Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Indiana? Are you interested in teaching English in Hanover Park, Indiana? Check out our opportunities in Hanover Park, 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 goes over methodology for teachers. It discusses a host of different methods first, like grammar - translation, audio-ligualism, Presentation Practice Production, Task Based Learning, Communicative Language Teaching, Community Language Learning, and the Lexical Approach. The method this TEFL course uses is called ESA - Engage, Study, and Activate. And ESA lesson can be structured as a 'Straight Arrow lesson', i.e. with an Engage, Study, and Activate phase in that order, or as a 'Boomerang lesson' , which means that after the Engage phase, there follows a first Activate phase so the teacher can see what the students need to study more. Then the study phase follows with a new Activate phase to implement the newly learned language. Finally a 'Patchwork lesson' consists of many more phases and mixes up the three possibilities even more. This type of lesson is useful for high level students and lessons of more than an hour.
In the Engage phase the students are invited to use as much language as possible in games or activities like Alphabet relay, Sevens, Anagrams, Memory games or Consequences. The teacher corrects as little as possible. In the study phase new language is practiced in a controlled way by practicing pronunciation, spelling et cetera, and games like hangman, word searches or gap fill are appropriate. Finally the Activate phase should consist of activities that give the students the freedom to apply the new language in creative ways and integrate it with the language they already know. This can be done by role play, producing materials, story telling or for example having a class discussion.
Correction can best be done by the students themselves so they have the time to reflect on their work and understand their mistakes/errors. Next it is possible to invite the other students to give the right answer (unless it makes the first student uncomfortable). Correcting by the teacher should be the last resort. In the Engage and Activate phase it is helpful to correct as little as possible and let students focus on their fluency, while accuracy is more important in the Study phase. Here the teacher can correct when (a) the mistake concerns the language point of the lesson, (b) the mistake is repeated over and over, or (c) when the mistake impedes understanding by the students.
