Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Georgia? Are you interested in teaching English in Social Circle, Georgia? Check out our opportunities in Social Circle, 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!
This unit covered potential problems EFL teachers may encounter.
I think the first lesson must be the most difficult problem for a new teacher. Before going into the classroom for the first time, the teacher doesn't know much about the students beyond the number in the class. The teacher doesn't know, for example, much about their level, their attitudes towards English, or how they will react to the teacher. While the teacher may be able to make some educated guesses about these things based on whether the students signed up for the class or whether it is compulsory at their school, the teacher is certainly faced with more unknowns than knowns. This can lead to a lack of confidence heading into the room for the first time. In new group classes, students may feel just as nervous as the teacher about meeting for the first time, but they have a lot to talk about to get to know each other. That's a good starting point for the first lesson. In existing group classes, students' may be more relaxed with each other which can help the teacher feel more comfortable. The teacher is unknown to the students, so they may feel more curious about this new person, which engages them in the first lesson.
Once that's out of the way and the course is rolling on, the use of the students' L1 must be the next biggest hurdle in monolingual classrooms. Whether students use their L1 with a classmate to get to the English they want to say or just want to chat with their friend about last weekend, it's so easy to slip back into their mother tongue. For the teacher, it's a delicate balance between encouraging them to use English only and hounding them for using their L1.
