Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Delaware? Are you interested in teaching English in The Beeches, Delaware? Check out our opportunities in The Beeches, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
In this unit, I learned first about modals. These are words I have known and used all my life, but never knew they were classified as modals. There are many different uses for these words in sentences including to express obligation as with the words must and should, to express possibility or probability as with the words may and might, and to express ability as with the words can and could. One useful idea for teaching these in the classroom would be for the students to engage in role-play, such as in a dentist-patient relationship with the dentist giving advice as "You should brush your teeth every day." Another useful teaching idea is to have the students come up with rules, such as "Children must be home before dark." The next topic discussed in this unit is the active versus passive voice. The uses for the passive voice include when the person performing the action is not known or unimportant, such as in "Criminals will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." I learned that it is important to teach students to retain the same tense of the verb when going from the active to passive voice, such as when the active sentence "I am reading the book" becomes the passive sentence "The book is being read by me", where the present continuous tense is maintained. One technique for teaching the passive voice which would be helpful having students play a memory game where they had to match a sentence in the active voice to the correct sentence in the passive voice. This unit goes on to mention different types of clauses, i.e., independent, dependent and relative, and gives examples of defining and non-defining relative clauses. A defining relative clause, as in "The man who lives upstairs won the lottery", is essential to the meaning of the sentence and cannot be removed without changing the meaning of the sentence. Whereas a non-defining relative clause, as in "The man, who lives upstairs, won the lottery", is offset by commas and can be removed from the sentence. Regarding these two sentences, the first one emphasizes that it is the man upstairs and not some other man who won the lottery; and in the second sentence the fact that the man who won the lottery lives upstairs is just an added fact to help describe him, but can be taken out without affecting the essential meaning of the sentence. The last topic I learned about in this lesson is phrasal verbs, again another way to describe words I have been using all my life but never knew they were called phrasal verbs. These are multi-word verbs which are made up of a verb plus one or two particles, i.e., prepositions and adverbs. These verbs can be transitive (those that take a direct object) or intransitive (those that do not), and consist of verbs such as pull over, drop off, and break down. It is emphasized that phrasal verbs can be very difficult for students to learn, and that it may be best to teach them as vocabulary words.
