Careers In Esl

  There are many different types of books that are useful in ESL teaching and these fall into three main categories: book series, general teaching theory books, and activity books. The best books for a teacher will depend entirely upon the situation they find themselves in and there is no ‘one answer fits all’ solution.  [Read more]

  Globalization and the increasing demand for English speaking professionals all over the world, especially in emerging regions, has brought about a new, steadily growing sector: English as a Second Language (ESL). An ESL teacher is, therefore, an educator who works with English Language Learners (ELLs) whose native language is not English. The goal of the ESL teacher is to help the students reach a certain level of fluency in English, on both a spoken and written level. ESL educators are not to be confused with foreign language teachers. ESL teachers do not share the same native language and are specifically trained to offer explanations and directed teaching methods to non-English speakers. This teaching style is mainly focused on repetition, drills, demonstrations, and...  [Read more]

  The first group of students we are looking at in this series are the beginners. It is important to understand that beginners can be of any age. This is why we break this category down into the following sub-categories: absolute beginners, false beginners, adult beginners, young beginners and beginners without the Roman alphabet. Find out more about this type of student group in this video. 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 lesson talked...  [Read more]

  The next category we are looking at in our series on teaching special groups in ESL are individuals. Teaching individuals, or one-to-one, forms a large part of the ESL market. Find out the positives, negatives and tips in this video. 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. After reading Introductory Unit I found out how the whole course will be structured, what are the objectives of the course. It was useful to find out the general terminology used...  [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]

  Our next category in our series of teaching special groups in ESL is English for specific purposes. This video focuses specifically on teaching business English. How is business Enligsh different to general English? Will you be able to teach business English? Find out in this video. 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. I have learnt from this unit the complexity of future tenses. I have learnt that so many tenses can be used with future meanings....  [Read more]

  Throughout section on the teaching of productive skills and the teaching of receptive skills our activate activities will usually involve some form of game and our final consideration here will be the use of games in the classroom. We can start with a definition of what we actually mean by a game and it basically has three components. A game is an activity that has rules it should have for its purpose in the classroom a teaching point and by nature to the fact that it's a game it should also include an element of fun. So that will be our working definition for a game that we're going to use in the classroom. There are many different types of games and they range between the competitive and those will require cooperation and there are all sorts of games that involve both of these...  [Read more]

  So speaking activities will come in many different forms but we can generalize them into three basic types. Control activities tend to be used in the study phase and here, the teacher will be helping the students in terms of what they need to say and how they go about saying it. So, there's a high level of structure within a controlled activity. A guided activity has slightly less structure than this and it can be used in either the study or the activate stages themselves. The final type of activity or class of activity is called creative activity and this one would be used in the activation phase. In a creative activity, we're giving a scenario or a very small amount of structure and we're asking the students to actually create their own answers to this particular question....  [Read more]

  A career in teaching ESL online is a great way to break away from the 9-to-5 routine and create your own remote lifestyle. With a TEFL certificate you can teach English from anywhere in the world while traveling to amazing countries or enjoying more quality time with the things that matter in life.  [Read more]

  This is one of the most common questions asked and the answer starts with a further question, where are you in your ESL teaching career? The good news is that regardless of your answer, ITTT has a TEFL course which will meet your specific needs. So what are the options?  [Read more]

  The next example of a game that we can adapt very easily for classroom use is the game of Jeopardy and in this particular game, what we can do is to have a set of levels for our questions, I'd say one through five, where one is going to be the easiest example and five is going to be the most difficult and then, in each of these sets of boxes, we can have various grammar points, such as tenses, perhaps modals, vocabulary and maybe even conditionals. So what the students can do is they can pick a particular topic first of all and within that topic, they can pick the level of the question that they want and then we can have a set of cards that have been created to fit into these slots and we can ask them that question at that level. So, a very simple adaptation of the game jeopardy...  [Read more]

  This video focuses on some of the problems teachers of business English might encounter. How is business Enligsh different to general English? Will you be able to teach business English? Find out in this video. 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 highlighted the importance of sentence structure and how that structure can completely change the meaning of a sentence if used incorrectly. I learned a lot about the different types of verbs,...  [Read more]

  This presentation is going to have a look at the idea of receptive skills and how we can go about teaching receptive skills lessons. There are two receptive skills and they are reading and listening. If we think about first of all, why do we read or listen, then there are probably two main answers to that. Firstly, it could either be for entertainment or it could be for a specific purpose. Within the reading and listening areas there are a number of sub-skills that we can teach our students. Firstly, what we can do is to show different examples of reading. So, let's say, for example, that we have just bought ourselves a new video camera and along with that video camera came a whole book of instructions. In order to find out how to get that camera working, then we would need to...  [Read more]

  For the lesson that even takes place, there are a number of things that you need to have considered. Obviously, you need a very clear idea of what it is you're expecting the students to have to do and they need to know why. It's very important before you ask them to do an activity that they have an understanding of the purpose of that activity. You should, secondly, have had a thought about what they already know. Linked to that is, will it be necessary to do any form of pre-teaching before I can expect them to do this activity and finally, we need to make sure that we have prepared all our materials and our instructions for this particular activity. So, we'll consider a straight arrow ESA lesson, the focus of which is to be speaking skills. So, we'll start with our engage and in...  [Read more]

  Once we're satisfied that all the students have been engaged and that they've been given the opportunity to say something, we can move on to our study phase. Here, it may be necessary or useful to actually pre-teach some gaps in knowledge that have been shown from the engage phase and those gaps in knowledge may include actual grammar structures or indeed useful vocabulary and it's very important that, before we move on to doing any forms of activity, we check their understanding of this material. So, we need to do some study exercises. It's also very useful if you leave this information up on the board through all that study period. Those study activities can just be the normal types of gap fills or matching activities and, as always, we need to demonstrate those activities,...  [Read more]

  So let's have a look now what might take place in a typical writing lesson and, again, we're going to use the format of a straight arrow ESA lesson. Our first stage is to the go to the engage stage and, if we think back to what we said before, what we need to do is try to generate interest. So, an example here could be we show a picture first of all taken from a newspaper or magazine and then we can ask the students some questions. From looking at the picture we can ask them if they can tell us what is actually happening now as shown by the picture. Then, we can generate a bit more interest by asking them to give us ideas about what they thought was happening before this picture took place and what happened after. So, here we're just trying to build up the idea of a sequence of...  [Read more]

  So, for the study phase what we're going to do is to show them the idea of the cartoon strip. In the cartoon strip what there's going to be are some people with speech bubbles and this is going to represent where dialogue will appear and in the bottom, there are these rectangular boxes, where there will be descriptive things happening. So, it will explain the actual situation that these people are in. So, we get across the idea, first of all, that these are speech and these are for description and we can then show them a blank one of these cartoon strips and try to elicit from our students what could possibly the people be saying and in what actual situation are they in, in order for them to say that. Once we've gone through that, we can move on to our first study activity and in...  [Read more]

  So, we'll focus first of all on a speaking skills lesson and perhaps a starting point for this would be to ask a question which is: Why do we speak to each other? The reason that it's important to ask ourselves this question is that whatever answers there are to this should be present in our lessons. So, why do we speak to each other? Well, there are a multitude of answers to that but when you boil them all down to their essence, they probably actually come down to one or two things. We communicate to each other by speaking because of either a need. We need something. We want something or a desire to achieve something. 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...  [Read more]

  There are many different types of groups of students that you will encounter when teaching English as a foreign language. This video introduces you to the five different types of student groups. 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 discussed the different forms of the past tense of English language verbs. It was pretty straightforward in addressing the past tense, discussing the past simple, the past continuous, the past perfect, and the...  [Read more]

  The next category we are looking at in our series on teaching special groups in ESL are young learners. We consider students aged 2 to 16 young learners. Find out the positives, negatives and tips when teaching young learners in this video. 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 has definetly taken the rust off my knowledge of grammar and it's implimentation within speech. Very refreshing! The biggest hurdle for myself was simply just taking my...  [Read more]

  It is said that Poland has more available positions for ESL teachers than any other country in Europe. While most teachers find it difficult to save a great deal, the average salary of US$600 to $1,000 per month should be enough to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.  [Read more]

  This video covers the differences teachers encounter when teaching monolingual and multilingual classes. Monolingual students all have the same native language. Multilingual students have different first languages. Watch this video to find out how to deal with these types of classes as a teacher. 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. two videos comparing two different ways of teaching. the first one a \"bad\" teacher that only needs to pass the...  [Read more]

  Before we move on to the planning of a lesson for speaking skills, something that we need to look at first is the idea of the accuracy versus the fluency of speaking. Accuracy relates to the correct usage of grammar and vocabulary, whereas fluency relates to our ability to continue speaking without any interruption. Now, ultimately within a whole ESA lesson or within language learning itself fluency and accuracy are equally important. Within an ESA lesson, however, depending upon which stage we're at in that lesson, then we're either focusing on accuracy or we're focusing on fluency. Remember in the ESA lesson, in the study phase, this is where we're looking at the target language where we're doing our language learning, so it's very important in this stage that we focus on the...  [Read more]

  This presentation is going to cover the teaching of productive skills. To start with, if we think about the way in which you learnt your first language, most of us go through a particular process. Firstly, we listen to those around us, after that first silent period of listening to other people, then we start to make utterances. Having learned to speak to a certain extent at least, we then go on to learn how to read and to write and this process that we go through is actually covering the four skills that we're trying to teach our English students. So, we have listening, speaking, reading, and writing. If we group those skills into their different types, then the two skills of reading and listening are known as receptive skills, whereas the skills of speaking and writing are...  [Read more]

  Regardless of which particular business English setting you find yourself teaching in, there is a typical process that is recommended to go through before you start your course. Watch this video for helpful tips and tricks for anyone who is teaching business English classes. 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. I am particularly fascinated with the section on rising and falling intonation and how that indicates or predicts mood and/or information,...  [Read more]

  There are some general Do's and Don'ts that need to be considered when teaching young learners. Watch this video to get more insight into teaching this special group of learners. 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. Phonetics are such an important part that is overlooked so much! I realized how much I need to learn and practice it, I learned the types of stress, intonation, how every single part of your body, all the way from gestures to postures...  [Read more]

  Regardless of which type of beginners you are teaching here are our top 10 tips for the teaching of beginner classes. 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. Unit 6 was about the past tenses and how to use them correctly. It described the different situations of when to use each tense and how to properly structure them. Sadly, there aren't any rules for knowing the irregular verbs. You simply just have to study and remember them, and in English...  [Read more]

  There are some general Do's and Don'ts that need to be considered when teaching business English. Watch this video to get more insight into teaching this special group of learners. 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. It was a very interesting but also guided unit demonstrating the activities in writing as well as speaking.The ideas produced as well as the extensive assistance showed me how well prepared the teacher should be.The games in the...  [Read more]

  There are some countries throughout the world where a degree is a required qualification for teaching ESL. However, with only a TEFL certificate there are still numerous opportunities on almost every continent. There are more opportunities worldwide than we can cover, so try to do your own research where possible.  [Read more]

  So, some of the ways in which we can avoid these problems occurring in the first place is to reteach the vocabulary that's going to be required in the particular activity and the grammar. Now, having said this, it doesn't mean that if we think about a particular article that they're going to read or a listening activity that they're going to listen to. They don't have to know every single word in there but they do need to know a certain number of words in order to actually make sense out of it. Secondly, most of the materials that we'll be using for both reading and possibly for listening will be what's called an authentic material. In other words, it's a real piece of material from a newspaper or magazine that hasn't been created for a particular class and so we need a very...  [Read more]