us how easily can we...  [Read more]

  http://www.teflonline.net In this video we look at a TESOL teaching idea for the past continuous tense. For this activity students are put into groups and are handed pictures of people doing different activities. The pictures are placed upside down in a pile and the students take it in turns to turn them over. When they have turned over a card they must make a past continuous sentence based on the picture they have. For example: If they turn over a picture of a woman swimming they would say: She was swimming yesterday. For more advanced students this activity can be used to compare past continuous and past simple. For example: While I was doing the washing up, I broke three plates. Becoming a TESOL teacher enables you to travel the world experiencing new cultures while...  [Read more]

Volunteer Teaching As I began my TESOL course in Phuket, I met all types of people wanting to be teachers. Some students needed to work immediately after graduation and others were going on to a college or university to further their academic careers. I was in the position of having to return home and finish other work commitments before I could embark on a teaching career. I soon realized that if I was going to be confident in my new found teaching skills and to have the opportunity to build on what I had learned, I was going to have to do something proactive in the area of teaching English as a second language even though I was not in the position to take a full time teaching position. In pondering my predicament, I realized that I did have an option that would serve me and people...  [Read more]

  You can choose from thousands of teaching jobs available around the world. Earn money while traveling. Teaching English is a great way to supplement the money you have saved to fund your world travels. A TEFL certificate will enable you to spend extended periods of time in your dream destination rather than just passing through and help you get to know a country in ways that no ordinary travelers can. Volunteer in some of the world’s less developed areas and help those who need it most. Working as a volunteer English teacher is a very rewarding experience. These are just some of the many things that you can do with a TEFL certificate. Are you ready to live and teach abroad? Click here and get started today: https://www.teflcourse.net/?cu=YTDESCRIPTION Below you can read...  [Read more]

  In this video Linda explains the differences between "assure", "insure" and "ensure". They not only sound similar, but those three words also make an outcome sure but they are in no way interchangeable. "Assure" is used to speak out a promise or say something with confidence, for example "I assure you that he is a great lawyer". "Ensure" is used to make something certain, such as here: "Please ensure that you will be home at five o'clock today"."Insure" means to protect an object against risk by buying an insurance policy from an insurance company, like here: "I insure my television because it was expensive". Once you have realized the three different meanings and usages, there is no way you'll confuse them again. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one...  [Read more]

  In this episode, we cover the pronunciation of the word "huckster". This word has to meanings an can either refer to someone who sells or advertises something in an aggressive and dishonest manner or to a person who creates promotions for commercial clients, such as for the radio or TV. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Lesson planning seems to be the most important lesson I have learned from this course so far. I had not thought that it would...  [Read more]

  The first part of my study phase is going to be the board work and I'm going to use the information that I generated in the elicitation part of my engage phase to move on to the actual board work. What I'm going to do is to show the structure of this particular tense. So, the phase study I'm expecting to take about ten minutes on this particular part and, again, the interaction will mainly be the students talking to me. So, how am I going to achieve that with this information? Well, we could ask the students to have a look at the sentences themselves and to tell us what they can see. If we look at each of the first words in here, then at this level, I should hopefully be able to elicit from my students what each of these words have in common and they may well give an answer that...  [Read more]

  Our next particular methodology is accredited to James Asher around 1965 and is called total physical response. Asher looked at the way in which we learn our native language and he saw that most children, before they even went to school, have picked up a very large percentage of both the grammar and the vocabulary that they would use in their native language before any type of formal schooling. So Asher started to have a look at ideas of how to use the whole of our brain in language learning in the way that we do when we're very young. It's accepted that within our brain there are two hemispheres, one is the left hemisphere the other is the right hemisphere, and one of the functions of the left hemisphere is language learning. One of the major functions of the right hemisphere is...  [Read more]

  In this video we take a look at the difference between "me" and "I". While they are often used without a problem in normal sentences, they are often used incorrectly in certain situations. For example, in the sentence "can you send the report to Ian and I" the use of "I" is incorrect. It should be "can you send the report to Ian and me" The reason for this is that "I" is a subject pronoun and ?me" is an object pronoun. If you remove Ian from the sentence, it becomes clear that the use of "I" is wrong. You would not say ?can you send the report to I" but you would say "can you send the report to me?". This is an easy trick to see which of the two is the correct one. Watch the video and give it a try. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their...  [Read more]

  Just to finish off this particular section on lesson planning, we're going to go through a couple of procedures that should take place during the study phase periods, particularly when we're doing the activities. It is quite important that before we actually go into a study activity that we go through a process of showing how that activity is going to work and one acronym that is often used for this is D-E-GO. The D part of this stands for a demonstration of the activity. Now, it's very important that you don't try to explain how the activity is going to work but rather you actually demonstrate the process. An example of the demonstration of the process of the activity could be something as simple as taking the first question and using it and writing it on the board. This will...  [Read more]

  There are two issues that need to be stressed when working with the international phonemic alphabet. First is the fact that we are no longer concerned with how a word is traditionally spelled. Additionally we need to stress that we are only concerned with the sounds needed to correctly produce a word. So rather than numerous spellings, which can often be pronounced in different ways, we have one symbol representing one sound. Once we can isolate a sound, rather than juggling various spellings, we can work with our students on how to say that sound. Doing that successfully is related to manner and place of articulation, which will be covered shortly. To get a better understanding of the phonemic alphabet, let's take a look at our chart. In the bottom half of our chart we have our...  [Read more]

Online vs. Onsite Courses Becoming certified to teach English as a second language can be done onsite or online. On online course was the most efficient, economical and in many ways the superior way for me. This article explains my background and situation. It also touches on the process I went through to get to this, the final lesson. Online is not for everyone. It takes an open and creative mind to step into the world of computers and electronic tutors. An imagination and discipline were keys to my approach. Imagination was profound when I would take time away from class and Google some blogs about teaching English. Dave’s Café was just one of these places where you could find endless discussions on the joys and perils of teaching English in other countries. These stories were the...  [Read more]

Creating Materials In my experience of teaching English, I think the most fun I and my students had was with created materials, or realia, used in conjunction with the planned lessons in the text. As a photographer, I had a number of images that could be printed out and used in games, for vocabulary lessons and also as a basis for dialogues created by the students themselves. An article about realia by Stefan Chiarantano (2005) describes using plastic fruit, toy animals, Christmas cards, maps and other items to introduce new vocabulary to his young students. Cultural items, such as the Christmas cards, can also be used to teach students about customs in other nations. They are often very curious about other customs and their very curiosity will improve their attention spans and help them...  [Read more]

  http://www.teflonline.net The teaching idea covered here is one that would be particularly appropriate for more advanced English language learners, those who can use different tenses accurately. The activity is a board game that focuses on comparing and contrasting the tenses, focusing on the Present Perfect and the Present Perfect Continuous. Each student takes a turn at rolling the dice and moving around the board. For example a student could land on a square that says "Something you have been learning for a long time." An appropriate answer for the student could be "I have been learning English for a long time." The next student takes a turn and could land on a square that says "A beautiful place you have visited." This time the student could use the Present Perfect rather...  [Read more]

  We are going to move on to the second of the productive skills, which is writing and, again, we'll have look at the background, too, and create a typical lesson for a writing skills session. One of the things to be aware of in a writing skills lesson is that writing tends to be more formal than spoken English. So, there will be some differences between the two, such as writing very often uses less contracted forms and so on, but having said that there are many similarities between the two particular skills. So, many of the considerations that we had for a speaking skills lesson will also apply here to a writing skills lesson. Within writing skills itself there are some sub-skills that we may want to teach and those sub-skills could include, but are not limited to, hand writing...  [Read more]

  Then, we have a set of objectives and aims. Here, the learner objectives relate to what we're hoping the students are going to be able to do by the end of your lesson and quite often, that can be a useful way of writing out what the objectives are. So, we would start the sentence "By the end of the lesson, students should be able to?" and then a list of two, three or four items that we're expecting the students to be able to do by completing this lesson. The learner objectives are different to the teacher aims the teacher aims are what you are expecting from that lesson itself. Now, when you first start teaching, quite a normal aim might be to complete the lesson successfully, to get through the whole thing without having any problems. As time goes on and you become more...  [Read more]

  Our second example sentence 'I am playing football at the moment.' is the present continuous tense. This has a different structure as the subject 'I', the verb 'to be' in the present tense 'am', 'is' or 'are' plus the verb with an '?ing' on the end. So here: 'I am playing football at the moment.' Whereas the present simple tense is used to talk about habits routines and facts, the present continuous tense is used to talk about actions in progress at the time of speaking or around the time of speaking. Our third example sentence is the present perfect: 'I have played football twice this week.' Here, the structure is the subject 'I', auxiliary verb 'have' or 'has' plus the past participle. The past participle is usually formed just by adding '-ed'- on to the end of the base form of...  [Read more]