Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Michigan? Are you interested in teaching English in Sheridan, Michigan? Check out our opportunities in Sheridan, 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 lesson, I learned about the productive skills of a language i.e. speaking and writing. Both are used for communication purposes, but I must admit that I had never thought about at such detailed level. While accurate use of language is important part of writing, fluent use of the language is important factor in speaking. Although English learners preferably focus more on speaking skills, but we must know that writing needs much more degree of accuracy, so it can not be ignored. During ESL lessons, we should give equal importance to both of these skills and key factor to achieve this is concentrating more on accuracy during Study part and concentrating more on fluency in Activate part of the ESL lesson. Before introducing any writing or speaking activity, it is very important to encourage students and create their interest in such activities because as learners they may not have confidence, they may have fear of making mistakes or other reasons which could be stopping them to participate freely in such activities. Instead of individuals, working in pairs or groups may help them gain confidence and also make the activities more enjoyable. Handwriting and spellings may pose challenges in a writing lesson sometimes, because handwriting being a personal issue, we can not make them write all in the same way but we can encourage them to improve their writing. Sometimes words pronounced in the same ways could create confusion for example 'flower' and 'flour'. So we may need to help them overcome these kinds of confusions through various exercises and encouraging them to read extensively. In lesson plans for both; the writing and speaking skills, we should always try to engage them in a simple discussion or talk as a warm up session before the actual lesson After that comes the elicitation of vocabulary, the language point we need to concentrate in the lesson. With the help of matching, gap fill and other appropriate study exercises, we finally reach the activate stage in which students use the learned vocabulary or the language point and make a presentation to the class in the form of written text or spoken word. During the feedback process, it is always important to convey them what did they achieve rather than what they couldn't. Positive feedback encourages the students to improve faster, so it is better to discuss on the things they can improve, be it grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary. Serious mistakes can always be discussed with the concerned student individually rather than in front of the class.
