Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Pennsylvania? Are you interested in teaching English in Tecumseh, Pennsylvania? Check out our opportunities in Tecumseh, 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 focused on the characteristics that are likely to make an effective teacher or successful student, as well as basic frameworks for categorising students into different skill levels.
Of the factors relevant to being an effective teacher, these are further broken into personality based traits such as ability to empathise and be patient with students, or a natural love of teaching, and more systematic abilities such as topic knowledge, ability to motivate and ability to give good feedback without damaging motivation. Given that student side factors often cannot be changed in a classroom, a teachers ability to demonstrate these skills will have a large impact on the quality of their teaching as well as the relationship with students.
The unit also outlines basic roles of the teacher in the classroom, being broken into 9 general groups of behaviours in the classroom. Of these I personally feel that the more participation and individual corrective based methods are perhaps more important than the more authoritarian options, as in my experience students are often well aware of the concepts taught through the commander type roles, but require practice and individual tweaking to improve their accuracy or comprehension. there are obviously exceptions though.
Next the unit discussed the types of students grouped by age, factors that make an an effective student, and differences between different student types. Discussing what internal factors improve a students ability to learn, A good sense of motivation, an understanding of good study techniques and a willingness to accept corrections seem particularly important to me (though all factors play a large part) Without motivation, a student is unlikely to put in the effort outside of class to effectively internalise knowledge, and will most likely fail to improve. Effective study methods I feel are essential to any memory heavy venture such as language learning. Without effective revision and utilisation tasks outside of class students are unlikely to retain more than the basics of any lesson. A student who combines motivation and understands their learning process has a much better chance of successfully acquiring a second language. Finally, mistakes in my opinion are the single most effective way to improve understanding while experimentation is important, this method will lead to poor accuracy and low comprehension without the student being willing and able to receive negative feedback on issues and to learn from them in a way that improves their accuracy.
Finally, the unit discusses different student ability types and splits them into 6 general groups based on competence. These are beginner, elementary, per-intermediate, Intermediate, Upper-intermediate and advanced. However I feel that the given descriptions for these grades are quite vague, and would struggle to accurately place many of my current students into any specific category, as "able to discuss a variety of topics" is likely to have wildly different interpretations from different people.
